Message From The CEO: Q1 2019

Welcome everyone to our new company newsletter. Our goal is to publish one per quarter in order to keep all of our friends, customers, contacts, and partners up to speed on all the great products and opportunities that we have planned in the coming year.

I’m sure the first thing you notice is the new company name. Last year, we changed our name from Proximiti Communications to MessagePro. This new name better reflects the needs of our customers and new line-up of products. We know that every one of our clients, partners, and even in our own business needs new messaging capabilities.

The statistics are simple and well understood: 78% of phone calls aren’t answered today. It’s now considered rude to call without an appointment. In fact, the entire sequence of most communications has flipped. You used to call and if no one answered, you left voice message or sent an email. Most of today’s communications starts with text message. If you don’t get the information you need from that communications, you then move to email or a voice call. That’s how we came to our new tag line, “Solutions for a Messaging-First World”.

Our new line-up of products fit this new communications model; Business SMS and texting, secure messages, interactive messaging, and appointment management. We also have solutions for when a session moves beyond simple messaging. These include cloud-based faxing, voice mail, and cloud-based phone systems. Every solution is cloud-based and can be used in a variety of ways: marketing, recruiting, engaging mobile employees, operations management, and more.

The big opportunity is now to text enable business phone numbers, also known as Business SMS. If you are not familiar with Business SMS, please look at this 90-second video (https://youtu.be/ohIqFxmbayQ) it does a great job of explaining Business SMS. We know that 99% of businesses need this and don’t know about it. Extremely simple and fast to deploy, it can all be done via e-mail and web set-up. Call centers are heavy users but just about every business or organization needs it. We find most partners engage slowly—responding first to customers that ask about it and not really thinking about what a significant long-term revenue stream messaging can be.

We also see great opportunity in Health Care, which is now close to 20% of today’s economy. Messaging is a critical component of rapidly emerging new health care models, particularly value-based care. Payors, including Medicare and Medicaid, are encouraging remote patient care. This includes video calls between patients and doctors, check-in texts, information collection like weight or glucose levels, and more. MessagePro provides unique and highly cost-effective solutions to address this growing market.

In 2019, we are looking to increasing deployments of our core technologies, improving features and functionality through ongoing customer interaction, and new innovations in bot technology and AI.

We look forward to a great 2019!