Increased customer satisfaction, increased conversion rate (for some), reduced time per ticket all helped ease businesses into it, but more than anything I think businesses see their competitors using live chat and feel they must to keep up. Live chat hit a critical mass at some point a few years ago and then it exploded to where even the smallest businesses utilize it.
I believe that people would rather communicate via text when they can so consumer demand could drive adoption of this platform much quicker than live chat. It's also not as big of an ask for a business in a lot of ways as switching from email to live chat was, if they are already using live chat.
We can either integrate with the existing chat and just add on SMS/MMS as a channel or offer the live chat portion on the same platform. The biggest issue I think will be the additional cost.
I don't think cost is enough to stop it if it is truly what consumers want. Think about free shipping - it is a serious loss for many small ecommerce businesses, but they still do it to be competitive.