By Silvia Mwendia
Kenyans can now access professional counselling
services via text through a newly launched platform, My Insight, which
has led the way into a new area of service delivery by
short-messaging-services (SMS).
My Insight was launched at the beginning of the month with
the aim of offering anonymity and being the first point of contact for
guidance and counselling services.
“Sometimes people are more comfortable getting such
services in the privacy of their homes or villages and, with this new
technology, My Insight is making counselling on a wide range of issues
available to them, quickly and securely,” said Ms Cellina Alisi, founder
of My Insight.
But as counselling services move from traditional
face-to-face consultations to more accessible platforms, such as My
Insight’s SMSes, it begs the question of the degree to which brands must
consider the most appropriate delivery channels for the function of
their products or services.
In counselling, early evidence is that SMSes can provide some help.
In 2015, Thomas D. Hull of Columbia University
conducted a preliminary study on the effectiveness of SMS therapy by
looking into Talkspace, which is an online and mobile-based therapy
company.
By analysing the company’s messaging therapy, the
study titled ‘A Preliminary Study of Talkspace’s Text-based
Psychotherapy’ found that 90 per cent of the patients showed a “nearly
full point improvement in psychological well-being”.
The respondents who also received the text-based
therapy were quite satisfied with the treatment they got at Talkspace,
compared to other types of treatment they had tried in the past.
Some 92.3 per cent of the respondents said
Talkspace helped them make progress on their problem, while 96.1 per
cent felt that they got the help right when they needed it.
This, while removing the breadth and depth of
typically one hour long face-to-face counselling services, the new
generation of text-based counse’ling services are, it seems, better
fulfilling clients’ needs in some ways.
In exploring what clients really need, and get,
from counselling, in 2012, a study titled ‘Meaningful Experiences in the
Counseling Process’ by Corrine Sackett, Gerard Lawson and Penny L.
Burge, published in The Professional Counsellor Journal, analysed the
experiences of clients during counselling sessions, and found that six
elements made for meaningful counselling, being insight, immediacy,
goals, emotion, non-verbals, transference and countertransference.
Thus, as long as counselling is focused,
personalised, insightful, professional and immediate, it seems that SMS
texts can indeed serve to assist, opening the way to other brands, too,
in extending their uses of SMS platforms.
In this, the extent to which SMS services can usefully be deployed does depend on the target market.
“Is it the middle class? Is it people at the bottom
of the pyramid? Is it the affluent? Are they comfortable using it?”
said Kenyan marketer and founder of digital agency Dotsavvy, Moses
Kemibaro.
However, the growth in SMS based services and
marketing has so far been largely confined to surveys, promotions and
announcements.
No comments:
Post a Comment