Modern contact centers must support multiple channels of communication to make it easy for customers to engage with them. While everyone provides phone and email support, some contact centers are just beginning to explore other channels like live chat and texting.
Messaging More Important Than Ever
Phone and email have led customer contact strategies at contact centers for decades, but nowadays organizations must be available via live chat and text message. This ensures they provide an omnichannel experience to their target audience. Messaging can close the generational divide in your buyer personas by appealing to their preferred method of communication at the moment of interest.
Contact centers are quickly learning that voice-only support isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Massive increases in call volume due to things like COVID are making it difficult to provide a quality customer experience. With email rendered ineffective by a mountain of spam emails, messaging has shown itself to be a must-have communication solution for capturing and engaging a contact.
Not all messaging is created equal
While messaging is critical to a modern contact center, it’s important to understand that not all messaging is created equal. There are subtle but significant differences between live chat and texting which a contact center should consider as they pursue omnichannel.
Perhaps the most important consumer habit to consider is impatience. 81% of consumers find it frustrating to be tied to a phone or computer screen while waiting for customer service help. This is interesting considering that live chat requires being tied to one screen. When you’re online at your desktop that’s ok, but often this is not the case.
How is texting different? Think about it, when you’re at a computer live chat is easy. But on your smartphone, chat is a little clumsy. You’re required to stay on your mobile browser until the chat session is over and most of us don’t operate our phones that way. We bounce around between apps or send a message and set our phone down as we multi-task constantly.
Texting provides an easier mobile experience than live chat. You can send a text, navigate to other apps, or set your phone down and when a text comes back in you’re notified with a sound/vibrate and banner so you don’t miss it.
With consumer data now showing over half of all customers visit websites from their mobile devices, providing mobile-friendly messaging is more important than ever.
Comparing Live Online Chat vs. Texting (SMS)
While both live chat and texting provide excellent alternatives to email and phone calls, there are important differences to consider. Keep in mind that live chat was designed to solve problems in an online environment not necessarily a mobile environment. Let’s look at how live chat compares to business texting.
There is value in both texting and live chat as they relate to customer communication. A true omni-channel solution should have both. However, using live chat alone to fulfill your messaging strategy ignores consumer’s need for immediate accessibility. Texting delivers the same value as live chat but it also provides on-the-go access without being tied to one screen.
With a business texting platform from Textel, no customer messages will get lost in the shuffle at a contact center either. Best of all, Textel integrates seamlessly within NICE inContact and Genesys Cloud‘s chat windows to allow your agents an easy to use way of texting through the tools they use every day.
Textel’s cloud-based business texting platform is now a Premium App on the Genesys® AppFoundry. The app is available for Genesys Cloud™, one of the leading public cloud contact center platforms.
We sit down with Paul Jones, Senior Director of Channel Development, to learn more about the app and how it helps Genesys Cloud customers be more effective.
Genesys Cloud and AppFoundry
Textel: What is Genesys® Cloud and the Genesys® AppFoundry?
Paul Jones: Genesys Cloud is a public cloud-based contact center as a service (aka CCaaS) platform. As a CCaaS it helps organizations provide better experiences to their customers and employees.
The Genesys® AppFoundry is their marketplace focused on customer experience solutions. The AppFoundry allows Genesys customers from all market segments to discover and rapidly deploy a broad range of solutions that make it easier to interact with consumers, engage employees and optimize their workforce.
Textel: What does it mean to be a Premium App on the AppFoundry?
Paul Jones: Beyond the benefits of the integration, there are several benefits to being a Premium App, but the primary benefit to Genesys customers is their Textel subscription is on their Genesys invoice. That means there are fewer invoices scattered around for simpler vendor management.
Textel: Which Genesys Cloud customers can use Textel’s integration?
Paul Jones: It’s available for all Genesys Cloud customers on the Cloud 2 or Cloud 3 tier. That means Cloud 2 customers who normally wouldn’t have access to texting can now do it and Cloud 3 customers get a ton of additional texting enhancements. This also means users with a Business user license can send and receive text messages.
How Textel’s Integration Works
Textel: Let’s talk about the integration. What does it do specifically?
Paul Jones: The integration works seamlessly within Genesys Cloud by text-enabling a contact center’s pre-existing business numbers. When a customer texts the pre-existing business number, it’s automatically routed to an available SMS-proficient agent who can then text right back. Teams can also send outbound texts on an ad hoc basis or using event-based triggers in the Genesys platform.
Textel: Where do agents see the incoming and outgoing texts?
Paul Jones: The agents see all text communications in the Genesys Customer Experience Platform’s chat window so they can manage it all in the application they’re already using. This also includes any historical text messages if the customer texted them before.
Textel: Does that includes MMS text messaging?
Paul Jones: Yes. Customers and agents can send and receive anything from emojis and pictures to even things like gifs, calendar invites, and documents. It’s a great way of exchanging a lot of information in a short amount of time.
Textel: Which is huge for contact centers overwhelmed with phone calls.
Paul Jones: To be honest, they can’t afford not to. Contact centers are already finding additional channels to connect to their customers like social media, but they have to incorporate texting if they’re going to complete their omnichannel strategy.
Textel: What are contact centers getting with the Textel integration that isn’t available by supporting social media channels.
Paul Jones: I wouldn’t say we compete with social media channels. People communicate in different ways and contact centers need to support those ways as best they can. That said, our texting integration does have benefits to both agents and customers that social media and apps lack. Texting requires no app to download or new system to learn. Customers don’t have to open an app to talk or receive messages from an agent.
Textel: And that’s just one app you’re talking about.
Paul Jones: Imagine being a customer navigating over a dozen apps with a dozen workflows. Same thing with social media – you could be talking to several companies but on a handful of different social apps. We don’t want contact center agents managing a dozen different apps to do their job (hence Textel’s integration with Genesys), so why should we force customers to do that?
Learn More about Textel’s Genesys Cloud Integration
Textel: Where can they learn more about the integration?
Paul Jones: Genesys users can check us out on our Premium AppFoundry listing. I’m also more than happy to field any question people might have. They can email me at [email protected] or call/text me at 844-483-9835.
Contact centers are all learning one thing – when it comes to pandemics, flexibility is the name of the game. Remote work coupled with daily regulatory changes across state, county, and city boundaries are forcing IT decision makers to re-evaluate the systems they depend on to keep employees connected to each other and their customers. Texting should be at the top of their list. Here’s why:
Voice Calls are an Unacceptable Bottleneck
COVID-19 disrupted every facet of human life. Travel plans were scrapped, education was turned on its head, and virtually every service provider from healthcare to supply chains changed how they operated overnight. With disruption comes the need for help and contact centers were overwhelmed by a tidal wave of customer calls. In fact, as recently as July 15th contact call center call volumes jumped to over 800% of their normal levels!
If we consider that the industry standard for average handle time (AHT) is 6 minutes and 10 seconds (including wait, talking, and wrap time), an 800% increase in call volume will absolutely destroy AHT if a contact center isn’t adequately staffed.
Texting is 4x faster than a voice call which means agents can quickly handle more interactions in less time. Texting also distills down a sender’s main points due to the friction of writing out their thoughts. With voice calls, customers tend to add a lot of unnecessary filler into the conversation which drags the interaction out and may lead the agent to focus on the wrong thing.
Texting Increases Agent Capacity
Voice calls monopolize agents’ time. It’s because the interaction requires full engagement as both customer and agent listen and respond to each other. While acceptable pre-pandemic, the previously mentioned increase in call volumes due to COVID-19 means contact centers must either:
Frantically increase headcount (while sweating over onboarding requirements) or
Risk losing customers with long wait times, a massive callback list, and burnt out agents
Texting changes all that. Because texting doesn’t command an agent’s complete attention to hear every word, the agent can answer additional customer texts. Texting can be asynchronous, meaning, there’s a slight delay between when the customer reads the text and responds. This can be advantageous for an agent who wants to manage multiple text threads and can respond to Customer B while waiting for Customer A to reply.
Texting Gets Better Read and Response Rates
It’s said an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Some contact centers have taken this mantra to heart and are proactively reaching out to customers to notify them of changes due to COVID-19. Others are trying to get the word out as their businesses re-open with promotions to re-engage their customers. The problem is that budgets are tightening and businesses are facing major financial struggles due to the pandemic. Contact centers must invest in technology that has the highest chance of success.
Phone calls typically only create a meager 5% response rate.
Email is worse at just 3%.
Texting Solves Issues Faster
Texting removes barriers to communication which makes it easier for agents to resolve issues. Features such as MMS allow customers and agents to send and receive images, video, emojis, and documents can often say more than a 6-minute phone call.
Texting Can Create a Better Experience for Everyone
Texting creates a better customer experience in general simply due to the better responsiveness of agents who can handle more texts faster. It’s a better experience for contact center teams as well since they get happier customers and can resolve issues quickly.
Best of all, in many cases it doesn’t require a large effort to train agents on how to incorporate texting. Many major CCaaS vendors like NICE inContact and Genesys integrate seamlessly with texting platforms like Textel that allows agents to utilize the same tools they rely on for chat to manage texts.
Texting – An Essential Tool for 2020 and Beyond
The pandemic will end but pinpointing when is impossible. Contact centers that will survive and thrive are those that are able to take an unbiased look at how they’ve done things and adopt new technology, like texting, to change the way they do business for the better.
The other night, I went to an Italian restaurant with my husband. We put our name on the waitlist for a table, and I gave them my number to text when a table was available. When they finally sent that text, it came from a short 5-digit number, also known as SMS short code. When I received that kind of SMS short code text, I was feeling pretty excited because it was telling me I was about to get a big bowl of pasta. But, on the whole, oftentimes SMS short code texts are a pain to receive.
Real quick, let me review: what do I mean by SMS short code? SMS short code is a 5- or 6-digit number used to send SMS or MMS marketing messages to phones. Short code messaging is used only for one-way, non-personal communication, and mass texting. Ultimately, SMS short code has its place. But large businesses, especially their contact centers, are realizing that one-way alerts aren’t the way into a customer’s heart.
Instead, companies are switching to a long-code form of messaging which allows for person to person communication. Let me convince you why long-code is the way to go for your enterprise business.
Why SMS Short Code Doesn’t Fit What Customers Want
Customers today are pretty worn out by advertising. It’s everywhere we look and is embedded in nearly every app on our phones. With every purchase we make, we’re asked to sign up for newsletters and for email promotions. The truth is — it gets old. It’s hard to engage with a brand when you constantly feel like you’re being marketed to.
SMS short codes have become similar to those annoying promotional emails that you automatically archive or delete. When you use SMS short codes to get your customers’ attention, most likely, the only feedback you’re getting back from customers is a one-word reply: “STOP.” This isn’t helping anyone. How do you avoid shutting down customers with a text?
Simple – you give customers what they want — the chance to text your business back. A RingCentral survey found that91% of customers prefer receiving a text from a business to voicemail. And 78% of those surveyed want the ability to text, not call, the business back.
SMS long-code offers this functionality. Long-code, to compare, is a 10-digit number that allows for two-way communication between customer and business. When would you use this?
Imagine this: you need to notify your customer about an upcoming appointment. When they get that text, they realize they’re double booked. Now, if this was a short-code message, that customer has no way to respond via text. Instead, they have to take time from their day to call you and wait on hold to reschedule. But, with a long code text, your customer can, within the same text thread as the reminder text, send a message back to a real person, or even an automated system, on the other end to get a new appointment time.
This meets what customers want and offers an overall better customer experience. It gives your contact center agents a way to build deeper and more personal relationships with customers. And, it gives you an opportunity to gather more substantial feedback from customers over text. What’s more, it cuts back on obnoxious and overwhelming promotion messages for customers.
How to Use SMS Short Code vs. Long Code
Both SMS short code and SMS long code have their place in an enterprise business. But using both effectively requires some understanding of the benefits and how to use it effectively.
SMS short codes offer some useful advantages:
Sending mass texts:
When you need to send customers promotions or coupon codes quickly, SMS short codes are incredibly useful. Or maybe you need to send out an emergency alert to all your customers, blast a short code text to all your customers to give them a quick update.
Easy to remember:
Short codes are short (I know…duh.) But this makes them easy to memorize and ideal when you need a customer to send a text to enter a contest or for a quick and easy opt-in to your subscriber list.
Offering two-factor authentication:
It’s important to keep customer info secure. For companies that need to offer two-factor authentication for a customer account, SMS short codes are an easy way to send customers a verification code.
While, yes, there’s a time and place for these kinds of messages (like finding out your table is ready so you can load up on carbs!), they’re not super useful from a customer support side of things. SMS long code, however, offers its own set of perks.
Here are some of the advantages of SMS long codes:
Two-way texting allows for better record keeping:
With two-way texting, your enterprise contact center can keep a record of communication that stays attached to each customer’s account. When they reach back out to ask another question or schedule another appointment, businesses can route that text back to the original call center agent who they spoke with last, providing that special element of delight that easily improves the customer experience.
You can build a personalized relationship with customers:
Texting is an intimate form of communication. Customers are used to texting friends and family. It’s casual and much less stuffy than an email or even a phone call. So when your agents are able to text with customers, your brand gets direct access to customers that’s flexible and more personal than other channels.
Get real-time feedback over text:
SMS short code doesn’t let you get much feedback from customers. You can maybe send a link to a survey, but these are easily ignored. But with long code texting, your agents can finish a conversation by sending a few questions or a survey in the text thread to get immediate feedback on the customers’ experience.
Offer a new channel of communication to lighten your employees’ load:
Long code texting doesn’t only support your customers. When your agents have an additional way to interact with customers, this lightens your operational load. Agents don’t have to stay on the phones all day — something that often contributes to burnout. Instead, put a dedicated team on two-way texting and lower your call volume while you also lessen stress for your agents.
Ultimately, if you’re weighing your choices between SMS short code and long code, consider which lets you best support your customers’ experience. While SMS short code can offer some benefits, long code texts open the door for direct communication with your customers that also gives you better records, feedback, and efficiency in the call center.
Tis the season to drive holiday sales through high-performing communication channels.
Trust us – it’s not just the egg nog making everyone merry. Call center texting is beginning to snowball as enterprise businesses focus on reaching their customers via text across their existing business lines.
After RetailMeNot reported that shoppers are ready to spend at least $60 more on gifts this holiday season than last year, retailers have been working to find creative ways to get in front of their consumers. Specifically, they’re looking for ways to stand out from their competitors and reach more consumers first, and more effectively.
RetailMeNot uncovered that 95% of those retailers believe that deals and discounts are the most effective way to drive purchases during this time of year. And it should come as no surprise that 72% of their marketing investment is happening across mobile.
Why? Because, it’s where their customers live!
It’s a fact that has caught the attention of more and more call centers as they try to produce an omnichannel communication platform that targets customers in the way they want to be contacted.
Yet, (if you remember from our recent article: An Easy Business Texting Strategy to Improve Revenue in 2019) only 48% of enterprises have text-enabled their business phone line. <cut to Macaulay Culkin slapping his hands against his face in sheer terror!>
So, in an effort to make the holidays just a bit brighter for the call centers who still aren’t using text to enhance the customer experience, we offer these 5 gifts (or benefits) to using business texting to help ring in a successful new year.
5 Ways Business Texting for Call Centers Drives Holiday Sales
Get Your Customers’ Attention
First and foremost, you must reach your holiday shoppers on a channel they’re currently using. The good news is that text messages are opened 98% of the time and the recipient often takes action immediately after reading. Besides being optimized for response, this channel helps you communicate with the most consumers in the fastest way.
Invite Them Onsite for a Holiday Promotion
Customers are looking for an excuse to swing your way – give them a great one. Share your holiday promotion with customers and invite them to your business to be a part of something special. And just so they know exactly what awaits, send them a fun picture to further entice them to stop in.
Share an Exclusive Marketing Offer
If in-store business isn’t your forte, send them a text with a link to the special product that you know will catch their attention. With most sales happening across a mobile device, your job is to make it easy for customers by sharing an exclusive offer that keeps them from walking out into the cold and only requires them to set down their hot coffee and click to purchase.
Send Appointment Reminders to Reduce No-Shows
Guarantee sales by scheduling important automated text reminders that reduce no-shows by up to 50% according to Appointment-Plus. This easily enhances the customer experience by letting them know you’re excited about their arrival – plus, it saves lost revenue by giving them a chance to reschedule if holiday shopping has bogged them down and made them unavailable for the current time.
Create a Sense of Urgency to Propel Holiday Sales
The beauty of business texting for call centers is that you can alert customers to the sales they don’t want to miss without interrupting their day. These notifications do more than increase customer satisfaction, they prove helpful and thoughtful. Plus, when it’s followed up with a discount offer, customers will be further incentivized to add your product under the tree this holiday season.
Want to learn more about how call center texting can improve your bottom line this holiday season and all year long? Try Textel’s business texting platform today!
