Texting has always allowed for immediate, informal communication. Over the past few years, we’ve seen businesses using text messaging as a way to speed up communication and get better response rates compared to email. Now we’re seeing businesses step into the full potential of messaging as not just a notification tool, but a conversational toolbox, with channels, formats, and integrations galore.
We’re really excited to see how companies in industries that run the gamut from healthcare and foodservice, sports management and trucking, and even nonprofits and government agencies, are taking advantage of the unique properties of messaging as a channel to create richer experiences for opted-in mobile subscribers.
Texting is making life better, period.
It’s a technology that’s been around for decades, but recently we’ve seen its potential fully realized as companies get creative with ways to use texts to make life better for humankind.
Think about doctors’ appointments in the 90s. No shows were a constant drain on clinical efficiency, costing providers thousands every year. And mitigating that by hounding patients to show up required an administrative staff to get on the phone and call patients one by one.
Now, texting has changed that. Yosi, a healthcare messaging platform based in California, found that implementing text confirmations and reminders reduces the no-show rate by up to 75%³ and saves $42,000 per physician annually.⁴
Turns out, a text a day keeps the doctor profitable and on time. But it’s not just providers who benefit: patients who show up actually get care. And save the hassle and cost of missed appointment fees and rescheduling with busy clinics.
Remember when people would sit around skimming ads and clipping coupons on Sunday afternoon?
Now you can unlock your phone and see the biggest sales from your favorite brands in seconds. There’s no reason to ever miss a 40% OFF sale ever again.
If you want to stay vigilant about monitoring your credit, you once had to call your bank or log in on your computer to check your balances.
And many consumers still do. But now, you can easily get credit card transaction notifications in real time. Your teenager headed to the mall? Don’t sweat it: get instant alerts on every purchase.
Texting is the best way to reach drivers with important safety recall information.
CellARide found that texting is the most useful, immediate tool for communicating about vehicle recall announcements and reminders, because it’s widely used across generations. And it serves multiple stakeholders very well. Josh Holstein, founder and CEO said “We work with automakers, who care about government compliance and their customers’ safety. We also work with dealerships, who care about safety and have an ROI to think about. With texting, we’re able to accomplish both—showing an ROI up to 30x and making a positive impact on safety.”
87.7% of consumers we surveyed received the same or more texts from businesses and organizations in 2023 than in 2022.² The increasing volume also correlates with consumers feeling more in texts from businesses.² Consumers are nearly twice as likely to say they trust texts from businesses, as they are to say they distrust texts from businesses. In fact, consumers show strong preferences for SMS as a channel for some business communications, like two-factor authentication.
Multimedia Messaging Service, or MMS, used to be a cherry on the top for business messaging. And yes, MMS is typically double or even triple the price of SMS. But, in the scheme of things, it’s still pretty cheap and the ROI is often worth it.
With MMS, shoppers see the neon running shoes with their own eyes. They feel the cadence of a runner demonstrating the shoes in a video. Suddenly, the customer has motivation to click through the link and buy their next trainers.
| Car dealership | 360° video of a crossover SUV that just arrived on the lot |
| Ecommerce clothing | Gift featuring new arrivals |
| Elementary school | Poster advertising the Valentine’s breakfast complete with dress code and requests for items |
| Preschool | Video of parents’ child going down the slide on their own for the first time |
| Enterprise HR | Morale-boosting photo of free donuts in the breakroom |
| Finance | JPG chart of current mortgage interest rates |
| Restaurant ordering platform | A carousel of this week’s featured dishes |
| Healthcare | Appointment reminder with a map of where Radiology is located within a multi-provider building |
| Cruiseline | A highlight video of the next Caribbean cruise’s ports of call |
Every vertical is being impacted by messaging in a big way this year. In the next three chapters, we’ll dive deeper into Retail & Ecommerce, Hospitality & Tourism, Healthcare, and Fintech. But we wanted to give a special shoutout to Education and Hospitality this year, too.
SchoolPulse sends messages to give students an outlet to share their feelings in an effort to assess well-being and prioritize students’ mental health.
At an elementary school in Boston, 30% of the parents speak Spanish, and a total of eleven different languages are represented in the student body. In years past, teachers had to call in translators for parent-teacher conferences. Most of the time, quick daily check-ins were neglected because it wasn’t realistic to translate short, frequent messages.
Now, the school uses DeansList, a messaging platform that automatically translates both sides of a 2-way SMS conversation into over 100 languages. Suddenly, all parents are getting frequent updates in their native language.
And SMS is a key here, because DeansList CEO Matt Robins has seen that home internet and even smartphones are still not universal in lower income school districts. SMS is the only channel teachers can use to reliably communicate with parents on a daily basis.
Hospitality and tourism, reliant on guest satisfaction, are often at the cutting edge of new CX technologies.
Ever since the pandemic, many hotels have struggled to stay fully staffed, leaving front office employees struggling to provide a welcoming customer experience while maintaining cleanliness and administration. SMS to the rescue! Confirmations, reminders, and 2-way customer service conversational texting has helped ease the staffing strain.
Vintage Hotels, a chain of boutique hotels in Ontario, Canada turned to texting to cut down on front desk calls and help guests explore their surroundings. They chose Revinate’s Ivy platform and started sending:
General Manager
Vintage Hotels
Cruise lines have spotted a revenue opportunity to help groups of friends connected while on board without racking up hefty international roaming fees by coming out with their own proprietary texting apps like the Carnival HUB App.⁷
1. Bandwidth business survey
2. Bandwidth consumer survey
3. Yosi Health, “Leveraging Tech to Improve Outcomes, Lower Costs, & Enhance the Patient Experience”
4. Center for Health Care Strategies, “Yosi”
5. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, Kraft, M. A., & Dougherty, S. M. (2013). “The effect of teacher–family communication on student engagement: Evidence from a randomized field experiment.”
6. Revinate, “How Vintage Hotels drives guest engagement with Ivy, Revinate’s text messaging solution”
7. Carnival, “Stay Connected Via Text!”
