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What percentage of businesses have someone available to answer text messages? My feeling is the answer starts with 0.0 and then may have some more zeros before a non-zero digit occurs.
But it also seems like twitter.
Cool concept. My main hesitation around using this product would be companies signing me up for coupons/spam via text messages. I can't imagine how annoying it would be to filter out text message spam...
I attempted to create a similar service a few years back, but my concept was more targeted at users searching for local products and services, and not targeting a specific business. We would submit the user request to all matching local businesses. Maybe something to also consider, best of luck.
Here are the problems that I see:
1. Employees are busy. In the bike shop, you're constantly running around, helping this customer and that customer, answering the phone, taking in a repair, doing a demo, etc. It's going to be very hard to get someone on a computer or iPad to do live chat. If an employee is typing on a computer within sight of a customer, the customer will assume that they aren't busy and will interrupt them with a question. The problem is so bad that when my father would go out onto the sales floor to fix a computer, he would put on a fake badge that said something like "DataTech Computer Repair Services" so customers wouldn't think he was a shop employee and interrupt him. Perhaps a speech-to-text interface might work but how is that better than a simple phone call?
2. Non-technical employees (most brick-and-mortar employees) are slow, inaccurate typists. Back when my parent's store was heavy into e-commerce, we quickly found that we needed dedicated guys to take online orders over the phone because most of our guys couldn't touch-type. If your interface requires a lot of typing, the employees and the customers using it aren't going to be happy.
Here's my take. I grew up in my parent's brick-and-mortar retail business: a four-store bicycle shop that's one of the largest and busiest in the nation. We were an early pioneer on the Internet, one of the very first to sell bicycle parts online back in 1995. These days, they don't do much e-commerce but brick-and-mortar business has grown a lot and the management is still tech-savvy. Here are the problems that I se…
Here's my take. I grew up in my parent's brick-and-mortar retail business: a four-store bicycle shop that's one of the largest and busiest in the nation. We were an early pioneer on the Internet, one of the very first to sell bicycle parts online back in 1995. These days, they don't do much e-commerce but brick-and-mortar business has grown a lot and the management is still tech-savvy. Here are the problems that I se…
answering the phone