In 1984 Queen wrote a song about how the rise of MTV would kill the radio, fortunately they were wrong. Don't get me wrong, I like a good music video as much as the next person but even with YouTube and Telstra 4G coverage there are still lots of places I can't watch a video beyond the infernal 'buffering' pop-up.
Its a similar situation with SMS vs. mobile apps on smartphones.
In 1992, an engineer called Neil Papworth sent the first SMS message (read more here) to his boss at Vodafone, it said simply "Merry Christmas".
Many people these days almost dissmiss SMS as an ancronysm, something left behind on their latest glass slab in case they need to talk to some ludite using just a mobile phone.
But there's more to it than that, the reasons SMS is still valid is the same reason that the RFS and CFA use pagers to alert fire fighters, it works without the need for a data network. SMS will work over the slowest phone network. Mobile apps don't.
Its why at Wild Dog Solutions our customers typically implement SMS before anything else, it enables instant communication to even the oldest of mobilephones that a tenant or contractor maybe using but still allows a conversation to take place.
The tenant can respond to confirm an appointment or request a callback and the housing officer can be notified immediately and the Tenant Diary in the housing management system updated in real time with the details.
Of course Tenant Portals are useful, we wouldn't sell them if they weren't; but they don't cover all the bases and when you are dealing with a country as vast as Australia the more options you have to extend your reach the better solution you can offer your Tenants.
