Q+A: How better messaging can save businesses time and money

Welcome to Fear and Greed Q&A, where we ask and answer questions about business, investing, economics, politics, and more. I'm Sean Aylmer. When businesses think about text messaging, it's often about marketing, like promotion, sales, special offers. But messaging is increasingly becoming part of the way businesses actually operate, confirming appointments, managing deliveries, receiving abandoned purchases, and dealing with customer service issues in real time. This is the third in our series with Cinch, a great supporter of Fear and Greed, looking at how business communicate directly with their customers. Andrea Topping is Vice President, Product Applications at Cinch. Andrea, welcome to Fear and Greed Q&A. Thanks so much for having me. So traditionally, businesses have treated messaging as a marketing channel. Fair enough. But there must be a lot more to it. Are they kind of too narrow in their thinking?

Yeah, I think when I think about customer communications, right, it's all about meeting every individual out there where they want to be met, right, over the channel that they prefer. And there's so many nuanced differences in those preferences. And it's easy to think about your own experience and where you like to interact with the brands that you like to receive communications from and the channels that you prefer for them to communicate with you via. But it's really hard to put yourself in the shoes of every single member of your audience and know where they want to be met. And it's always changing. It's For businesses, it's just all about thinking about how do we want to communicate and what are the right channels? And I would say nine out of 10 times, that's going to be based on the individual members of your audience and where they are best met.

When I think about it, the only channel that I would continually look at is text messaging. And my co-host, Michael Thompson, is often cranky at me if I'm not looking at an email or something like that. And it is very much kind of, it's right there in your face. Where are the biggest operational gains? Is it about sort of missing appointments? Is it deliveries? Where does messaging genuinely save business money and time?

Well, obviously, I think it really depends on what kind of business you're running and what your needs are and where the biggest gaps are in your, you know, if you have a funnel, right, where you see conversions start to drop off, that's usually where messaging can come in and play a role. If you're an appointment-based business, right, like if you've got, you know, people coming to you, then confirmations and reschedules and notifications, right, for missed appointments, those are critically important. I mean, because you've got a capacity utilization that is immediately impacted by someone not showing up on time or not showing up at all. And that falls directly to your bottom line, right? So that's an example where it's just like a no-brainer to use messaging. But it's like when I think about how to use messaging better, it's all about giving people the opportunity to respond in an effective way. And so, you know, this operational appointment for an appointment-based business