With getting on for 1.5 billion cars in the world and untold millions of trucks in circulation globally, driver training is a huge business. There are a huge range of opinions as to when fully autonomous vehicles of all types will be cruising our streets and highways but the consensus is that given the issue of regulation, we’re realistically probably 20 years off that going mainstream. Until then, humans will most definitely remain in the driving seat and with a forecast 2 billion cars come 2035, hundreds of millions of people need training.
With so much flexibility available to driving instructors to work the hours they want providing they are pulling in enough income, there has been a rapid increase in the number of independent driving schools. Simultaneously another trend has emerged: the arrival on the scene of some large companies moving into the sector seeing the opportunity. The result is a lot of competition so if you’re in the driving education business, you really have got to make sure your client engagement is on point at all times.
The average age of a driving school client is approximately 26 today which is a critical factor to take into account when working in the sector. People in their 20s have grown up with digital technologies as part of their daily lives and for them it’s second-nature to have their mobile phones with them at all times, responding to text messaging rapidly. Very rapidly.
Fellow Mobile Ecosystem Forum member Mobile squared provide excellent statistics about the world of business messaging and were the first research company we know of to announce that over 90% of SMS are ready by recipients within three minutes! You get the idea. People cannot but help pick up their devices to check out any new messages when they hear that beep or see that flashing light. If you send your content via SMS, you just know it will get read.
Work assignments change fast when you are in the driving education business, with customers constantly booking and changing lesson times, and you need to use channels which allow people to rapidly communicate in practically all circumstances and locations.
It’d be easy to assume everybody has a smartphone and 24/7 access to the internet or mobile broadband but this just isn’t reality. How many times (even in so-called ‘developed’ nations) have you experienced poor internet coverage, outages etc.? If you need to send content rapidly that you absolutely need to have read rapidly by its intended recipient then you cannot go wrong using a2p SMS – Application-to-Person SMS.
Customer engagement today is all about conversations with your customers and these have to be two-way. Traditional one-way communication no longer does the job well and you need to give clients a way of responding back to you. As with SMS text messaging, chat apps are a great way of interfacing with stakeholders too.
The first chat application to provide a business messaging option may have been Rakuten Viber but globally much of the growth is being driven by WhatsApp and we know ourselves just how useful these, Telegram and others can be for communicating with customers. Don’t ignore them either.
If you absolutely have to rely on one channel to reach as wide an audience as possible in as impactful a way as you can then you just have to use SMS. No smartphone required. No internet. Plus you know yourselves in areas where mobile reception is poor that whilst you might not be able to make a call or send an email, then an SMS might just get through. It is a resilient technology and although fast approaching 30 years old, it’s something you cannot ignore.
We’ve been in the business of delivering organizations’ marketing, informative and transactional content around the world via SMS and chat app solutions for 12 years now. This is what Intis Telecom focuses on. We make it genuinely easy for any organization to send its customers (or other stakeholders) content rapidly and accurately, allowing them to get on with doing what they do best – treating their customers, business partners and own personnel with exceptional care, as individuals.
