How can a text message be interactive?

Purists will say “wait a minute, mobile text messages don’t have hyperlinks so they can’t really be ‘interactive.’ ”

Purists can be so irritating, can’t they?

That’s correct, of course, so why does Voicent describe its BroadcastBySMS text-messaging tool as “interactive?”

Because it is. Consider this:

You send favored customers a text message saying “That thing that you love is on sale this week. Reply with the word ‘yes’ and we will set one aside for you. Reply with ‘more’ and we’ll email you offer details.” When the recipient replies with ‘yes,’ voila! the text message is officially interactive.

By the way, using Voicent’s IVR Studio together with BroadcastBySMS, you could completely automate the sending of that ‘more information’ email. Nice, huh?

And to the purists who say “well, technically, an SMS text message is not IVR, we say . . . hey, who asked you!