Building revenue for your company is more than just getting customers in the door. It’s about creating lifetime customers. To do so, pay attention to your customer lifecycle. The customer lifecycle refers to the full lifetime of customers from when they learn about your product, to when they make a purchase, to when they become a loyal customer.
The five stages of the customer lifecycle are:
Reach
Acquisition
Conversion
Retention
Loyalty
The customer lifecycle starts with your sales team reaching customers and continues throughout the customer journey with sustained customer support. Once you reach customer retention, your team drives profitability. In fact, increasing customer retention by just 5% leads to a 25% to 95% increase in profit.
So obviously you want to keep customers engaged with your company and continue building revenue, right? You don’t reach the loyal customer stage by chance. You have to first actually connect with customers, and then have to maintain those connections.
Customers expect you to keep them engaged across all channels. In fact, 85% of consumers expect to use a blend of physical and digital channels to connect. For sales and support interactions, customers value you saving time and money or making their lives easier.
Traditional channels like phone or email get a notoriously low response rate. They can be as low as 6% when salespeople try to make contact through a phone call or email! It makes since though, I mean, how many of us answer a call from an unknown number any more? And then, our email inbox is cluttered (I have about 4,000 unread messages in my inbox alone), with nearly 50% of emails being spam.
When you’re limited by traditional communication, other challenges get more complicated, too. Every sales and support team has to face:
Difficulty in Lead Qualification: When email responses get delayed and phone calls go unanswered, your sales team struggles to track down and qualify hot prospects.
Vying for the Competitive Advantage: Odds are, customers aren’t only talking to you. Your teams need tools that give them a competitive advantage and help them stand out.
Managing Administrative Tasks: Sales teams spend less than 36% of their time selling due to manual processes and administrative tasks. They need tools that let them focus on selling.
Maintaining Relationships Post-Sale: Once a prospect becomes a customer, support and sales need effective ways of nurturing a relationship.
How do you meet these challenges? Well, SMS messages have an open rate of 98% (compared to 20% of all emails and 16% of phone calls). So to break through the noise, and connect with customers faster through texting. By investing in texting technology, you can reach customers through the entire customer lifecycle.
Three Texting Tactics to Help your Bottom Line (and how to do ‘em)
1. Send mass promotional texts
The best way to boost sales and start the customer lifecycle is to reach customers through promotions. Once a text has been sent, 95% are read within the first 3 minutes of receipt. So sending out promotional texts to customers is a primary way to draw customers in..
An SMS promotional text may take only five minutes to set up. Let’s say you have a list of prospects that have opted into receiving texts. They responded to an ad campaign in the past and you want to draw them back in. Here are some ways to do so:
Get creative with a text-to-win campaign to start a conversation.
Blast a message about a new product discount that just launched.
Create unique coupon codes for prospects to send via text.
How will this help your bottom line? Let’s take an example: Let’s say a clothing retail company sends one promotional campaign to about 1,200 people a month. After that campaign, they get about $2,500 in additional business for that month. By letting prospects know about possible discounts, they boosted their monthly revenue significantly.
I really struggle to follow through when I’m shopping online. Seriously, I’d be embarrassed to share how many of the open tabs on my computer are from different stores with items just sitting in my cart. I am notorious for abandoning carts. And I’m not alone. Nearly 88% of people never finish the checkout process. How can your sales team help avoid this loss of revenue?
To bring potential customers back into the customer lifecycle, follow up with customers who have abandoned purchases. Use texting to encourage those shoppers (like me) who’ve left products behind to come back and buy.
Let’s say a shopper leaves items behind in your online store. Have either your sales or your marketing create automated messages that send to their phone. It might look something like this:
Perhaps incentivize the customer to follow through on the sale with a small discount on their purchase. This use of texting restores customers who may otherwise walk away from a sale without a second thought.
3. Send date-triggered campaigns
Buying is personal and emotional, right? So, your customers want to feel known and respected by you. Personalized messaging stands out and helps you reach and acquire customers, while also nurturing the relationship. For a more personalized approach with your customers, send date-triggered campaigns.
These kinds of text messages let you text customers at times when they are primed to shop. This may be on their birthdays, anniversaries, or Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale reminders. Who doesn’t want to get free or discounted stuff on their birthday? Here’s how you can do this:
With the help of your texting platform, keep track of customer birthdays or note when customers first joined your company. Then automate date-triggered messages to go to those customers who opted into texts from you. Maybe send a promotional message five days before a customer’s birthday with a discount code or a BOGO deal so they have time to use it. Chances are, they’ll be excited about your birthday gift and will buy something in your store, supporting your bottom line and helping to retain customers.
A good customer service experience can drive success for your company. But a bad one can wreck your reputation. Zendesk reports that after more than one bad experience, around 80% of consumers say they’d bounce, preferring to do business with a competitor. Bad customer service drives customers away.
But a good customer experience means that customers are much more inclined to go easy on you even if another experience goes awry. According to Hubspot, 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases with companies who offer an excellent customer service experience.
We’re rooting for you to see that success in your company. And one of the best ways to improve your service is to learn from others’ mistakes. So we’ve gathered a few bad customer service experience stories to see what went wrong and offer what could have gone differently.
Broken Customer Service Experience 1:
The Problem:When you have really long hold times
Sitting on hold has to be one of the most aggravating customer service experiences. Nobody wants to be put on hold, especially when they need help quickly. Studies even show that 15% of customers will simply hang up after being on hold for only 40 seconds. Plus, customers expect the fastest response to be when they call you by phone. So if that expectation isn’t being met, that’s an issue.
The Scenario: I remember one horrible evening before leaving for my honeymoon, I sat on hold with an airline to figure out an issue with my flight’s ticket for nearly 2 hours. Within those two hours, my anxiety to resolve the issue only increased. After a point, it felt like my issue would never be resolved because I’d never get to actually talk to an agent. The whole interaction deterred me from ever wanting to reach out for help again.
The Solution: Long hold times are the result of a lot of possible issues: lack of training for agents, operational inefficiencies, staffing shortages. But one primary reason companies suffer from long hold times is because they haven’t sufficiently used technology to reduce inefficiencies.
Here are some ways to fix hold time:
Use automated messaging to communicate hold times to customers so they can choose whether or not to wait it out, request a call back or hit a texting service option.
Improve your self-service tools so customers can fix simple issues and get quick answers. With better self-service support, you’ll reduce the call volume coming into your support team so they can focus more on the customers with complicated issues.
Deflect customers to asynchronous channels through your IVR. Customers who need immediate help then have other options to reach you — like via texting — to avoid sitting on hold. Then, have separate teams of agents for each channel ready to help.
Broken Customer Service Experience 2:
The Problem: When you lack empathy and compassion
As a customer service rep, your tone is everything. When your tone of voice on the phone or choice of language in a text, chat or email communicates annoyance or is patronizing, it’s a huge turnoff to your customers.
When customers experience an issue, they’re looking for an agent to be on their side. They want the company to apologize and accept fault. Now, I’m not saying the customer is always right, but it’s important for agents to acknowledge any inconvenience caused. If an agent doesn’t emotionally engage with the customer, that communicates a lack of care.
The Scenario: A few months ago I had an issue with my electric toothbrush. Part of the plastic had begun to crack — an expected issue after nearly a year of use. The toothbrush was under warranty, so I reached out to the customer service department to receive a replacement. I included a full explanation of the damage with photos.
The agent responded to let me know they would send a replacement, but then followed up with a long message in a condescending tone to explain to me how the crack could only have occurred as a result of something I was doing wrong in changing the batteries on the toothbrush. There was no recognition of fault in the product. This really irritated me because I had been very careful to follow their tutorials to care for the toothbrush. There has to be a better way of handling this issue.
The Solution: I assume he was trying to be helpful to avoid future damage to my toothbrush, but the interaction still bothered me as a customer and sure doesn’t make me want to have to contact them again. What could this agent have done differently?
Here’s what:
It’s important for companies to own some of the fault. To make that interaction better, the agent could have started by apologizing for the inconvenience.
Make every customer interaction a learning experience. I discovered that the problem with my toothbrush was a common issue with other customers. So this agent could have made this a learning experience for the product team. For instance, he could have asked for an MMS message with a picture of the broken piece so he could share with their product team. That way, they could further improve their design.
Train agents to specifically start an interaction with compassion and empathy. Perhaps create some templates or scripts to guide agents through different scenarios. Record calls and keep transcripts to show agents good and bad examples of customer interactions to help them see how empathetic responses fit into the real world.
Broken Customer Service Experience 3:
The Problem: When you’re unwilling to receive customer feedback
Customers really hate being ignored. We have so many avenues available to offer feedback to companies. And since customers are aware that businesses are aware of their complaints, ignoring them is always worse than acknowledging them. When you don’t respond to customer feedback, that signals that you not only don’t care about your customers’ opinions, but that your customers aren’t valuable to your business.
The Scenario: One customer’s experience with British Airlines exemplifies what’s wrong with ignoring customer feedback. After the airline lost his luggage, the customer tweeted at the airline to get their attention, even promoting the tweet:
But it took eight hours for their social media team to respond! And then, in addition to this, their response was confusing.
Why would an airline that operates around the clock only provide limited hours for responding on Twitter? When an airline has lost the customer’s luggage, the expectation is that the issue is resolved as soon as possible. Brands are expected to respond to customer feedback promptly.
The Solution: Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. Customer feedback is vital for success. To avoid customers resenting you for ignoring their feedback, be on the front end and seek it out.
Here are some ways to be proactive in hearing from customers:
Use texting to reach out to customers proactively. Texting is an incredibly reliable way to reach your customers. While emails may sit in an untouched inbox or go straight to the spam folder, texts have an open rate of 99%. Send customers surveys or feedback forms via text to get the best response.
Add in a text support line with auto-responders and keywords to begin information collection when live support isn’t immediately available. Customers feel like they’re being proactive in seeking help and your company gathers the info you need to resolve an issue as fast as possible.
Seek feedback after every interaction. Use every conversation as a chance to hear from your customers. That way, customers can respond to the service experience they just had while it’s fresh on their mind. Automate a quick survey to send to customers after any interaction they have with you.
For a while now, it’s been clear that texting isn’t just another way to connect with old friends and family. Texting has also become the preferred channel for customers to reach businesses and vice versa. Primarily, businesses and customers alike are seeing how reliable texting is for efficient and effective communication. As many as 60% of customers read texts within 1-5 minutes after receiving them. And the average SMS open rate is 5x higher than your typical business email. Customers are eager to reach you and hear from you via text.
In a world where communication remains a crucial part of any business’ strategy, texting can be an effective way to build business, improve consumer-to-business relationships, and enhance your brand. But it can be tricky to know what works in business text messaging. We need examples.
As the youngest in my family with three older siblings, I spent a majority of my life looking to my older family members as examples: What’s cool to wear? What music should I like? What should I not do to avoid getting in trouble with mom and dad? We naturally look for examples to understand how to grow and thrive. The same goes for our businesses. We look to good examples for how to grow and thrive with our customers.
So we’ve gathered a list of some of the companies who are leading by example. These are some of the best business text message examples out there. Ready to get inspired?
Suntrup Automotive Group has been servicing and selling cars in the St. Louis area since 1957. As a reflection of their amazing customer service, Suntrup was honored with the Women’s Choice Award for being one of America’s Best Car Dealerships for customer service and continues to strive for excellence in every aspect of their business. One way Suntrup maintains excellence is by opening communications between their service team and their customers with business texting.
To streamline communication at their dealership, Suntrup uses business texting to keep customers in the loop. Here’s how:
When a car gets serviced and is ready for pick up, the service advisor sends a text out from their computer to the customer notifying them that their car is ready or asking for approvals. The customer then has an easy way to chat back and forth with the service advisor — able to ask questions, give approval for work, or schedule a pick up. There’s no need to play phone tag or get bogged down with emails. With online texting, Suntrup can shave off over 40 hours of work every month, cut back on interruptions, and build customer trust.
I love to travel, but the process of flying stresses me out. I know I’m not alone in this. Every time we prepare to get on an airplane, there’s a lot to keep track of: security lines, boarding passes, baggage claim ticket, boarding time. I’m getting stressed just thinking about it. So as soon as I book a flight, I’m quick to download the app of whichever airline I’m on so I can check-in as soon as possible, look up my boarding time, check my gate, etc. Delta, though, relieves stress and helps me to be a step ahead in how they use business text messaging.
Delta Air Lines continues to earn accolades from customers for its outstanding customer service in the U.S. and around the world, frequently dubbed the best overall customer service airline. One way they stand out is through meeting their customers on the go. Here’s how they do so:
Delta keeps customers up to speed with any changes during the customers’ journey. When you sign up for texting from Delta, any time a flight change or gate change occurs, you’ll get a text from Delta with all the info you need immediately, no matter where you are. Customers can avoid showing up to the airport to find their flight delayed. Instead, they’ll know as soon as the airline makes the call, saving customers stress and time.
Delta also made another industry-leading move with business texting. To connect with customers in their channel of choice, Delta integrated messaging in their app with Apple messaging, letting customers connect with a live Delta representative to get in-the-moment assistance. Instead of sitting on hold for two hours after a flight gets canceled, customers can text a Delta rep using the phone in their back pocket.
Ginger Bay is dedicated to providing the best salon and spa experiences for men and women. In fact, they are so good at it that they’ve been named a Top 200 Salon & Spa in the nation from Salon Today Magazine for 21 years.
With no change to your existing phone service, Ginger Bay implemented business texting to stay in contact with scheduled clients, send alert notifications, and send out call-to-action marketing:
Ginger Bay uses texting to communicate with customers. But aside from just using it to schedule and manage customer appointments, Ginger Bay drives customer engagement as well. Using Textel, Ginger Bay sends texts to customers to offer promotions, keeping customers loyal and interested. To do so, they release a keyword for their guests to text their salon phone number by a certain time to receive seasonal gift card promotions, bonus points related to a loyalty program, or discounts on products. During one promotion cycle, they received over 300 texts in 45 minutes! With this example, we see how one business text message keeps customers coming back to your brand over and over.
I have horrible eyesight. And for years, I’ve gone from one pair of glasses to the next, trying to find the right pair that I will actually want to wear. But then I tried Warby Parker. Warby Parker makes buying glasses easy — offering Home Try-On so customers can give five pairs of glasses a trial run before committing. Warby Parker has also made it their mission to offer a cohesive omnichannel experience, adopting business text messaging as a customer service tool. Here’s how they use texting to assist their customers:
Glasses are an expensive online purchase with a lot of details involved: health insurance, prescriptions, returns, exchanges. Making that kind of purchase online means customers need access to help at nearly any time of the day, and quickly during their purchase. Warby Parker has made it incredibly easy to get help, offering live chat, email, phone, self-service, and text support. When you need someone to answer a question, customers can just click on the “text” icon on their website and open a text thread within their phone or laptop’s messaging app.
The brand also has some fun with their SMS support. Back in 2017, Warby Parker invited customers to text their “Costume Council” to get ideas for what to wear for Halloween that year. In using text message support in this way, Warby Parker inspired interest in their brand and kept current customers engaged.
This post originally published on June 29, 2018 and was refreshed and republished on June 2, 2022.
It may be tempting to say, “We offer our customers multiple channels to reach us…so we’re good!” But, customers today don’t really want only a multichannel experience. Instead, they want a seamless experience across channels. Or in other words, an omnichannel solution.
As many as 70% of customers say connected processes help win their business. But what does that mean, really? Maybe it’s having a seamless handoff between sales, enablement and support when they sign on. Or maybe it’s that they want you to automatically have context into what they’re calling about when they call so they don’t have to serve up a triple scoop of repeat pains for every interaction they have. Or, and stay with me here, maybe it’s both – plus more. These are the things that directly impact the quality of your customer’s experience and the loyalty they’ll have in their future purchases.
While an omnichannel experience is fairly easy to understand, it’s much more complicated to manage and deliver well. If you’ve invested in an omnichannel experience, but are still seeing inconsistencies and hiccups in your customer experience, it may be time to rethink some strategies. We’ve gathered 5 ideas to help you improve your omnichannel experience so you can deliver a better customer experience across the board.
1. Connect your systems seamlessly
Oftentimes companies think they’re already delivering an omnichannel experience when, in reality, what they’re offering is just a bunch of different channels that aren’t working together. In other words — a multichannel experience. This is when your multiple marketing and service channels work independently.
Maybe your customers can contact you in store, on the phone, by text, or over email, etc. But if each of those touchpoints are working on their own, when customers move between different channels, they have to repeat themselves over and over. This also only adds inefficiency and frustration among your employees who have to start from square one with each customer when they reach out on a new channel.
To combat this clunkiness and create an omnichannel experience, connect your channels so they can work with one another. As customers move across channels, move the customer data with them. This supplies employees across all your departments with all the company’s information about that specific customer. So as a customer switches from one channel to another, they won’t have to re-explain what they need. And agents won’t have to dig through multiple platforms to get the customer history.
Include this seamless interaction across all touchpoints in the customer lifecycle — websites, texts, live chats, emails, phone calls, and in-person assistance on the sales floor — to offer a more personalized customer experience.
To deliver a solid omnichannel experience, data is key. With every interaction your customers have with your business, they share a lot of info about themselves. Use that information to deliver a more personal and more cohesive customer journey. Take time to understand your customers’ behaviors. Maybe that includes:
Looking at what are the most popular pages on your website
Noting which self-service tools are most used by customers
Analyzing reactions to changes in your product and service offerings
What time of day are most purchases made? Which channels do customers use most to reach out to you? How many repeated times does a customer reach out about a single issue? All of this data provides a 360-degree view of the factors that influence your customers’ behavior so you know how to match your omnichannel experience to their expectations and needs.
3. Add automations
You wanna up your omnichannel customer experience? Add automations and bots to help your operations. Find a balance between bot and human interactions with customers to deliver speed and efficiency while also maintaining relationships.
Use automated texts, keywords, live chat bots, IVR, text IVR, and targeted emails to keep customers engaged and supported on different channels. Then, with the help of automated data collection, lean on automated technology to channel customer data and requests to live agents when the requests are more complicated. Automation can do the heavy lifting for those more menial tasks on your team, giving your employees opportunities to grow and resist burnout.
4. Make your service consistent across every channel
It’s important that if omnichannel experience is being offered, employees are able to deliver consistent service quality across platforms. Companies that can do this retain 89% of their customers as compared to those that don’t only retain 33%. Every channel of communication should deliver the same quality of service. Let me illustrate:
Let’s say I go to your website. I find a massive FAQ page and a live chat bubble pops up to immediately offer help. But when I go to your site on my mobile device, it doesn’t fit the screen. The service portal is clunky to search and there’s no live chat offering. When I email, it takes an agent 3 days to respond. But if I text, they answer immediately. And if I call, your IVR menu is too confusing to get me to the right place. Sure, my data is transferred between channels, but has your omnichannel experience really worked? Honestly, no.
To make this better, make sure information and service is unified across every channel. Train agents on each channel so they know how to navigate them, know how the data transfers over, and understand how service style shifts between channels. Maybe even have teams dedicated to specific channels so employees can focus on delivering quality service no matter which channel they’re on that day. Then, as a customer moves between channels, they get an accurate and smooth brand experience.
5. Include texting alongside other channels
As many as 85% of people keep their phone at arms reach at all times and the average American checks their phone 96 times a day. Your customers are on their phones and use texting to communicate every day. Companies are finding that texting is a reliable way to reach customers. In fact, SMS response rates are 295% higher than responses from phone calls. And on average, it takes people only 90 seconds to respond to a text message versus the 90 minutes it takes to get a response to an email.
Customers want to be able to text you — 63% of consumers report that they’d switch to a company that offered text messaging as a communication channel. So, if you’re not too overwhelmed by all these stats, hopefully you can see my next conclusion. It’s time to add texting to your omnichannel experience. With texting, you can relieve some of the pressure on your other channels.
For example, reduce the number of incoming phone calls, and reduce the number of customers sitting on hold by offering for customers to move to a text thread with your agents. Or include texting as an alternative option in your IVR to deflect calls to text, giving more time to your agents to handle complex issues with customers over the phone and providing fast service to customers via text.
Adding texting gives your customers a more flexible way to contact you. Unlike live chat, texting allows customers to move about while they’re receiving help from you. They don’t have to sit in front of a desktop to carry on a chat, but can carry on their day’s errands and tasks while getting support from you using the phone in their back pocket. Add texting to your omnichannel experience to improve your service quality across the board.
Texting is part of our everyday lives. Even as I write this blog, I’m carrying on a texting conversation with my sister and my college friends, and just minutes ago used texting to verify my bank account. We’re so used to SMS messaging that most of us expect businesses to communicate with this channel too. In fact, 69% of all consumers want to communicate with a business via text.
Texting gives businesses a distinct advantage — it lets you interact with customers on a personal and convenient channel. To see how SMS messages fit in a business, we’ve imagined how the quintessential American office of Dunder Mifflin would have used business texting. What if the characters of NBC’s The Office had the texting technology we have today?
How Michael Scott would use SMS Messages
Ok, so maybe the “World’s Best Boss” would misuse access to SMS messaging at times. But even with Michael Scott’s (often stressful) craziness, we can imagine some practical uses for business texting.
Sending out Discounts and Coupons
What if Michael could have avoided the “golden ticket” debacle entirely? Instead of giving out a massive discount all to one client, he could have used SMS messages to connect with each winning client about their golden ticket coupon. Maybe it could have gone something like this:
Fundraising and Event Communications
Michael Scott’s Fun Run Race for the Cure would have been a bit more successful if he could have promoted the event to all of his clients simultaneously. Whether you’re fundraising or sharing info for an upcoming event, an SMS message is a reliable way to reach all of your customers at once. Instead of relying on the sales reps to ask incoming callers for donations, he could have contacted his clients using a mass SMS message and maybe could have raised more than $340. It could have gone something like this:
How this translates to your brand:
You don’t want to pretend to be Willy Wonka for a day to reach your clients. But use an SMS message to reliably reach customers selectively or on mass. Text messages have a significantly more successful open rate than other channels of communication, with a 98% open rate as opposed to just a 20% open rate with email. This lets you successfully reach your customer base when you run promotions or fundraisers.
How Kelly Kapoor would use an SMS Message in Customer Service
Kelly Kapoor — the queen of customer service — is a master at handling any customer stress that comes her way. She’s the go-to in the office when it comes to navigating complicated conversations. And you know she would be on top of the latest trends with SMS messaging. So we’ve imagined some ways that Kelly would use SMS messages to build relationships with customers and handle customer support. Here’s how:
Two-Way Customer Conversations
Kelly Kapoor is not wrong. When customers text you, they want you to text them back. Two-way conversations is one of the biggest benefits of using SMS messages. When you text your customers, you create a relationship that encourages flexibility and shows that you’re available to help them. We can count on Kelly to add in a bit too much personality. But if Kelly were to use two-way SMS messages, it would go something like this:
How this translates to your brand:
According to a recent survey, 63% of consumers would switch to a company that offers texting as a communication method. As Kelly showed us, business SMS messages make for an easy way to address follow-up questions or requests from your customers. It’s fast, personal, and can help to resolve inquiries quickly using the channel of communication we all feel comfortable with (especially Kelly).
When you offer text as a support option, you add convenience and flexibility. Customers can text with support departments while they’re at home, in the office, or running errands. With SMS customer support, the customer is in control.
Texting is also an extremely helpful asset for companies that have long-term client relationships — companies like Dunder Mifflin. Texting keeps a solid record for customer service so you can verify details from recent conversations or double-check important information like invoice numbers and address changes.
How Pam Halpert would use SMS messages
Every office needs someone sane to deal with the craziness of incoming communications and appointment and meeting schedules. Pam Beesley Halpert has to handle all the details and put up with whatever Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute are up to that day. That’s a lot of multitasking. For a receptionist, SMS messaging makes that multitasking simpler, allowing you to juggle all kinds of incoming and outgoing office communications simultaneously. Here’s how Pam would use an SMS message:
Scheduling Meetings:
SMS messaging can be useful for scheduling meetings and appointments — something Pam has to do a lot of for Michael. To avoid having to repeatedly answer phone calls, imagine Pam could use an SMS message to schedule those meetings. Maybe it would go something like this:
How this translates to your brand:
An SMS message system isn’t just useful for support or sales. It can be incredibly useful for managing business operations. As we can see with Pam, SMS messaging makes for a flexible way for your operations team to juggle meeting and scheduling communications in a way that integrates easily with your existing systems. Plus, since an individual person can have multiple text threads going at once, SMS messaging is more efficient than taking one phone call at a time.
Add business texting to reach customers effectively. And hopefully you’ll end up a bit more efficient than our friends at Dunder Mifflin.
