* E-mail might not yield a competitive advantage - but IM would
As I’ve discussed before, e-mail no longer provides any company with a competitive advantage. Because virtually every business uses e-mail, providing this capability so that vendors, customers and others can communicate with you via this medium does nothing to enhance your competitive edge – only a lack of e-mail capability provides any sort of competitive differential, all of it negative.
Not so with instant messaging.
Although instant messaging use is extensive and growing within the workplace, its use is still limited enough that providing vendors, customers and other partners with the ability to communicate with you via instant messaging can give you a competitive advantage.
For example, in a recent article I discussed the results of a survey in which we found that one in eight patients would very likely or definitely switch physicians if a competing physician’s office provided instant messaging capability to its patients. Imagine if you could communicate with your bank, your ISP or your insurance agent via instant messaging to get time-sensitive issues answered right away. Would you pay a little extra for this kind of priority support? What if an airline provided instant messaging support for its frequent fliers that flew a minimum number of miles each year in an effort to gain increased customer loyalty?
Why don’t more companies offer these capabilities, either free to their best customers or for an extra fee? In part, the lack of interoperability between competing, consumer-oriented instant messaging services means a company that wants to provide these services would have to support several different systems, which would add to the cost and complexity of providing instant messaging support. However, I believe that the biggest reason that so many companies don’t provide this kind of service is simply because they either haven’t thought of it, or they want to compete on price more than they want to compete on service.
In my opinion, instant messaging support will become the norm in a few years, just like support via e-mail is commonplace today. At that point, letting customers and others communicate with you via instant messaging will no longer provide the competitive advantage that it would today. I’d like to hear your thoughts on this issue, both from the perspective of a customer who would like to communicate with service providers and others via instant messaging; and from the perspective of these providers who might or might not want to provide service via instant messaging – please drop me a line at mailto:michael@ostermanresearch.com
