What You Need to Know About the New Texting Regulation !Threatening Your Communications!

The news is that this month, texting from a company to an individual is now subject to registration obligations. Brands who don’t register will have their texts blocked or seriously delayed. FranConnect invited two of us to help franchisors understand their obligations and what to do about them

• Kevin Nethercott (VP Partner Engagement, Mavenir). The majority of texts that travel through the major carriers such as AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile actually go through Mavenir
• Tom Ngo (CEO, Lumin.ai). We’ve made it easy for our franchise customers comply with the new registration obligations by doing essentially all of the legwork on their behalf.

Keith Gerson, President of Franchise Operations for FranConnect, chaired the panel. He began by having Kevin and me provide franchises with context regarding the importance of texting. Some quick highlights:

• Texting is not just is a weak form of human contact, behind in-person and voice conversations. Rather, it’s a great way to put control in the prospect’s hands, leading to a better first conversation either in person or over the phone.
• Because of that, answer rates are much higher for texting than for voice.
• Automated texting falls into a hierarchy. The most primitive form is semiautomatic: a first text goes out automatically, but it’s all manual after that. Then you have menu-driven texting, e.g., choose 1 for checking and 2 for savings. The most sophisticated is conversational AI, where the conversation happens in natural language.
• Appointment rates and attendance rates can both be boosted via automated texting, often leading to a 2X improvement in completed meetings for a given lead spend.
• Before AI, a salesperson would arrive on Monday morning with a list of call-downs to do. With AI, that same salesperson spends all of Monday actually meeting with people.

We spent the balance of the time educating our franchise audience on recent tightening of a brand’s obligations in connection with texting. Key points:

• Brands must now register their text traffic with The Campaign Registry (TCR).
• Lumin.ai has a program in place to do nearly all of the legwork for a brand.
• If a brand doesn’t register, texts will be blocked and/or delayed.
• The industry is doing this partly to benefit consumers, but frankly also to collect extra fees. From a brand’s point of view, those fees are not significant.
• Alternatives exist: you can rent a short code for a monthly rental fee in the range of a thousand to many thousand dollars; or you can rent a toll-free number (but expect regulations there as well).

We ended the webinar with some eye candy from Kevin: a preview of what Rich Communication Services (RCS) will look like as soon as it’s rolled out en masse by the carriers and handset manufacturers.

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