Why is it that when companies sit down to define their digital processes, they just can’t let go of the old ways, and thus negate the benefits and undermine their own business case so effectively?

I signed up with my energy supplier for an all-digital account. It’s fairly basic but it allows me to have some self-service capability, it was promoted as offering  ‘no more paper bills or correspondence’, delivering a green experience, better for the environment and less carbon emissions. I know this as no sooner had I signed up for a 100% digital experience than I received a good old-fashioned letter in the post to tell me all of this and confirming my digital account was up and running. Now where did I put that face palm emoji?!

We all know that an SMS, WhatsApp, WeChat, Push Message, Messenger or Snap get the quickest response from us by far, and yet somehow they do not seem to be invasive on our time, they have the psychological effect of being perceived as valuable to us and replying to them is easy. Now compare that to e-mail which even Bill Gates in his famous (if now ancient) 2006 Forbes interview describes as needing 3 screens plus an assistant to process his 100-a-day emails (apparently a lot back then!) and beware of the Monday morning inbox which I think we can all agree is a bit depressing and does the opposite of personal messaging, it takes away energy, it steals your time and its somewhat depressive in nature. Kind of strange that personal messaging in Apps compared to email has such different psychological engagement with us, perhaps even stranger then, that in a digital world pretty much every business asks for e-mail confirmations and communications to be built into their process and system whilst rarely demanding or using personal messaging, even less use is made of context aware messaging which provides a specific, relevant and valued communication to an individual or a micro-segment of customers, but this will change because just like the paper letter that I received from my energy supplier, it just simply must. Such second-class digital customer engagement will not result in great customer experiences or great outcomes for service providers.

Now if Paper and e-mails are confined to history will there be a flood of individual messaging that overwhelms the individual and undermines it as a personal communication method? Well at first possibly yes, but we can look to the world’s largest and most mature digital marketplace - China, with by far the world’s largest number of mobile data subscribers . For example, China regulates that any one organisation can only have a maximum of 4 messages sent via any method to any individual in a month. The point was to follow up on the Chinese ban on Telemarketing and ensure a flood of irrelevant messages does not occur. As Bill Gates says even, he used to get loads of SPAM offering him get rich quick schemes!!!!

So, this is why we at AwareX are working on new technology for a TeleManagement Forum (TMF) Catalyst project for live demonstration in May 2019 at the Digital Transformation World conference with some of the worlds largest service providers and BSS players to deliver fully optimised, fully context aware, push and in-app messaging that contains advanced analytics and AI-derived selections of fully matched products and services to customers of both Telecoms service providers and financial services providers who absolutely have to maximise their return on investment by delivering the right offer to the right person at the right time and using the right medium to get maximum click through rate and up-sell purchase of new products and services. 

And no, we won’t be sending out paper letters to end customers to confirm their purchases and increase our costs!!! (it would waste one of our 4 per month allocation).