Businesses race to keep up with generation IM and SMS

Consumers are embracing new technologies such as instant messaging (IM) but feel let down by companies that fail to keep up.

There is a gap between what tech-savvy consumers expect and what businesses can deliver in terms of customer contact, according to researchers at the Henley Centre.

Marcus Hickman, managing director of Henley Centre Headlight Vision said: "We have this always-on culture - consumers are contactable all the time and they expect companies to be contactable all the time. Organisations' ability to respond to these demands isn't growing at the same level."

According to the BT-sponsored research, 35 per cent of consumers want to be able to contact their bank by IM. And 57 per cent want transactional SMS capabilities.

Hickman warned: "Consumers have great expectations of what businesses will offer and businesses are struggling to address that."

The problem is only going to get worse with the next generation. He said: "They are using online chat rather than email so you have to be ready for that generation -many businesses still just have call centre, branch and website and that's very clunky."

But simply offering lots of new access mechanisms may not help, he warned: "Customers will just contact you more if they can and they might not offer you any real value."

New media and development manager at Comic Relief, Amanda Horton-Mastin, said the charity is trying to shift donations to the web.

She said: "We've seen a growth in the number of donations on the night and we think that's because more people are pressing the red button and using interactive TV or going online."

This year the charity received £5m over the web, £1.5m via interactive TV and £600,000 by mobile phone - compared to £22m by phone.

She added: "The phone is dominant but there's increasing use of new media. We want to drive people into making online donations."

Web donations average £35 each, compared to £28 by phone and £20 by interactive TV "which probably reflects the demographics of the people using each of the different media", she said.