ST. LOUIS, June 23, 2022 – Textel, the fastest and most reliable full-service, cloud-based texting platform for businesses and contact centers, announced an expanded partnership with NICE (Nasdaq: NICE) CXone to bring its innovative texting services to NICE’s international customers. By replacing the need for phone calls, Textel’s advanced texting platform lets users worldwide increase revenue while dramatically reducing operational costs.
“We’ve had a successful partnership with NICE CXone in North America, and we are excited to expand it internationally,” said Brandon Pineda, channel director at Textel. “Combining the solutions of Textel and NICE CXone, the ROI and benefits to businesses have been truly remarkable.”
Built seamlessly into NICE’s CXone platform, Textel’s integration lets users have flexible, two-way dialog with their customers via SMS and MMS. This lets customers communicate faster and more efficiently than on traditional channels (email, voice, chat). With features like skills-based routing, agent-initiated and blast outbound capabilities, agentless textbots, Interactive Text Response (ITR), call deflection, and group texting functionality, agents can oversee multiple interactions simultaneously. And, with full transcript reporting and analytics, managers have the tools they need to coach agents.
Textel was recently awarded the DEVone Application Certification. The distinction assures NICE CXone customers that Textel’s innovative cloud texting and MMS is a trusted solution that meets specific quality, performance, and security requirements upon technical integration.
NICE’s CXone platform takes a holistic approach to improve both agent and customer experiences, helping organizations of all sizes modernize and remain agile and resilient in today’s increasingly digital landscape with omnichannel routing, analytics, workforce optimization, automation, and artificial intelligence.
Darren Rushworth, President, NICE International, said, “We are excited to grow our partnership with Textel and offer our international customers another channel to communicate with their consumers via Textel, the gold standard of texting. Growing the number of channels to reach consumers promotes more opportunities for a frictionless customer experience.”
About Textel
Founded in 2014, Textel is the rapidly growing texting platform for businesses and contact centers that is specifically designed to enhance the customer experience, increase customer engagement, improve contact center performance, and drive revenue. With over 1,500 customers around the world, Textel helps companies communicate faster and more efficiently than traditional channels (email, voice, chat). Visit Textel on LinkedIn and Twitter.
About NICE
With NICE (Nasdaq: NICE), it’s never been easier for organizations of all sizes around the globe to create extraordinary customer experiences while meeting key business metrics. Featuring the world’s #1 cloud-native customer experience platform, CXone, NICE is a worldwide leader in AI-powered self-service and agent-assisted CX software for the contact center – and beyond. Over 25,000 organizations in more than 150 countries, including over 85 of the Fortune 100 companies, partner with NICE to transform – and elevate – every customer interaction. www.nice.com
Texting has become the most natural form of communication for most of us. Some 5.1 billion people on Earth own a cell phone, but most of us aren’t using them to make phone calls all day. Let’s say I want to reach a group of friends to plan a girl’s trip. Or maybe I need to ask my husband to pick up dinner on his way home from work. I send a text. Why? Because texting is a reliable, convenient, and fast way to reach someone. It doesn’t disrupt life like a phone call and doesn’t require formality like an email.
Companies are starting to take note of the benefits of using business texting from a computer to reach customers. Sure, you may be feeling some hesitation — is business texting worth the cost? Is texting our customers too invasive? Do our customers actually want to text us?
We’ve gathered 12 statistics that’ll answer your questions and prove its practicality. We’ll see why it’s actually one of the bestways to reach and engage your customers.
6. 78% of consumers wish they could have a text conversation with a business. (Text Request)
7. 85% of customers prefer receiving text messages over a phone call or email. (PC Magazine)
8. 91% of customers who opt-in to receive texts from a brand see those messages as “very useful.” (Salesforce)
9. 47% of consumers say that, in general, they prefer texting to talking on the phone. (Nielsen)
10. 60% of consumers say they’d prefer to book their hair care appointments over text. (PR Newswire)
Business Texting Leads to More Conversion
11. Prospects who are sent texts convert at a rate 40% higher than those who don’t receive any text messages. (InsideSales)
12. 72% of customers are more likely to purchase a product from a site while communicating via texting in real-time, with a real employee. (PR Newswire)
A few years ago, I worked at a company that built software for dental offices. Our system helped front offices schedule patients, dictate Explanations of Benefits and process insurance. Yes, it was as riveting as it sounds. (I’m lying. It was, of course, boring to market and sell. But it was a vital product that seriously helped people and their dental offices.)
Anyway, one day when my team and I were heads down working on documentation for our up-and-coming self-service portal, there came a massive explosion. In seconds, the building was covered in smoke and everyone learned what the one thing they’d grab if ever they were caught escaping a fire. (For me, it was my gallon of water and lunch box. Most everyone else grabbed their car keys. One guy grabbed the ping pong paddle and shoved a ball in his pocket. Humans are weird in emergencies.)
As we were evacuating, we realized something. No one had a way to tell our customers we’d been unceremoniously thrusted out of our building for the afternoon. Calls, questions and issues were building by the minute and we had to sit idle until we could access our compliant devices again.
If only we had a mass text app.
Mass texting is like sending a bulk email. When you send out a mass text, you’re not starting a massive group text with all of your customers (that would be bonkers!). Instead, a mass text app helps you to broadcast information – like an emergency plan after your building undergoes an extremely unexpected explosion. And, it lets you send out the info to all of your customers, simultaneously as individualized messages.
Maybe most companies don’t endure such dramatics in their day-to-day. But a mass text app is still insanely helpful in more situations than just unexpected emergencies. Imagine this: your site is having some issues and isn’t letting purchase orders go through. You want to protect against your customer service team getting slammed with calls and emails. So you send out a proactive message. You hit them with a text that they’ll actually open (usually within the first three minutes of its arrival). You’re proactively protecting your customers from endless frustrations and saving your agents time and energy in a stressful situation.
These, of course, are just a couple of use cases for mass texting. It’s important that your mass text app gives you lots of functionality for you to use it to the fullest. So to help you get the most out of your mass text app, we’ve gathered a list of six features to look for so you’re getting the most bang for your buck!
6 Must Have Features to Look for in a Mass Text App
1. Scheduling
Automation can be a lifesaver when your customer service team has their hands full. Often, you don’t want to draft and send a text right away. Instead, with scheduling, your team can create text campaigns in their down time and schedule them for a future date.
Plus, by scheduling messages in advance, you can make your mass text campaign more strategic. This way each message gets sent when it will attract the maximum attention from your customers. Send personalized promotions to customers by scheduling texts to send on customer birthdays or for special events. And you can prepare and run automated recurring campaigns to send on a biweekly or monthly cycle.
2. Text Throttling
With text throttling, control and limit the number of text messages sent at one time through your mass text app. This feature can be beneficial when you anticipate a message you send will receive a big response. For example, maybe you have a product update you want to notify customers about, but don’t want to get customer responses all at once. To avoid overwhelming your customer service team with responses, you can select the speed at which you want to send your texts. For example, send:
5 texts per minute
50 texts per minute
500 texts per minute
1,000 texts per minute
So let’s say you were to send an announcement about a deal to 3,000 customers and were expecting a response rate of 10%, you wouldn’t want to receive 300 replies at once. But, if you instead used scheduling to deliver 300 messages every hour, it would throttle the customers’ response rate and relieve your team of being overwhelmed.
3. Mass Text App MMS
The best mass text app lets you send more than just SMS. With multimedia messaging, your service team can include photos, videos, and other files in your messages. Bypass steps and save time in helping your customers by sending out images or how-to videos to multiple contacts to walk customers through the product.
Or use MMS messaging and have your sales team send product demos to select groups of prospects or renewal customers. With more dynamic messages, your texts will stand out to customers and they’ll be more likely to engage with your content.
4. Lists and Segments
A mass text app isn’t really that useful if you can’t guarantee who your messages are going to. Use lists and segmentation to ensure you’re sending the right messages to the right people. As you add to your opt-in list, you’ll start to notice that you don’t want to send every text to every customer. For example, if you’re trying to reach out to customers who haven’t scheduled a hair appointment yet on their usual cadence, you don’t want to also text the customers who are already booked.
You pay for every text you send out, so it makes sense to reach customers with an appropriate message that will deliver ROI and make for a more personal experience. Find a mass text app that makes it simple to sort contacts into subgroups based on purchase history, keywords, interests so you can manage what message goes out to which customers.
5. Custom Fields
Texting should feel personal. One of the biggest benefits of texting your customers is that it gives you an avenue to reach them in a personalized way. To lean into personalization, make sure your mass text app lets you customize your interactions. With custom fields, add personal names, order details or delivery dates into your mass texts. That way, the text a customer receives feels more like it was catered for them specifically, helping your brand stand out even more.
6. Reporting and Analytics
It’s no good to go through the hassle of adding a new communication channel with customers if you have no way of knowing how it’s performing. Whether you use mass texting for marketing purposes, to do proactive customer support, or to reach new sales prospects, you need ways to know how contacts are responding and how your team is performing.
How many of your customers are responding with keywords or opening your links? How many customers are reaching out via text for support? These are the questions that your metrics and reports can help answer. Find a mass text app that provides easy-to-consume, customizable reporting features that give you insight into how your campaigns are working.
To make sure your SMS messaging platform actually adds value to your company, you have to watch the right metrics. Read more about which 5 metrics you should be tracking to find success.
When your customers feel appreciated, your company reaps real, measurable growth. Growth like a boost to revenue for one. The payoffs for valued, great experiences are tangible. In fact, when you provide stellar CX, customers are willing to pay 16% more on your products and services. And they will be more loyal to you.
What can customer loyalty really do for you?
Retain customers. Repeat customers typically spend more than new customers. They already trust your business and its products or services.
The strategy is simple. To retain customers, spark a relationship. And do that by building experiences that create an emotional connection with your customers. But where do you start? Create a strategy for texting online. As many as 89% of consumers say they prefer texting with businesses over any other mode of communication. So it’s time to build out a strategy to drive your customer loyalty. And make some cash along the way.
Your Step-by-Step Guide to Building Out a Strategy for Texting Online to Drive Customer Loyalty (and Revenue)
Step 1: Build Your Opt-in List
To build a relationship with your customers, you have to know who your customers are. Before you can text your customers, get permission to contact them and build an opt-in list. Opt-in lists establish a list of customers who have agreed to receive communications from you. They’ve already signaled that they want to be loyal to your brand. They make it easier for you to know your audience and target personalized content to fit their tastes.
To create your opt-in list, promote opportunities to sign up for texts in their order detail email or during the checkout process. Provide an online form for customers to sign up for emails and texts from your brand. And consider incentivizing customers to sign up with a coupon or exclusive deal. Make your texting opt-in like joining a loyalty club to engage with and create a stronger bond with your customers.
Step 2: Keep your Audience Engaged with Texting Online
After you have your opt-in list, you have to keep that audience engaged in order to retain them. Texting online gives your business a perfect channel to not only acquire customers but to retain them. Harvard Business Review knows that it is anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive to get a new customer than to keep a current customer. So, what touchpoints are you using to keep your customers close?
Here are some ideas that not only engage your customers, but also increase profit:
Gift your customers right off the bat. Welcome new subscribers with a discount coupon to use in their first 30 days.
Send customers in your opt-in list triggered messages about product updates, exclusive offers, or upcoming deals. Be cautious, though, about not sending these so frequently that they get annoying.
Give customers reasons to make repeat purchases by creating a point system and rewards. Just like with a credit card program, reward the more loyal customers with a discount after reaching a set point number or give them free shipping after spending a certain amount of money.
Send relevant content that interests your customers. Use MMS messaging to send interesting videos or create a newsletter with helpful product info.
Reportedly, customers like to be part of online texting loyalty programs. As much as 90% of participants in an SMS loyalty program have gained value from being a member. With special loyalty rewards and perks for signing up for SMS, your brand can give members the VIP treatment they expect.
Step 3: Customize and Personalize your Content
Personalization increases customer engagement and revenue. According to CMSWire, Amazon gets 30% of its revenue just from personalized recommendations. Today, personalized recommendations are almost as expected from brands as toilet paper is to bathrooms.
Considering that SMS has a 98% open rate compared to email marketing, texting online gives you a direct way to deliver a personalized experience with the guarantee that your customers will see your messaging.
Send texts that are personalized and ultra-relevant to your customers. Include their name in texts to make them feel known. Keep track of important dates — like their birthday or anniversaries — to send them exclusive offers on those days. Use feedback surveys and track customer purchases to make purchase recommendations or notify customers of specific sales that would pique their interest.
When you give customers a personalized experience, you’re more likely to keep them around and continue increasing revenue.
Step 4: Close Sales and Support Customers With Two-Way Texting
To maintain a relationship with your customers, you have to talk with them. Two-way texting online gives your sales and your customer service team a way to communicate directly with customers in a channel that’s more convenient and flexible than others.
Customer service agents and salespeople spend a lot of time on the phone. Texting online gives your teams a flexible and convenient way to cut back on wasted time (without leaving their CCaaS platform). To help your sales team qualify sales, send a text to the potential customer first. Include information that will help them decide if they are a good candidate for your services or not. If you use two-way business texting online, you can let your customers make certain selections to get more information.
Provide proactive customer service by sending messages to teach customers how to use the product well. Give customers an easier way to reach you through two-way texting. This way, they can ask a simple question or request information without increasing your call volume. And they won’t spend unnecessary time on hold.
And if that isn’t enough, here’s an added bonus. McKinsey found that companies that elevate their customer service see employee engagement rocket up the charts by 20% on average. Now, literally, everyone is happy. With these added strategies, you’re building a team of engaged employees and customers, while driving revenue along the way.
This post was originally published on November 8, 2018 and was updated on June 16, 2022.
Every customer support team has its goals: speed up response times, make it easy for customers to reach you, create a customer-centric culture. Recently for many brands, they’re working to reach these goals by adding SMS messaging to their omnichannel experience. Why? Because our culture is all about texting. With nearly 8.5 billion text messages sent in the US every day, customers find SMS messaging faster and more flexible than other forms of customer support.
But how do we know if texting really adds value?
Let me give an illustration: My husband and I live in an old house. It’s got a lot of quirks — squeaky floors, old plumbing, doors that don’t seem to fit quite right. We can live with a lot of it, but we also want to improve the value of our home. With every update we make, we want to make sure that the money we’re putting in gives us value and to the house as a financial investment. We know we can’t put bandaids on big house issues — like a leaky faucet — and expect much of an investment return. The same goes for your business.
When your team invests in a piece of new tech, it can feel like a risk. You have problems to address in your company, and you want to really know that your investment is paying off and actually healing those problems. The only way to do so is with tracking effective metrics. How do you know that SMS messaging is adding value to your brand?
To help, we’ve gathered 5 metrics that are worth watching to track success in your customer service and improve your customer experience.
5 Metrics to Track the Value of SMS Messaging
1. Average Handle Times (AHT)
I’m sorry to tell ya. When your customers reach out to you, they’re not looking to strike up a long deep conversation. At least, not typically.
Customers want efficiency. They want their issue resolved or their questions answered as promptly as possible. Overall, adding SMS messaging boosts efficiency in your customer support team. To see if this is a reality, track the AHT of your customer interactions.
Average handle time refers to the time a customer spends with a customer support agent from the beginning of the interaction until its resolution. On a traditional channel, like by phone, the average handle time can be really long depending on call volume and the complexity of a customer problem. By phone, only one agent can help one customer at a time.
But when you add SMS messaging, you make it possible for agents to help multiple customers simultaneously. And, since one agent could carry on 4-5 text threads with customers at the same time, it’s possible to lower your average handle time significantly. Track AHT to see the impact.
2. Average Hold Time
I will pick any other channel of communication to reach a company before I call them. Why? Because who has time for that?! Calling a business is time consuming. And most customers really don’t want to take that time out of their day to wait on hold. When you make customers sit on hold to talk to you, it negatively affects their customer experience.
According to HubSpot, around 33% of consumers feel the most frustrated when they’re placed on hold. Another 60% say that being put on hold is the most annoying aspect of the customer service experience. You don’t want your brand to be “annoying.” So what if you give your customers another option?
With SMS messaging, customers with quick questions or issues can avoid the dreaded hold time altogether. Instead, they can shoot your customer support team a text to reach you directly. Or to help customers hop out of the call queue, deflect calls to text through your IVR menu. Fewer customers in the call queue helps to lower your average hold time, giving more time back to those customers who need the phone support and giving more immediate help to those customers with simpler questions and issues.
3. Average Speed of Answer (ASA)
Speed of service isn’t everything as it doesn’t always give room for quality. So while you don’t want speed to be the sole focus in your contact center, it is a good measurement of efficiency. The average speed of your customer service agents’ answer to a customer measures both your team’s overall performance and accessibility.
The average speed of answer industry standard is generally 28 seconds. Often, a longer ASA translates directly to worse customer satisfaction and increased agent burnout. But with SMS messaging, your team can answer questions faster.
A texting conversation allows your agents to respond to a customer and experience a bit of lag between responses. This makes it possible for customers to know they’re getting help faster, and gives agents the ability to juggle multiple customers at once. Plus, with the help of automation and bots, you can deliver an immediate response to customers with help on the way without interrupting their day, lowering your average speed of answer.
4. Issue Resolution
Last week, I had an issue with a postal delivery. In attempting to reach out to the postal service, I sat through a confusing and frustrating IVR menu that offered no option that fit my situation. It’s been 3 days since I’ve heard from the support team by email, I’ve left a couple voicemails at my nearest local post office, and still my issue is not resolved. Needless to say, I’ve had a pretty lousy customer experience.
Issue resolution is really the goal of good customer support, right? If you want to improve your CX, you need to improve your issue resolution rates. SMS messaging helps you do that.
Texting helps your team prioritize issues so you can help more customers than you would by phone. Communicate with customers before they even need to reach you about billing reminders, scheduled appointments, and more. Or, reach issue resolution faster with MMS messaging. Use different forms of media, like photos or how-to videos, to get customers help without needing to have a drawn out or convoluted phone call. Track issue resolution to ensure your customers are truly getting the help they need.
5. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
Ultimately, all these metrics are aimed towards the same goal — customer happiness. To make sure that your SMS messaging platform is adding value, track your customers’ satisfaction with your service. Research suggests that 89% of customers will make an additional purchase after a positive customer experience.
To know if your customers are satisfied with your CX, track CSAT. SMS messaging ideally lets your team offer faster, more effective, and more proactive customer service. Send out surveys and watch your CSAT score to make sure this improvement is really happening in your contact center.
