OpenMarket – October 28, 2016
I’m at the Money 20/20 show in Las Vegas this week and it has been interesting how the topic of millennials and how to engage with them keeps coming up. This year OpenMarket has been surveying millennials to learn their communications preferences, and we know that they value SMS over email and voice as their mobile communications channel of preference with businesses. We also know that 80% of millennials would prefer to receive a text message from a company’s text-enabled toll-free phone number rather than having to wait on hold. 18% of millennials have already attempted to send text messages to customer support phone numbers without any call to action by the business. This finding is in alignment with a prior survey we did regarding texting toll-free phone numbers as well.
Also, the speed at which millennials are opening their text messages is astonishing. 83% of text messages are opened within 90 seconds. 90% of text messages are read within 3 minutes, and 98% are read within 10 minutes. Clearly SMS messages are getting through to these users. We also know that when a SMS message contains a URL in it, that users are clicking those links at higher rates (36%) than they are for e-mails with links (3%) from businesses. So it is no wonder that 80% of financial service companies are currently using or planning on using SMS to communicate with their customers or employees.
Millennials have some financial services use case preferences as well. They would like to receive more fraud or suspicious card activity engagements with financial service providers via texting. 42% prefer to receive SMS fraud alerts. This isn’t surprising given that FICO found that 83% of millennials use credit cards and that 31% of them carry a monthly balance of $1,000-$4,999 on their credit card.
41% of millennials are using P2P (Peer-to-Peer) for bills and 36% are repaying their friends via P2P solutions. This trend is fueling novel ways for this generation to manage their money flow by using SMS to review and approve payments like the payment solution offered by Pay2Day Solutions.
Lastly, if financial service providers like banks aren’t meeting their needs, millennials are leaving. A recent FICO survey reveals that 45% of millennials aged 25-34 cited high fees as a key reason for leaving their bank. Their second biggest reason for switching banks is if they receive a poor experience when they miss a payment.
Enterprises are using OpenMarket to help guide them in defining their mobile messaging journeys as millennials are forcing the evolution of mobile engagement with financial service providers. Contact us if you want to learn more about how your business can benefit from our subject matter expertise and demonstrated service performance and reliability.