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The 10 Cent Solution -
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You've seen the TV ads and commercials for text messaging. Teenagers sharing comments about a date, office workers secretly commenting about a boring presentation… Yet another toy for the younger set to be entertained and buy cell phones? Wrong!
Text messaging on a cell phone is the ten cents solution to wireless dispatching and true real time communication between the office and a mobile work force, truck drivers, sales men, repair services, collection services, and, yes, even your business.
Here is how it works. You can send an email to a phone with a message of up to 160 characters. The phone beeps and the message is there to read, with subject and text. Who ever received the message can then use their phone (yes almost all cell phones support text messaging), personal digital assistant (PDA), PALM or any hand held to quickly respond and confirm that it was received. So how can this help your business? Here are some examples.
1. You run a small business and have someone handle the phone and update customer information on a computer. After they take a call, they email to your phone the name, phone, address and work to be done. When you have parked the truck or complete what you are doing, you look at the message and everything you need is right there on your phone. No pencil, paper or voice message swapping is needed. The cost is ten cents to send and 2 cents to receive. Time between sending and receiving is a few seconds.
2. You run a delivery service and want to have known where the driver is on the route so you can update customers on the expected delivery if they call in. The driver sends an email to your dispatcher with the work order or customer stop number as each stop is completed. Your dispatcher receives the emails and has them routed to an inbox for the route. When a customer calls in wanting to know when the vehicle will be at his location, the dispatcher or order clerk can check the status by quickly looking at the inbox and will know which stop was completed and the exact time, within seconds. Let's see the cost: 40 stops on a route is $4.00 to send the message and .80 cents to receive it (if it goes to a cell phone or free if it goes to an email), or about $5.00 per day for stop-by-stop route monitoring. Sounds like a cup of coffee and a piece of cake.
3. You run a water delivery service, fuel delivery, roll-off service or any service that requires stop-by-stop invoicing. The issue is that when the drivers return at the end of the day, all the invoicing has to be completed. It would be nice to have the weight of the pull, quantity of water bottles, etc., as each stop is completed so the invoice can be completed and mailed immediately. The hand-held can be programmed to prompt for some basic information and send a text message back to the office. The office can read and enter the information to be invoiced, or with a little programming assistance, the emails can be exported into your computer so the line-item charges can be electronically created and then reviewed and posted with minimal clerical support.
The business basics behind this tool are simple. Fifty million cell phone users have created a low-cost, ubiquitous communication tool that supports almost instantaneous bi-directional communication. For $5.00 a day and a hand-held costing about $100.00, cell phones with text messaging can replace industry proprietary devices costing thousands to purchase and require separate communication services.
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