When the rate of abandoned calls in your contact center is high, you’re likely to see other success metrics take a hit — like customer satisfaction and retention. We’ve all been there as customers ourselves: the looped recording of hold music is slowly making you lose your mind, and you’re just over it. So, you hang up. Your question is left unanswered and you’ve wasted a chunk of your day. It sure doesn’t leave you with the best impression of that company’s service.
But, how do you even begin to reduce abandoned calls in your call center?
Globally, the average call abandonment rate is around 5-8% of calls abandoned. But unfortunately, COVID-19 made it worse. Staffing shortages paired with increased ecommerce during the pandemic has contributed to more calls coming into call centers, and more calls abandoned.
Implement Business Texting to Exceed Customer Expectations
We’re all pretty tied to our phones. In fact, the average American spends a little above 5 hours daily on their mobile phones! To get even more specific, the top 10% of heavy phone users have an average of 5,427 touches on their mobile phones every day. And, 91% of Americans keep their mobile devices within arm’s reach at all times. Any time our phones light up, we’re quick to check out whatever the latest notification could be.
Within customer service, consumers are much more inclined to communicate through text on their phones with businesses than via email or phone calls. Specifically 85% of smartphone users prefer mobile messages to emails or calls. Why?
Recent studies show customers and leads respond to a text faster than anything else. On average per channel, you’ll see:
Overall, businesses are discovering the power of texting because it’s what customers are wanting!
Just think about it — texting is fast and personal. It lets customers send direct and specific questions to agents without interrupting their own day. And, it gives agents the freedom to respond to a customer’s question or problem while taking on several other texts, resolving more customer interactions, faster. The conversation is likely pretty casual, giving agents a chance to take a personalized approach with each customer.
Texting Erases Call Center Abandonment
It’s logical really. If you provide easy to use and accessible texting technology, your customers will likely choose texting over calling. In turn, you’re reducing the volume of calls even coming into your call center. When you provide customers a way to connect with you over text, you’re more likely to see your abandonment rate plummet.
We’ve seen it firsthand at Textel. Our friends and customers over at Vera Bradley switched to a two-way texting model to give their customers the option to text back and forth with agents using their existing business line. The result? Vera Bradley experienced a 0% abandonment rate while communicating over text.
Another pro of texting in your contact center is cutting down the overall inbound support volume. By a lot. Instead of calling or emailing in and hoping to get a reply – eventually – customers can text in and start an interaction with an Agentless SMS. You can pre-program automations to run when your customers text in, whether they’re sending a specific keyword or just general text or picture-based questions. Agentless SMS is getting greater adoption because:
It deflects incoming calls to text, which reduces your center’s average handle time (AHT) and calls on hold.
It doesn’t shift volume from one channel to another. Instead, it lets customers resolve their issues via text without requiring an agent.
So, then your phone support becomes cheaper and customer retention rises. Your agents can optimize their time while your call center helps more customers. Strengthen your two-way texting capabilities and see it benefit every aspect of your call center.
Abandon a Call-First Approach To Change the Game
Give your customers the freedom to decide how quickly and easily their interactions with your business will be. Give them what they want — the ability to text you. Customers are sick of waiting on hold. They’re tired of taking tons of time out of their day just to get a question answered. When you embrace the right channels and text-enable your call center, your call center team can reduce abandoned calls and retain customers.
This post was originally published on March 26, 2021 and was updated on February 2, 2022.
Customer experience is everything. It’s the ingredient that sets you apart. It sparks business growth and promotes customer loyalty and retention. A positive CX ultimately affects your bottom line. In fact, customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that aren’t. So, how do you support your customer experience in your call center? Add business texting.
Ok, maybe I’ve lost you. Let’s walk through how adding texting to your customer service will refresh your customer experience:
Every interaction between a business and its customer is a conversation. As a result, customers more and more prefer to reach companies through messaging. According to surveys conducted by Zendesk, messaging by text and live chat are the future for building a successful customer experience. Why? Well, shockingly enough, your customers don’t actually want to sit on hold with your agents. And, they definitely aren’t thrilled when they’re stuck waiting a day or two to get an email back. They’re looking for fast and responsive service.
Conversational messaging is more effective than email, showing significantly higher open and response rates. Customers today want a personal, 1:1 conversation when they reach out to a company. But, what if you already have chat integration? Why should you need to add texting as a channel in addition to chat when chat seems to offer your company and customers the same benefits?
While live chat offers fast, real time service, it has its limitations. Let’s break those down:
Common Challenges Call Centers Face with Live Chat
Live chat is bound by operational and physical restraints that ultimately can harm your customer experience. Here are some challenges call centers face with chat:
1. Live chat is inflexible for your internal operations.
Chat sets the expectation that the customer will receive a response in less than 30 seconds to be considered a success. So, it requires an agent to be ready and waiting to immediately answer a customer. When a customer fills out a chat request and is told no representatives are available, it leaves a bad taste in their mouth.
But, hold up — have you been in a call center? This kind of flexibility is not always possible when phones are ringing off the hook and your team is understaffed. Chat establishes expectations with customers that realistically cannot always be met, thus negatively affecting your customer experience.
2. Live chat is inflexible for your customers.
Just as live chat requires your agents to be sitting ready and waiting before a computer screen, it also requires customers to wait. Let’s say it’s one of those days — your team is swamped. Customers are getting stuck talking with a bot on your live chat.
Customers choose live chat because it’s supposed to be quick and easy. It’s not convenient then for customers to get stuck sitting in front of their computer waiting for an available agent. On a bad day, live chat removes any form of convenience or possible flexibility for customer service.
3. When a chat is closed, it’s gone.
Chats are incredibly temporary. Once a conversation ends, your conversation’s history disappears. That means a new agent can’t pick up the conversation at a later date as easily. You don’t have as clear a record of your customer interaction. And, your customer can’t go back to reference their previously asked questions. Basically, everyone’s left in the dark, making crafting a customer experience tricky.
4. You’re stuck without much customer context.
In order to build a solid customer experience, your agents need to know your customers. It’s vital that every customer interaction, no matter the channel, can funnel its data to the same place. But, live chat is not always tied to your CRM. This means that your call center agents don’t have the same easy access to customer history or relationship context that occurred over chat.
Chat just cannot support your customer or your call center’s needs on its own. Add business texting and see a huge impact on your customer experience.
How Business Texting Helps Support your Customer Experience
At this point, nearly every American consumer owns a smartphone. According to Pew Research, as many as 97% of Americans now own a cellphone of some kind. And, as of 2021, the share of Americans that own a smartphone is now 85%. What’s the effect of this on your customer service and experience?
Customers want to be able to use that phone that’s in their back pocket to reach you. Text messaging hits customers right where they live, offering flexibility and ease unlike any other channel.As many as 78% of consumers wish they could text a business. That’s 78% of consumers telling you one way you could give them a better customer experience.
But, what makes it a better solution than live chat? Easy – Texting. In fact, texting is replacing live chat for your competitor’s on-the-go customers who want to connect when (and how) it’s convenient for them. Think about it: texting offers flexibility and accessibility in all the ways live chat can’t.
With text messaging, customers can communicate directly and conversationally with your business. The conversation stays logged for you and for the customer, retaining helpful details about the customer relationship and history. And, it gives your customers a place to go back to to find helpful guides, links, and media to answer their questions.
The channel offers more grace to your agents and customers, allowing for more natural pauses between replies. Customers can leave their computer to cook dinner or run to the store and still keep up the conversation. Agents get a breather between interactions, allowing for better internal operations, less stress, and more collaboration.
Integrate texting into your omnichannel solution for a more flexible way to support your customer base. Reach your customers where they are to provide a stronger customer experience.
Let’s get down to the basics. If your customers are unsatisfied with your business, your business will fail. It really is that simple. Keeping customers happy is a priority to build a profitable and successful company. But how do you know if your customers are happy with your service and your product?
For a customer service team, customer satisfaction (or CSAT) is one of the most measured key performance indicators (KPIs). Every contact center manager knows — if you don’t measure customer satisfaction, you can’t identify unhappy customers. If you don’t know who is unhappy, you don’t know who will churn, and you can’t figure out why they’re unhappy. It’s in your hands then to understand where unhappiness exists and improve your service to improve your customer satisfaction.
One simple way to boost customer satisfaction? Connect with customers using business texting.
What is Customer Satisfaction and Why is it Important?
First and foremost, we need to understand exactly what customer satisfaction is to know how business texting can help it. Customer satisfaction is the measurement of how happy a business’ customers are with its products and services, and it can be a powerful indicator of where the company is headed.
The future of customer satisfaction lies in greater use of technology, automation, and personalization. With new technology added into the customer experience, though, customers have greater expectations (as seen below).
According to a Deloitte report, customer satisfaction took on an important role during the COVID-19 pandemic, when businesses felt the impact of the pandemic on their bottom line. Maintaining customer loyalty and trust was paramount for survival, so many companies began to focus more on their customer experience. This means, businesses are using customer satisfaction and experience as a means of competition.
It’s time to join in on the competition. How can you meet customer expectations? How can you keep customers happy while keeping your budget under control? Add business SMS to your omnichannel solution to help.
The Importance of SMS for Business
Customers want to know they can reach you in a myriad of ways. If they prefer talking with an agent directly on the phone, they want a phone number to call. If they want the flexibility and low stakes of sending an email, they want to know they can shoot you an email. And, if they want to text you, they should have a way to do so.
Texting is worth the investment. SMS is the most used communication channel, with 4.2 billion people using SMS globally. How does it fit into your business?
Customer Service and Support
Customer service is at the heart of many companies’ success and is the heart of customer satisfaction. Providing an excellent customer service experience makes your customers want to come back. Consumers expect customer support to be fast, effective, and simple. Texting offers a way to give quick responses and start a two-way conversation that can be escalated to voice, if necessary.
Texting integrates well with your other channels with customers to boost customer satisfaction. It helps you lower wait and hold times by deflecting from your IVR. You can offer a flexible form of communication that live chat can’t compete with. If customers want a more personalized access to your help, texting gives them casual and personal conversations that email can’t. Texting, when added to your other channels offered, gives customers more options to reach you how they want to.
Customer Engagement and Sales
A Harvard Business School study found that for a 5% increase in customer retention, you can increase profits by at least 25%. That means that keeping your customers engaged can have a direct impact on your profits. One way to engage your customers is through sending out promotions and discounts. Not only does this potentially increase your sales and revenue, but also gives your customers a reason to remain loyal to your brand.
Use SMS for direct and personal access to your customers and to connect and engage your audience. Keep customers in the loop about new products or upcoming events. Send out personal birthday messages with a coupon to remind customers you care.
Context-Based Marketing
A business texting platform helps segment your target audience. You can send messages according to context. For example, Uber sends a message to airline passengers as soon as they land, inviting them to call a car to pick them up from the airport. Use texting to reach your customers where they are to keep them satisfied with your service.
3 Ways to Use Messaging to Boost Customer Satisfaction
So, SMS can fit easily into your business strategy. But how exactly does it support customer satisfaction? Here are some creative examples of how business SMS can be used to keep customers happy:
1. Send out exclusive content—pre-launch
When you have a new release or launch, why not build anticipation in the group with the highest chance of conversion: your existing customers? Send SMS messages offering your customer base the option of ordering before the launch. Make them feel special! They’re part of the club. Sending a text gives you the chance to target this high-intent group directly.
Yes, yes, I know. Email exists. But with the reliable open rate of texts compared to email, you’re more likely to reach your customers if you shoot them a text. This can create loyalty and enhance conversions.
2. Use gamification
We’re all a bit tired of telemarketers and stock promotional emails. Customers are less likely to open content when it’s pushing a sale on them. But, with gamification, you can creatively engage customers in your latest deals.
Gamification means incorporating gaming elements into a non-gaming context to make the experience more enjoyable for the customer. For example, you can engage customers with a loyalty reward program that is also a game. Like McDonalds’ Monopoly game. Using texts to communicate, let customers accumulate points to cash them in for products or discounts for future purchases.
3. Follow up
How can you keep customers satisfied? Find out if they are first! Send out surveys and questionnaires via text and email that ask customers to rate your product or service. Then, use the responses to guide your CX strategy and grow your business.
Then, use those analytics, insights, and administrative tools built into your text messaging service so you can improve issue resolution. Or look through records of text interactions to help you understand how to address customer concerns better.
Pairing Your Business SMS Strategy With Good Management
A business SMS platform can help meet your customer expectations. But texting can’t fix your customer experience on its own. Pair your SMS strategy with strong management for real growth in your customer satisfaction. There are other factors to take into account:
Prioritize Good Training and Coaching
Customer satisfaction doesn’t come without training and coaching agents to use the technology well. Provide best practice guides and an internal knowledge base for agents so they have resources to grow. Meet regularly with your texting team and collect successful and some unsuccessful texting interactions with customers. Use these to model how agents can more effectively communicate with customers. Support your agents in their work and grow together.
Be Personal
Although automation can save you a lot of time and effort, messages should be as personal as possible. Business texting platforms can help you insert personal details (e.g., the customer’s name) so you can send personalized messages to mass groups. Stay aware of your customer history and use it to create a personalized experience to keep customers satisfied.
Keep in Touch
Customer satisfaction happens when customers feel seen and heard. Use scheduled messages to follow up with customers. Keep track of important dates — like the customer’s anniversary with your brand or their birthday — and send out personal messages to help customers feel known. When you meet your customer where they are, and build the experience around them, you’ll see customer satisfaction soar.
Want to learn more about how Textel can boost your customer satisfaction? Let’s connect.
This article published on March 23, 2021 and was revised on April 14, 2022.
We often forget that we are all consumers and that time is the most valuable asset in our lives. We loath waiting on hold. We rarely respond to voicemails, but our expectations are very different when we text, and we tend to have more patience. Texting is the most-used smartphone feature, in front of emails, internet access, and voice calls. Most of us read texts within minutes of receiving them. We text our kids, our friends, and now, our businesses. It is no surprise that texting proves to be an excellent tool for business communications.
Business Texting Increases Customer Satisfaction Rates for Salons
Everyone texts. It is the surefire way of getting in touch with someone quickly. Your clients (especially your next-generation customer) want to text you on your landline phone number.
Texting is reliable. Texting is a preferred method of contact for clients. While some appreciate a phone call, others may prefer to keep things fast and easy. Texting takes far less effort than the sometimes-lengthy process of an entire email or the dead-end of leaving a voicemail.
For the Love of Texting – 10 Proven Use Cases for the Beauty Industry
Stay In Contact with Scheduled Clients Your clients who run late do not have the time to call your salon. Even if they do, they will not want to wait on hold because it is inconvenient. Most people would rather sit in traffic than wait on hold for an hour; however, they will text your business if you let them easily reschedule.
Schedule Appointments Your clients want to text your salon to schedule an appointment, and they want you to text them back. Imagine doing so right from your computer without ever leaving Millennium or Meevo or any other application. Talk about a time saver – less call volume, easily manage multiple clients at once!
Send Alert Notifications Changing business hours or procedures due to weather conditions or COVID requires rapid notification to your clients. Mass text blasts allow you to quickly send updates to your customers where they are most likely to see it.
Add a Human Touch to Your Brand The customer receives your text from your salon number, not an employee’s personal number or a 5-digit automated number. You can track each conversation your team is having with a client, and they can now directly text the number they already know and have saved on their phone.
Market with Specific Keywords You have a great new product launch, gift with purchase, seasonal loyalty bonus point offer, or seasonal gift card promotion. Create a social media post informing your guests of the keyword promotions! Your client texts the keyword “gift” to your salon phone number and invites the client to show the text message at checkout on their next visit to receive a free gift with subsequent purchase.
Virtual Concierge Does your salon offer seasonal gift card promotions? Remind clients to text the keyword “giftcard” to your salon phone number anytime, and your virtual concierge will auto-reply back with a text message containing the gift card promotion details and call to action. Your keyword virtual concierge is always working for you in the background, 24/7.
Call-to-Action Marketing Your salon offers a loyalty program, and there is a “bonus points” offer every month. Your loyalty program customers always want to be in the know. They can now text the word “loyal” to your salon phone number to find out the service of the month offer.
Communicate Internally with Staff Your team meeting is scheduled once per quarter. Your team can text the word “meeting” to your salon phone number to receive the auto-reply text containing the meeting’s details at any given time 24/7, 365 days of the year.
Staff & Front Desk Communication A spa guest would like to schedule more time with your aesthetician for an add-on masque. The aesthetician checks their salon management tool like SalonBiz or Meevo 2 and sees that she has a 30-minute availability. She sends a text message to the front desk so they can schedule the extra 30 minutes. Your team can now communicate with the front desk without ever leaving their treatment room.
Increase Front Desk Productivity Your call center is bustling. Why not increase productivity at the front desk by allowing your employees to manage all incoming text messages between guests at checkout? It is as easy as simply clicking on a reply button right from their computer without leaving your POS or CRM.
You can learn more about how Textel can improve your salon & spa’s productivity by contacting us.
Contact centers use technology such as business texting to optimize processes and improve communication with customers. However, business texting technology can also increase employee engagement and reduce attrition rates. A high turnover affects the quality of the customer service and ultimately leads to a decrease in ROI.
In this post, we’re going to walk you through the major reasons for contact center employee turnover and tell you about three benefits of using texting technology to keep your staff engaged and improve productivity.
Top Reasons for Contact Center Employee Turnover
The contact center industry is growing as more companies rely on them to communicate with their customers. Businesses use contact centers for sales, customer support, billing, and marketing.
Although the industry is growing, so do contact center attrition rates. According to a 2019 study from Daily Pay, attrition rates average between 17% and 45%, depending on the contact center’s industry and size.
What Causes High Attrition Rates in Contact Centers?
Contact centers can be a stressful place to work. Fortunately, the right strategy can reduce stress levels and turnover rates. There are, however, a few other reasons for attrition in contact centers:
1. Inadequate training
The fast pace of a contact center sometimes means that new recruits may need to start working before being completely trained. However, not training new employees to deal with the different use cases and complex customer situations may lead to frustration. A recruit who is frustrated usually performs poorly and will look for a better place to work.
How do you identify this problem? If you see a higher turnover in new employees, that can be a sign that it is due to poor training. You can solve this problem by providing engaging and comprehensive training for new employees.
2. Employee fatigue
Many contact center employees experience burnout. Lack of support, high expectations from managers, and a high-pressure environment contribute to this situation. Burnout is one of the top causes of employee turnover in contact centers. Multitasking and unpredictable work cause stress and a lack of motivation. According to the American Psychological Association, these factors can reduce productivity by 40%.
How do you identify this problem? Unlike lack of training, burnout affects employees who have been in the organization for a long time. Therefore, if you see a higher turnover rate in long-term employees, it may be due to burnout. You can solve this problem by providing support, allowing for flexible schedules, and promoting a positive work environment.
3. Lack of motivation and limited advancement opportunities
The longer you stay in an organization, the better development opportunities you may expect. Still, contact centers don’t typically offer formal career advancement paths. This can lead to demotivation, especially on top employees. A 2019 Achievers study found that 43% of employees planned to leave their jobs because of a lack of career development.
How do you identify this problem? When you are losing your top performers, chances are, they are looking for greener pastures. Your best employees are the most driven for career advancement, and if they don’t have good opportunities, they can leave. You can solve this problem by establishing a defined career path with a feedback process and clear expectations.
4. Outdated tools
Ineffective software can lead to employee stress, low productivity, and poor performance. For instance, manual dialing or relying exclusively on phone calls may be frustrating for staff and lead to poor conversions. Employees who are aggravated by unsuitable software may turn to other opportunities.
How do you identify this problem? When you see your turnover rates increasing, it’s worth investigating whether one reason is inadequate technology. The right software can make workers’ lives easier and increase productivity.
Advantages of Using Texting Technology in Contact Centers
Adding text messaging to your contact center toolbox can improve your customer service and streamline operations. It reduces on-hold time, provides faster service, and enhances the customer experience. Users prefer to deal with companies that offer text messaging as an alternative.
According to an eWeek study, customers prefer text chat to call when dealing with customer service. (Image Source)
However, there is an added benefit of using business texting: it reduces employee turnover. Here are three reasons.
1. Reduces burnout
Contact centers tend to be teeming with activity and noise when relying solely on phone communication. As mentioned above, multitasking and a high-stress environment can lead to burnout. Business texting provides a fast and cost-effective way for employees to reduce stress by reducing noise volume. Agents can text from the computer—or even on the go, using an intuitive user interface.
It takes care of customers’ issues faster: a quick message can often solve an issue more quickly than a lengthy and draining conversation.
It allows the agents to multitask without stress: agents can carry on multiple conversations at once.
2. Simplifies tasks
There are many ways a company can integrate text messaging into its processes. Texting can be used to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks. Autoresponder texts can take care of follow-up calls, on-hold messages, and auto-replies for frequently asked questions. Texting makes the agent’s work more manageable by reducing average handle time and helping to avoid miscommunication.
3. Increases efficiency
Texting helps your agents to handle more cases without reducing customer service. An agent can see the entire messaging history with a customer and request and receive documents and images within the text feed. Having everything on the same thread helps the agent to have context, respond efficiently, and avoid customer frustration.
Textel’s business texting software allows contact center staff to get messages from different channels (landlines and toll-free numbers, messenger, and SMS) all in one inbox.
How Textel Helps Contact Centers Improve Their Productivity
Texting is a preferred method of communication today for most customers. In fact, 98% of text messages get opened. Textel is a cloud business texting platform specifically designed for contact centers. The solution enables omnichannel communication, having two-way text conversations with your customers, or sending a text message to multiple customers at once.
You can learn more about how Textel can improve your contact center productivity by contacting us.
