Jimmy Kim explains why two-way SMS fails at scale: customer service teams trained for tickets can't handle real-time replies, and customers spot AI bots within two messages and feel deceived. Legacy companies underestimate the need for a dedicated, properly trained team.
Here's my big take around it. At scale, 2-way SMS becomes one of 2 things: a customer service nightmare that you can't keep up with. That's always what I see. Or B, an AI bot that customers can immediately tell is a bot, which in my opinion are both bad outcomes. And they really want to talk to humans. They can spot that in just like 2 messages. Yeah.
And once they do spot it, I think they feel a bit deceived, which I think really damaged the brand more than not actually having the feature at all.
By the way, AI features are getting better, so I don't think this is a long-term thing, but it definitely is what I've seen in the past historically with more of the legacy companies out there right now. Plus, I think that there's an operational reality that no one talks about with this. Replying to a 2-way SMS at scale requires kind of like a real team. Brands try to bolt in their existing CX team or, and ultimately it fails because CX is not trained to support responses. They're here to support tickets.
