How much easier would the world be if everyone texted? Say, for example, you could text your pizza place to order a large cheese. Or text your dry cleaner to ask if your shirt was ready for pick-up. Or text the bar to ask what their cover charge is tonight.
That’s a world that the team behind Pingup envisions. The Boston-based startup aims to help customers search for, discover and connect to local businesses via text, and it’s free for both parties.
“It’s clear that, when given the choice, most people today prefer to text rather than call every time. Our goal was to give people that choice,” says Pingup CEO Mark Slater in a press release. “We felt that they should be able to communicate with businesses the way they already do with their friends and family, and we couldn’t be happier with the result.”
The concept is incredibly simple: Users to go Pingup.com and create a user account. Customers are able to search keywords such as “pizza” and Pingup will automatically show them all the pizza shops in the area that are using Pingup for them to text.
If you are a business owner, you can search Pingup.com for your business and claim it as yours. After going through a verification process, businesses are able to receive texts from customers in any format they prefer, whether it’s text, web platform or mobile browser.
“Right now, we’re targeting small businesses,” says Dade Sokoloff, marketing director at Pingup, noting that eventually they’d like to have every business in Boston on their platform. “We’re a startup, and we want to walk before we run.”
Since their soft-launch last week, Pingup already has 100 businesses on board, and Sokoloff says they’ll be hitting the ground running this week, encouraging businesses to sign-up.
“We understand that for the user, the more businesses they can contact this way, the more useful this product is,” he adds.
For small businesses, Pingup can alleviate a lot of stress that comes with answering the same question via telephone over and over again. Sokoloff points to the example of Royale Nightclub, which recently starting using Pingup to field questions about dress code, DJs and more.
“Pingup lets Royale and Bowery Boston better serve our customers while reducing the cost of handling the hundreds of simple questions we receive every week about our events,” said Dave Ralph, management consultant for Royale and Bowery Boston in a press release. “You wouldn’t believe how many times people have asked to be able to reach us this way and we’re now finally able to provide what they want, which is amazing.”
While the food and nightlife industry may be obvious users for Pingup, Sokoloff says the technology’s usefulness doesn’t stop there. “Realitisically, any business is a legitimate use case,” he explains.
Car dealerships can use it to better connect salespeople with customers, shoppers can learn when products are in stock at retail stores and tenants can text property management companies when their is an issue at their apartment.
“It’s virtually limitless,” he concludes.
Head to Pingup.com today to sign up and request your favorite local businesses sign up, as well.
