There’s definitely a price war afoot surrounding SMS text messaging. Voxeo’s developer-facing subsidiary Tropo will take leadership with the introduction of SMSified later this week. With the launch, Voxeo will unveil a set of management and application development tools that integrate SMS – at one cent per message – with the rest of Voxeo’s resources for voice processing, call processing and message management.

The service’s name is a variation on “IMified” which is the name of to provide an easy mechanism for phone-based appliciation developers to add Instant Messaging to their modes of communication. for delivery of each message. While it might be tempting to think that one-cent pricing might be seen as an invitation for opportunistic marketers to launch text-based spam programs, the results are likely to be quite different. Developers who employed IMified have found it to put individuals in control of how they want to be reached by the firms with whom they do business. In many cases “chat bots” have become silent channels for information retrieval or carrying out transactions, like prescription renewals.

These days, text messaging is more pervasive than IM, especially from mobile devices. However, when priced at $0.03 to as much as $0.10 or more for message delivery, delivery of text messages in any scale could carry a prohibitive cost for service providers or individuals, if they have to pay for services. Even at those high prices, text-based “alerts” have become a mainstay for airlines, financial services companies, pharmacies and communications companies to provide customers with “intelligent notifications” when a flight is delayed, a balance threshold has been breached, a prescription is ready or a repair truck is on its way. In the ideal, it is part of a self-service or “assisted self-service” customer care program that lets individuals (determined by their current situation and preferences) determine whether to “talk, tap, type or swipe” to carry out a conversation.

Text has made its way into the clickstream even though it carries a relatively high level of pricing friction. The “one-cent” price point is destined to spark creative energy from the developer community which, in turn, will lead to a more prevalent position for text messaging in conversational commerce.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Voxeo, multimodal customer care, Tropo, text messaging