来自：venturebeat。

        ——你是一名资深营销人员吗？你想知道如何成为其中一员吗？在八月17至18号到旧金山的GrowthBeat来加入我们吧。来自最大的品牌和最领先的公司思想领袖将分享当今营销主管所面对的最紧迫挑战的赢取市场增长战略。

       对于许多人来说，在一定的年龄，信息，收发短信，以及短信应用程序——是他们的首选会话工具。

       他们一般用电话或邮件的方式通信，或者，只有别无选择时，我们才选择亲笔写一封信。

       由于这一趋势，信息通讯已成为综合发展的公司必须掌握的一部分，当他们处理客户。但通信也有它自己的特点。

       为了找出这种趋势是如何影响客户沟通，我们最近与Joe Gagnon进行了交谈，他是一位在接触/呼叫中心软件提供云解决方案的高级副总裁和总经理。

       虽然年轻消费者更喜欢使用消息，他指出，“不仅是这些Y时代的年轻人”，因为我们大多数人有时候都使用这些方式。他指出，它是尤其有用的，因为它结合了其他通信方式的几个特点。

       这种通信方式有电话的即时性，能够提醒你，但不会限制你。你可以稍后查看消息，就像电子邮件那样。它可以简单的像一条推特，或者它可以成为一个扩展交流亲密感情和信息，几乎就像一封信。

       例如一个CVS药店，可能当你的处方准备好的时候就文本提醒你，给了你一个直接持续保密的信息提醒。

       也有独特的发送返回的自动消息交互。通过一个平台，Gagnon指出，你可以通过短信预约设置。一些银行允许客户发送一个特定的信息来查询他们的银行存款余额，而大赛参与者通常也可以通过它来获取（比赛）信息。

       Gagnon说，这些特点使它成为一个“良好的参与解决方案”，融入消费者的生活，让品牌与客户进行沟通，“他们希望如何沟通。”

       他们可以将这种模式融入到多任务的生活中，在需要的时候开始和中止它。他说，公司已开始意识到“客户是在方便使用的基础上做出决定的。”

       如果需要的话，可以将消息组设置为一个客户服务代理。尽管逻辑设计不同，专家知识的使用往往受到客户关系系统的吹捧。消息被设计成在其它人中循环。

       实际上，通过一个“深层链接”将内容消息返回给客户，是一个在某方面上的表达专门内容的快捷方式。

       它有一个自然语言界面，似乎是现成的日常生活中的语句片段一种。而不是让消费者登陆网站来自助服务，例如，短信/消息已经是大多数人“培训了如何去做”，Gagnon说。

       考虑到消息的魅力，需要记住，发自内心的，这是一个亲密的媒介，而不是一个公告板或一个脸谱网页。

       消息应视为许可权威工具，但对于入侵的品牌适得其反。

How messaging impacts customer communications

        ——Are you a growth marketer? Do you want to know what it takes to be one? Join us at GrowthBeat, on August 17-18 in San Francisco. Thought leaders from the biggest brands and most disruptive companies will share winning growth strategies on the most pressing challenges marketing leaders face today.

    For many people under a certain age, messaging — SMS/MMS texting as well as messaging apps — is their preferred conversational medium.

    They will only resort to phone calls or emails the way the rest of us might choose to write a letter in longhand — that is, only when all other options have been thoroughly exhausted.

    Because of this trend, messaging has become part of the multi-channel mix companies must master when they deal with customers. But it comes with its own characteristics.

    To find out how this impacts customer communications, we talked recently with Joe Gagnon, senior vice president and general manager of cloud solutions at contact/call center software provider Aspect Software.

    Although younger consumers prefer messaging, he pointed out, it’s “not just about millennials,” since most of us use this channel sometimes. And, he noted, it can be uniquely useful because it combines several features found in other communications.

    It has the immediacy of a phone call, able to alert you but never putting you on hold. You can refer to the message later, like email. It can be as brief as a tweet, or it can become an extended exchange of intimate sentiment and information, almost like a letter.

    A CVS drug store, for instance, might text you that your prescription is ready, offering you an immediate but persistent reminder of confidential information.

    There’s also the unique send-this-get-back-that quality of automated messaging exchange. With a platform like Aspect’s, Gagnon pointed out, you can set up an appointment via a message. Some banks allow account holders to send a specific message to get back their bank balance, and contest participants can commonly use it for entries.

    These features make it a “good engagement solution” that blends into consumers’ lives, he said, allowing brands to communicate with their customers “how they want to be communicated with.”

    They can fit this mode into their multi-tasking lives, starting and stopping it when needed. Companies have come to realize, he said, that “customers are making decisions based on ease of use.”

    Messaging groups can be set up, so a customer service agent could bring in an expert if needed. This use of expert knowledge is often touted by customer relationship systems, although the logistics vary. Messaging is designed to loop in others.

    In fact, returning a message to a customer with a “deep link” into content is a quick way to surface expert content that lives somewhere.

    And it has a natural language interface that seems readymade for the kind of sentence fragments abounding in daily life. Rather than make a consumer figure out self-service on a website, for instance, texting/messaging is something most people are “already trained on how to do,” Gagnon said.

    But due consideration of messaging’s charms needs to keep in mind that, at heart, it is an intimate medium, not a post on a bulletin board or a Facebook page.

    Messaging should be treated as the permission-entitled channel it is, or else it can backfire for intruding brands.