leigh prather / AdobeStockThe only thing that seems to be certain in digital communications is change. Embracing new technology is critical, but to do so, it’s imperative to understand what’s on the horizon, the challenges, and how others are harnessing technology to their advantage.
In this Executive Q&A, industry expert Bryce Payne, TCN’s Vice President of Business Development, walks us through how text messaging is evolving, what’s on the horizon, what he’s seeing regarding the iOS 26 update, AI bots, short code usage, and navigating consent issues.
Missy Meggison:
Hi everyone, I’m here with another episode of Executive Q&A. I’m Missy Meggison, editor of insideARM, brought to you by Auriemma Roundtables, and I’m joined today by Bryce Payne, Vice President of Business Development at TCN. Bryce, can you give us a quick introduction, please?
Bryce Payne:
Hello, Missy. Yeah, like you mentioned, I’m with TCN. I’ve been with TCN for about 13 years now. I am out of our St. George office. We do have offices in New Jersey, Canada, Europe, Australia, India, and we’re opening up in the Philippines, but I’m here in beautiful St. George, so I’m looking forward to talking to you today.
[Missy]
Great, I’m glad to have you here.
[Missy]
Let’s talk about communicating with consumers. The only thing that seems to be certain in digital communications is change. Can you tell us a bit about how text messaging continues to evolve, what you’re seeing, and how we should be thinking about these changes?
[Bryce]
You know, it’s a great question, because there’s a lot of things changing that’s constantly ongoing. It’s very difficult to stay on top of some of the things when it comes to compliance and regulation. The positive things, of course, are we’ve gone from just your basic texting to now you have MMS, where you can include images, where you can put logos to be able to get trust, and you can put attachments, invoices, or even, like, model validation letters in there, so you can reduce your mailing cost.
And, of course, now we’re seeing the advent of RCS which is coming, which is really exciting to see now. This website experience-type approach that you’d be able to present in a text without having to go to a link or anything else like that. It’s going to be really interesting as that is newly available and coming around the corner, if you will.
[Missy]
Wonderful, and I’ve heard a lot of folks are really interested in RCS for all of the reasons that you mentioned. Can’t wait to see and hear more about it.
[Bryce]
It seems like it’s still rightly in its early stages here in the U.S. for business to consumer, but it is coming available, so it’s something to be thinking about and getting to know what you will do with it.
[Missy]
Awesome. I can’t wait to hear more.
ARM industry stakeholders continue to report that consent is an issue. What have you been hearing about consent, and how have organizations been resolving these issues?
[Bryce]
Well consent is, like always, it’s a challenge to make sure that people are able to get consent and keep good records of that. Some of the challenges that we run into that can put you in a real litigious situation is if someone revokes consent, if your technology is not such to immediately block any sort of communication that might be going out past that – we’ve seen lawsuits happen for that, because somehow the system just didn’t notice, and they sent out a text or something after consent had been revoked. So obviously, keeping good records and having the right technology to be able to make sure that’s all taken care of in real time is an issue. Also, sometimes you’ve got to look at different forms of communication to be able to obtain that consent.
The carriers just really have an aversion to third-party collections, and so it puts yourself in a little bit of disadvantage of trying to figure out ways to get consent that’s going to be compliant with the carriers. You’ve got to look for maybe different forms of communication, referencing that communication in the other forms of communication you can, so that they recognize that text that comes out, and they’re more apt to respond to it, versus maybe block it or complain.
[Missy]
Wow, there’s definitely a lot to unpack there. It feels like with every advancement we make, there’s a new challenge that needs to be overcome.
[Bryce]
It’s always hard to stay on top of these things.
[Missy]
Yeah, well, that’s why it’s great to have conversations like this, where we get to hear a little bit more insight than we typically get.
So, what other new challenges are on your radar these days?
[Bryce]
Probably the thing that I hear coming up the most of late is the call screening. Most people are aware because there was a lot of talk happening with iOS 26 and their call screening. Everyone’s been kind of panicking about that, and what’s going to happen both from a voice call and a text call perspective.
We’ve been looking into that quite a bit, because it’s of such great concern, and what we’ve found so far, the first thing to note is it’s not something that’s just automatically on, which was one of the concerns that I had, you have to go in and actually turn on that screening.
And we’re finding that some people, once they miss that phone call from their school or the hospital because it wasn’t in their contacts, they are concerned about having that turned on. We did a test recently of 10,000 phone calls, and we’re able to see how much the usage of that screening is. On iOS, 1.7% had the screening turned on and on the Android side of things, it was 0.7%. We did a follow-up test just recently, and we did see a little bit of an increase to 2%, but I don’t think it’s as big of an issue, and I also do think that people will miss a couple of phone calls, and they’ll turn it back off. So, it’s not as big of an issue as you think, but it is something to be aware of.
[Missy]
Wonderful, thank you for that. I have heard the same thing, a lot of communication about that, but glad to hear that it sounds like it might not be as big an issue as we originally thought.
Speaking of tech, how can the ARM industry utilize tech to meet the challenges we’ve been battling? Those that are just coming to the surface, and those that are barely on the horizon? What should we be looking at?
[Bryce]
There’s a lot of different things. Everyone’s always talking about AI, just getting back to what we just talked about on the iOS, one of the things that we’re using AI for is in that engagement, in the call screening. It will transcribe whatever you say there, so we’re using a bot to be able to leave a message that gets transcribed to the consumer that will entice them to go ahead and accept that call. So, we are playing around with some different things to see how that can help alleviate this problem with the call screening.
Also, some things to think about, just kind of jumping back a little bit, but it is technology when it comes to the iOS stuff and the call screening, is getting people to, you know, you can send them a V-card and have them add that into their contacts so that any further communication is not going to get blocked.
Some other technology that we’ve been looking at is things that will actually look at, as the call comes into a collection agency, it can determine based on a lot of data as to what best agent to send to, and I’ve actually seen an increase in collections on that end.
The other thing a lot of people ask about is branded caller ID and being able to actually show your logo in as the call appears. That’s been very difficult to utilize because it’s been very expensive in the past, but it’s something to be aware of that’s coming around the corner.
Now regulations are coming out to where the carriers are actually being required to provide it, and it’s going to come over the STIR/SHAKEN protocol. What I’ve heard of late, and this is just something to be aware of because I think it’s going to be a big thing, now that it’s going to be more readily available and less expensive to be able to provide that. T-Mobile is done with their technology. Verizon said they’ll be done by the end of this year. AT&T is probably more towards the middle of next year.
If you have T-Mobile and Verizon, you’re covering about 60% to maybe 70% of the carriers, and you’re going to be able to utilize that branded caller ID. Also getting more granular with some of your scoring so that you can figure out the best channel of communication. When it comes to texting, we’re hearing from everyone that they’re saying that’s the preferred channel of communication, and so if you haven’t established a process or a procedure on that, it’s something you need to really get on top of, and then also be looking into RCS and be prepared for that as it becomes available.
[Missy]
Wow, fantastic. Thank you for that great insight. Do you have any closing and final thoughts?
[Bryce]
My thought would be, since we tend to be focusing on the texting subject for today, is, it is the preferred communication coming about, so be thinking about your strategies. Sometimes there’s some misnomers that you have to have a short code. The majority of our clients just use 10DLC or toll-free, which is less expensive, and gives you some options there. So, figure out your strategies.
Also, start looking into what your RCS page would look like, because you can actually get your application in. It may take a long time right now, because that’s owned by Google and their approval process is very limited right now, but be thinking about that. And then, of course, jumping back to consent, I see problems where people just do not have things set up properly to make sure that they’re capturing and making sure the revocation happens quickly, but get that strategy in place, and realize that there’s a lot of things you can do with payment processing and everything through texting.
[Missy]
Wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing your time and experience with us today, and thank you for everyone for tuning in to this episode of Executive Q&A.
[Bryce]
Thank you, Missy, really appreciate it. Good to talk to you today.
[Missy]
You too.
