The customer contact problem

While on holiday I met some people who don't use mobile text messages - they claimed not to know how to access them on their phones. That can be a problem for an organisation which may assume that because it has a customer's mobile phone number, it can use it to send text messages that will be read.

Customer contact is strongly in the permission marketing area and if a customer hasn't given you permission to use a particular contact channel then you may well be wasting your time. The message may not be seen or worse, be filtered through a veil of annoyance that the company has used a channel that the customer finds irritating. It's no surprise that so many people sign up with the mail, fax and telephone preference services. They do it because they don't like the approaches, or they don't like the channels.