"If you can text your family and friends on iMessage or WhatsApp, why can't you text a business?", asks Dean Steingold, one of the founders of new Australian customer-to-business app, Urge.
Urge enables consumers to connect with small businesses through text messaging rather than phone calls. Consumers can SMS businesses – with images if needed – to send queries, place orders and book appointments.
![Text appeal: Urge founders Daniel Reyes, Dean Steingold and Doron Ostrin.](/web/20161113171400im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/p/s/t/v/g/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gpstws.png/1478028652808.jpg)
"It's like the Yellow Pages of this century," says Steingold, who hopes to sign on 1500 local businesses and up to 50,000 customers in the first six months of business.
Urge launched in Sydney and Melbourne a few weeks ago and will extend Australia-wide in about six months as a geo-location app.
They have businesses signed up in Los Angeles but are in the prelaunch phase over there, and two major South African cities are on their radar.
With dealing with some of the world's biggest online retailers through their B2B provider Productify, Steingold and co-founders Daniel Reyes and Doron Ostrin learnt the importance of stock levels inventory and how to get a scenario where a customer could get the exact stock level.
He says customers were willing to phone the store but many didn't, or they would go to the store and hope what they wanted was in stock. "And from that Urge was born – not just providing you with the ability to text a retail store, but text your hairdresser and ask, 'Can I come for a haircut?', or text your coffee shop saying, 'I'll be there in ten minutes, will my hot chocolate be waiting for me?'"
So how does Urge work?
Steingold gives one example of a mother taking her child to a party. The child plays with a particular toy and wants to have it. So the mum takes a photo of the toy and texts it via Urge to businesses and asks if they have it in store, instead of calling and explaining what the toy is, or going from store to store.
The other example he gives is getting a haircut. At 6am, when he is at the gym, he remembers he needs to have a haircut. If he is not able to call his hairdresser by 10am because it has slipped his mind or he is in a meeting, he would miss out an appointment that day. But if he texts the hairdresser at 6am, the hairdresser sees the message at 10am when he opens the hair salon and can let him know if he can or cannot accommodate him at the requested time.
Steingold sees the trend catching on. "Urge is tailored to making the experience for the business great as well. When a message comes through, it almost rings like a telephone ... they never miss it."
He says they are the only business providing this service in Australia. "The only competitor at the moment is Hey You, which is a not really a competitor in the sense that Hey You is just for cafes: you can order your coffee online and pay for it." He says the difference is with Hey You, you order from the given options, while with Urge you can order your coffee to your specifications.
When a message comes through, it almost rings like a telephone ... they never miss it.
Overseas, he says, many text a third-party company. "That model is very scalable in the sense that they can just load in 1000 businesses. But you are not actually texting 1000 businesses – you are texting a call centre of five people and they have to physically phone the store."
At present, Urge is free to both the customers and businesses. But Steingold is targeting revenue of $500,000 in the first 12 months of monetising the app.
He says they are a few weeks away from having payments built into Urge. "We will take a clip off the payment for a service. That's one way we are going to earn revenue.
"The other way is we will do a SAAS model where the bigger retailers get an analytics package so they can see how many messages are coming in, how many are turning into sales, or people coming into the store. Stuff like that we will charge for."
Apps like Urge, of course, face a rising challenge from much-hyped chat bots.
Chat bots are automated text-based assistants. They have been prominent on the WeChat app, especially in the Chinese market, but interest peaked recently when Mark Zuckerberg announced plans for Facebook Messenger to help companies easily build bots on his platform.
Technology expert and futurist Shara Evans says text messaging already is a tool for business.
"The question is will it remain a standalone application that you use across mobile networks or will it be more of an inline instant message that is used within the context of another platform.
"SMS numbers are still going up, but we're seeing that being eaten into with applications like WhatsApp, Skype, Facebook, LinkedIn, where there is messaging capability, people are also using those capabilities as well."
Evans sees value in on-demand services from a consumer perspective. "Having a portal that lets me send out a request to multiple nearby vendors who can then come back to me in a certain time frame ... would be really useful."
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