Previously, we chatted about forms of communications and how they’re changing in the b2b world. Today we will glance casually at what Instant Messaging has to offer your company. IM isn’t the new kid on the communication block anymore; its actually starting to show its age. Most IMs are old enough and mature enough to consider for more serious jobs than passing on jokes to friends and co-workers. While MySpace and Facebook are hanging around at the mall in the food court, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN and Jabber have all moved on to full time jobs in the retail and services industries. They have become responsible, productive members of society. Now the question is, how do we put them to best use. The key to understanding how IM can help you connect with your customers are ‘immediacy’ and ‘presence’. Lets do a little catagorizing, shall we?
Talking to someone face to face has immediacy and presence. You know they are there and that they are hearing you as you talk. The big downside is max distance being measured in feet. Also, face to face conversations are best done serially. You can have more than one conversation at a time, but the results are lousy and sometimes dangerous (me agreeing to Opera tickets with wife while talking to buddy about Hockey Playoff seats)
Phone conversations, too, have immediacy and presence. The distance problem is solved, but concurrency is still an issue. A good salesman might be able to hold two sales calls a once but I wouldn’t recommend it to the rest of us.
Along came email, which was a glorified post office with the new fangled ability of immediate delivery. Suddenly everyone was hooked. Communication through an immediate delivery that didn’t rely on presence was just the ticket for huge gains in efficiency. Digital records of the communication thread was the killer feature that cinched it. This became the defacto standard for business communication. Still, when something needs presence we fall back to the phone.
Now compare Instant Messaging. IM has the distance, presence and immediacy of a phone call. It has the efficiency and cocurrency of email by holding multiple conversations. It also has digital recordings of the communication thread. Its something of the perfect business communication tool, if only it didn’t suffer from an image problem.
In a few years your customers will start to host IM solutions for their company, as they do email today. Here is how you can put this information to use now to build stronger lines of communication. First, you need to get a corporate IM service. Each have their strenghts and reputations in the market. For a solution hosted at your location, I would recommend looking at Jabber. Now, extend this service to your customers as an alternative to email. For some customers, this will have instant geek chic appeal. Here is where knowing the weaknesses of the different forms of communication makes a huge difference. Hook up support staff with IM accounts. Start with the inside sales support people. Give the account info out to your customers. Now the customer has a direct, immediate, recorded, concurrent, pressence based method to get information about your products or services. They can ask that question while they are working with the product and writting up that email to accounting about paying you a bag of money for it. If that isn’t the bee’s knee’s in customer focused technology, then I don’t know what is.