Clerks are continuously looking for better ways to encourage timely payments. Reminder notices nudge compliance responses. However, mailed notices take time to prepare and 3 to 4 days to deliver. Text messaging occurs instantly and reaches a large audience. Consider the statistics compiled by Financesonline:
96% of adults in the US own a “cell-phone” of some kind. (Apofonica, 2019)
Americans check their phones 96 times a day or once every 10 minutes. (Asurion, 2019)
There were 2.098 billion text messages sent in the United States in 2019. (Statista, 2020)
SMS marketing has an average open rate of 82%. (Shift)
There is concerns about starting a texting service. Cell phone information is part of contact information captured in payment plan applications. If you deploy a texting service, won’t it require authorized consent from customers?
Rozanne Anderson, the VP and Chief Compliance Officer of Finvi reviewed the most recent Supreme Court ruling in Facebook v Duguid, which addresses acknowledged consent for text messaging customers. Rozanne’s complete review of the Duguid opinion provides useful information when making decisions on how to deploy your texting service. Rozanne summarizes the impact of this Supreme Court opinion.
Clerks should consider texting as a timely and efficient option for compliance notifications. You can learn more about requirements for texting service through Rozanne’s YouTube commentary and the 10 most frequently asked questions on the Facebook v Duguid. Finvi is a premier provider of enterprise technologies which includes compliance and payment plan solutions for court ordered payments managed by Clerks for courts.
If you want to extend your notification reach to compliance customers consider text messaging.
Don Murphy is the Principal & Senior Consultant at Compliance Improvement Services Follow Don on Twitter: D Murphy @CisImprovment