Back in 2013 we spoke with John Lauer, co-founder and CEO of Zipwhip and reported in a post entitled: ZipWhip: What if Every Phone Number Could Text? It’s been an exciting ride for the company over the years – innovating in the market to text-enable landlines. This past June we broke the news about the company partnering with Telmetrics to allow the tracking of marketing across phone and text. The relationship combines the power of scalable, secure, conversational and automated texting capabilities with a clear attribution picture for all text-marketing initiatives and allows businesses to capitalize on additional value-add services and marketing stack integrations from Telmetrics.

Most recently, Zipwhip announced the public launch of the Zipwhip desktop app, the first-ever desktop app available within the texting-for-business industry. Zipwhip’s desktop app enhances the user experience with new notification functionality and auto-launch on system startup, maximizing adoption and ensuring businesses never miss a customer message.

Zipwhip’s desktop application provides the full functionally and experience of the web-based product through an easy-to-use application installed on the user’s operating system. Available for both Windows and Mac users, the desktop app will launch as the user’s computer is turned on and is then viewable from the dock on MacOS or task bar on Windows. Desktop app users will be notified to new customer messages with instant push notifications along with a numerical badge indicator that tallies unread messages on the Zipwhip app icon. Users will immediately be able to see new messages when they get to work, without the hassle of having to log in again.

“For employees who spend a lot of time in front of a computer, the desktop app provides the fastest, easiest and most convenient texting experience,” said John. “Zipwhip users no longer need to dig through a sea of open web pages or worry about missing a message. Zipwhip is thrilled to be the first to market with such an important product, and we are proud that our solution continues to stand out from the rest of the industry.”

We had an exclusive interview with Scott Heimes, CMO and Keena Bean, Director, Corporate Communications. Scott explained the company has been around since 2008 – originally focusing on consumers and then moving to business where they text enable 10 digit and also toll-free numbers exclusively.

They have 12,000 direct customers and 25,000 more using resellers. They have raised $90 million. Their business is primarily software and APIs. Scott explained the desktop app they have just released is like Slack, without needing a login. It has instant-push he explained. They also have SOC 2 security built-in.

He explained that email is less effective these days as they are polluted with spam. Likewise for the phone and robocalls.

“We are pioneers and offer the most scalable and secure business texting platform and solution in the market,” he exclaimed. “We have all kinds of successful use cases from customer service to sales, marketing and internal communications. We have had great success in finance, staffing, franchising and insurance.”

He continued that many different sized organizations have figured out business texting has had a huge impact in reaching customers and successfully growing the companies.

“We help with the investment in landline promotion,” he exclaimed. The idea here is businesses are already promoting phone numbers – now they can also be used for text, in addition to voice.

The company also provides software that lets businesses communicate with customers via the web, desktop app as detailed above, mobile – Android and iOS as well as a Chrome browser extension which allows an overlay app in any web experience such as CRM. More news is coming soon as well which is pretty cool – we can’t share it just yet.

Keena added that when customers turn on the service, they get texts immediately, with no promotion, meaning landlines have been getting texts all along – they just didn’t know about it.

It seems obvious to us that all business phone numbers including toll-free should be text-enabled, meaning tremendous opportunity for the company to grow.

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