Q+A: SMS, WhatsApp and the battle for customer attention

Welcome to Fear and Greed Q&A, where we ask and answer questions about business, investing, economics, politics, and more. I'm Michael Thompson, and most of us receive, I would say, plenty of text messages from businesses. You get appointment reminders and delivery updates and payment requests, and of course, marketing as well. For businesses, SMS and messaging apps like WhatsApp can be an incredibly effective way to reach customers directly. But there is a fine line, of course, between useful... and occasionally annoying, and an even bigger challenge around spam, scams, and trust as well. Today is the first in a series of interviews with Cinch, a supporter of fear and greed, looking at how businesses can communicate directly with their customers. Paul Diamond is head of customer success, looking after small and medium-sized businesses across APAC at Cinch. Paul, welcome to Fear and Greed Q&A. G'day, Michael. Thanks for having me on here today. Let's start with the basic question I think that every business should probably ask. When should you text a customer? And perhaps more importantly, when should you absolutely not?

Yeah, it's a great question. And I do wish we all consider this when we're thinking about, you know, when should we actually reach out to our customers? And, you know, there isn't like a really a one size fits all. I tell you what we do know, though, like we do know that in today's world, I guess we're all getting bombarded with messages, whether it is, you know, like a text message, obviously, in-app notifications, emails, like, It's as if we've got so much coming inbound to us, us as consumers, we need to be kind of selective about sort of what we... And we are, we're very selective. We're quick to delete things, to pass over things. So from a business perspective... I look at it as three things, really. Like, is the message you're sending, is it relevant? Is it timely? And kind of, is it expected? There's no really magic frequency to it or when you want to go about it or how much you should send. That's kind of where I start with all my customers that we talk to. Like, how do we get the right message to the right customer at the right time through the right channels? They're kind of the things that we like to talk about when we're having these conversations with our customers.

All right. So anyone then who has received a text message knows that SMS is incredibly direct. Almost everyone sees the text message. Does that create then a risk that businesses can overuse it? And at what point then does that, what should be useful communication, start feeling like spam? Yeah,

yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think we've always tried to drive home with our clients that, I mean, I guess what clients want, right, is to get eyeballs on their content. So that's kind of that first mission of that. And that's what we're trying to achieve with SMS, with WhatsApp and DMs. SMS, I think above all other tools at this moment, is the most direct cut through and really important with the right type of message. For example, an appointment reminder, a one-time password, some sort of emergency notification, SMS is perfect in this space because it's simple,