Text or talk? Voice conversations are still critical, but data shows that the former is becoming a bigger part of customer service interactions. This trend is driven partly by consumer preferences and partly by companies striving to lower costs. Companies are also leaning towards text because of the promise of increased automation, which is easier to do once a conversation has shifted to text.
To facilitate text conversations, you also have to ask the question: “Which channel?” There is SMS, of course. And then there are the big messaging platforms: Messenger and WhatsApp (both from Facebook), Apple’s Business Chat, and Google’s offering called (for now) Google My Business Chat. Among those platforms, a big battle is raging.
Everyone involved in customer service wants to understand consumer channel preference. Otherwise, how can you allocate resources between phone, email, chat, SMS messaging and social channels?
Over the past year, there has been growing attention paid to the role SMS might play as part of the contact center mix. One reason for this is there are now several cloud services that provide easy platforms on which to develop SMS-driven interactions, e.g. 
