[Webinar Transcript from April 2022]

Hi everybody, welcome to the webinar today, we're excited you're here. My name is McKay Allen, I'm on the marketing team at Kenect. Today we're going to talk about collecting payments and how to collect those via text. We're going to give you a step by step how to do that, and we'll walk you through why that's important as well. Our goal today is to take about 15 to 20 minutes and then get you on your way for the rest of your day. I've been on a lot of webinars that are 60 to 90 minutes long and I found that they're giant wastes of time, so we're going to try to avoid that and be quick here today.

Who is Kenect?

All right. First, we are based outside of Salt Lake City, we're a text messaging platform. Kind of started with equipment dealers, power sports dealers, but we now work with a lot of rental companies, so storage companies, tent rental businesses, bridal shops, kind of businesses of all types. But basically, we allow you to do is keep your main number and make that number textable so you can send and receive text messages, and from your main business phone number. This allows you to communicate really efficiently to generate new leads, to collect payments via text, and to drive online reviews. And this is done on a one to one basis.

Why are we so focused on this? Because your customers really do prefer text messaging. 89% of consumers say they prefer to text with a business rather than call a business. Things get done faster because 98% of all text messages are open. Compare that to voicemail where none of them are checked. Compare that to email where about 12% are opened. Texting is the best way to communicate with people, it just is.

This is the look at the Kenect texting inbox, where you can send and receive text messages to and from this inbox, it looks and functions a lot like an email inbox, but it's for texting. This is the Kenect mobile app, you can send and receive messages directly to and from this app, you can assign leads to people on your team. Leads can go directly to certain people depending on assignment rules. You can request payment, you can schedule messages, you can invite them to video chat as well.

The other thing we just launched is the ability for you to send more than just one to one text messaging. It's the ability to send messages to up to a thousand people at a time. It's called broadcast messaging, it's a new product from us. Really simple, really easy to send a message to a large group of people and they think and feel that it's a one to one message.

All right, top seven ways businesses, rental businesses specifically, use Kenect. So scheduling appointments, sending quick information, sending things like warranty reminders, collecting payments via text, which is what we'll talk about today. Generating reviews via texts, and attaching and sending photos, videos, invoices, PDFs, and attachments.

Steps to Speed Up Payment Collection

All right, I want to talk three steps to speed up payment collection here. The first is go remote. So this was interesting, I think this is kind of a good slide to set the scene. I won't read all this word for word, you can read, but the bottom line here is people want that contactless interaction. They don't want to stand in line and wait to swipe a card. They don't want to give a credit card number out over the phone, that's not secure. And the thing that's craziest is they will pay more if the payment process is convenient. We see this all the time. Uber eats is the best example I can think of where people are going to pay twice what their meal is in terms of cost. So if they order a $7 sandwich from Wendy's they will pay $7 for it to be delivered, that's how much they're placing, how much value they're placing, on convenience. So if you're having a hard time getting paid, or you want to get paid more or get paid faster Text-to-Pay is the way to do it.

Now I want to walk through some Text-to-Pay data here. 85% faster. You will receive payment 85% faster if you Text-to-Pay. Why? Because text messages are open 98% of the time and 96% of the time they're open within three minutes. Payment is on time nearly 100% of the time. 45 minutes is the average time per person saved in the service department, and this is for dealers, but the data's about the same for rental businesses, for self-storage facilities, things like that. Some dealers are now running 70% of their volume through Text-to-Pay because it's that powerful. And then 91% of the customers, your customers, prefer Text-to-Pay when they start using it.

So I wanted to show you how this works. While you're texting somebody, in this case Bill, you simply click on the little payment icon, this will appear where you put in the amount, the invoice and what it's for, and then the customer completes the transaction, it's that simple. That's simple, that's secure. You never see the card, you get paid faster because they open it. It hits your account instantly, and the biggest benefit is your employees and your customers love it. That's the biggest benefit of this.

So, we launched Text-to-Pay in April of 2020, we had 70 or so on at that first month, we're now up to 1600 locations that are using Text-to-Pay on a regular basis. In terms of volume we have seen 15x growth per month over the last two years, so more than $14 and a half million ran through our Text-to-Pay platform in March.

Second thing that this does is it improves communication. So every business I've ever talked to struggles with this, people want to text you so then people feel obligated at your business to give out their cell phone, they then have horror stories. This allows you to stop taking calls after hours, for your employees to stop having to give out their cell phone number.

The other thing I would say here is be proactive. If you are struggling with things like inventory at your business, if you're struggling to get enough help and so your service isn't as good as it normally used to be, I would just be transparent about that. Don't wait for them to reach out frustrated, be transparent with your customers about this, make them feel like they're part of the team with you and over communicate. They're probably experiencing the same thing wherever they were.

The other thing I'll show you here is the number of businesses that are receiving more leads per location per month. So you can see here a 40% increase in text leads year over year for this is across our entire customer base. The average location that uses Kenect is now getting 22 to 25 leads per month via texting. And then the other thing I would say here is now buying is done almost entirely remotely. So Google and Amazon have trained us, for better or worse by the way, to demand a simple and convenient buying experience. And like I said before, this is from Deloitte, 70% of consumers will pay more if the buying process was convenient. 90% of the decision is now made before people come in or call, they want to make that decision online and via a text. They're buying independent of discounts. And then look at this quote here, "Digital across the entire funnel, less than a third of young consumers prefer conducting a sales in person, at a dealership or business. Respondents are even more interested in contactless services. Half of respondents are willing to pay extra for this service." Convenience and simplicity win.

So please provide the ability for your customers to pay via text. You will get paid faster, you will get paid more easily, it will save you time and your customers will love it, there is no downside. And again, we're not asking you to replace your payment platform, we're asking you simply to add this as an option. So thanks for jumping on the call with us today everybody, you can text us or call us at this number (888) 972-7422. Thanks, bye, bye.

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