Last week, West Corporation announced intentions to acquire SchoolMessenger, a provider of proactive notification in the K-12 education market. This is a very interesting acquisition as West continues to enhance their outbound service offerings. We’ve seen other service providers, such as Genesys, enhance product offerings by acquiring outbound notification provider SoundBite, for example.
West’s acquisition of SchoolMessenger is very consistent with Opus Research’s view on the idea of Conversational Commerce, albeit with an education-oriented focus in this case. It is consistent across three key conversational commerce elements:
Context – Nothing demands more real-time conversations and context that an event at your child’s school. The need for immediate, precise and accurate information is critical when communicating in a very stressful, and potentially rapidly changing situation. Understanding that context, and the ability to act on that is a critical element of the school-to-parent conversation.
Omnichannel Engagement – SchoolMessenger’s solution has the ability to deliver context-aware notification is a variety of channels such as voice, SMS, email, social. Additionally, since West is known for its ability to handle a extremely high volume of conversations, SchoolMessagenr will also be able to support the high volume, simultaneous conversations across all channels.
Personalization – Parents and others responsible for their children at school have the ability to personalize their conversational experience allowing them to identify their preferred and prioritized communication channel for the fastest and most precise information. Even more, it’s interesting that parents can request real-time translation in their notification to their native language.
This acquisition by West will fit in nicely into their omnichannel outbound strategy focused on the education market.
How does your outbound conversational strategy fit alongside your inbound strategy? Is it all the same across the markets you serve, or are there unique considerations for each? How are you thinking about inbound and outbound conversations in the markets you address?
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