Pronto: Mobile messaging app for talking to your customers

[prontodeveloper]

Hello,

I am a small business owner building a mobile messaging app for small businesses. The app enables you (and your employees/co-workers) to chat with your clients. So, if you are busy, the app directs the chat request to the available co-worker's smartphone. This ensures your customers are well-served at all times.

I wanted to know if this is useful for small businesses. Also, is this something you would be willing to pay.

Thanks

[Brian Altenhofel]

Native app? SMS? Web app?

What makes it different from the many helpdesk apps that are out there?

[Freelancier]

I see what you're saying: have a way to forward messages to someone or a different device when you're busy. See if you can patent it... or if a patent for it already exists. Might be unique enough that no one has thought of it for chat.

[Brian Altenhofel]

I see what you're saying: have a way to forward messages to someone or a different device when you're busy. See if you can patent it... or if a patent for it already exists. Might be unique enough that no one has thought of it for chat.

Most helpdesk apps I've evaluated have that sort of functionality via on-call lists and escalation.

[Harold Mansfield]

I have to agree. What's new about this? And isn't mobile chat or text messaging a little more personal? I mean are people really just texting companies and any response will do? Or do they message specific people in that company?

Also, what's so hard about returning a text message when you are free? In my experience people don't use text messaging in business when the response is urgent, unless they are talking to co-workers and that's the culture of that company.

I can see this being useful if your customer service model is built on text messages. But for most companies it is not. Social Media responses hold a lot more value and that's where most companies are putting their customer service resources and brand monitoring because you can respond to more people, much quicker, it takes few employees to do so and you get far more marketing juice out of it.

For instance, if you are using a SM Tool like Hootsuite you can forward messages and mentions about your company to specific departments that handle whatever the complaint or issue is and they can respond quickly to the user. This takes one person to run and you can monitor all of your profiles as well as the general messaging universe.

So to me, yet another text messaging app is about 5 years behind us. We aren't really having a problem in that area and as Brian said, almost every CRM has this capability on some level.

Just my opinion.
Maybe if I heard of a working example where this makes sense I could see the value in it.