There’s power in storytelling. Stories can shape, strengthen or challenge our opinions and values. And when a story catches our attention and engages us, we are more likely to absorb the message and meaning within it than if the same message was presented simply in facts and figures. The same goes for storytelling in our businesses. And the biggest story worth mapping and telling is the story of your customer journey.
A customer journey is a story about how you understand your users. It’s a roadmap for how they behave, and what you can do to improve their trip so that they keep coming back. When you pay attention to your customer journey, you can understand what they need, what motivates them, what concerns they have. Ultimately, it lets you boost your customer experience, leading to higher conversion rates and improved customer retention.
To know how to navigate your customer journey, though, you need to know how to connect with customers. What do they want? What makes them tick? And how do you make that connection? One way is by texting them.
Build Texting into Your Customer Journey
Business texting has only become more common and popular in recent years. We’re all within reach of our phones at any time, making texting a reliable way to grab your customers’ attention quickly. Texting is accessible to anyone with a phone — 97% of the American population — making it a useful channel to integrate into your customer journey.
Customers today care a lot about speed and convenience. Why would I buy from a brand with clunky technology, slow delivery, and a hard-to-reach customer service team? Instead, I go for the brands that I can reach out to at any time, on any channel, and who will help me fast. Texting helps you to do this — to reach customers instantly so you can guide customers along every step of their journey.
There are a whole lot of creative ways to integrate texting into your customer journey and experience. Let’s walk through the steps together:
Step One: Invite Customers to Reach Out to You Via Text
Before any other steps can be taken, you have to get opt-in from customers to get their consent for you to text them. This is the first touchpoint in a hopefully long-term relationship with your customers. It starts with inviting them to text you and receive texts from you. Find ways to spark that conversation early in the customer journey. On your landing pages or while they’re making a purchase, ask customers to provide a mobile number and accept incoming text messages from your company like Subway’s example below:
Step Two: Build a customer base using promotions, coupons, and rewards.
Once you have their details and consent, build your customer base. Texting opt-ins gives you a reliable list of customers who actually want to hear from you. Incentivize customers to join you for the journey, by sending them limited offers, coupon links, and other marketing messages. This will help to keep your customers engaged and increase sales.
Business texting also lets you segment your customers so you can send targeted offers to fit the specific preferences of your customers. Assign keywords to any customer or group of customers in your database according to the products they bought or showed interest in to establish a more personalized experience.
Step Three: Keep customers supported by carrying on two-way conversations.
Customers won’t stay along for the ride if they don’t feel well supported. In fact, 90% of Americans use customer service as a factor in deciding whether or not to do business with a company. So to effectively use texting within your customer journey, add two-way communication. This lets you provide service and fulfill sales with a personal and casual channel.
We’ve all been there — dragged into an exhausting call with customer service that lasts forever. That hurts your customer experience. But with texting, you can offer a fast and flexible channel for customers to get questions answered. And, when you add MMS messaging, you can include images, links to help tools, pdf files, and even emojis to make your messages more attractive, increasing engagement and offering more help with fewer words.
Step Four: Help customers stay in the know with appointment and payment reminders.
I have a calendar that hangs on my kitchen wall with all the deadlines, reminders, and plans in my life and my husband’s. There are times it gets utterly overwhelmed with pen marks. I’m not always going to remember that one bill that’s due in two days. Or I may have forgotten the date of the dentist appointment I scheduled two months ago. This is where texting adds so much to the customer journey.
Help customers stay in the know, cut down on no-shows and make your front desk staff’s life easier by automating appointment and payment reminders to customers. These automated text messages streamline communication and provide better customer service.
Step Five: Value customer thoughts and gather feedback from them.
Essential to the customer journey is knowing what your customers want. A successful customer journey includes a way for customers to communicate obstacles they faced along the way. Customer feedback, when gathered and used well, improves your product and your service, builds brand loyalty, and makes customers feel valued and important.
Texting is way more effective in reaching customers than any other channel. Customers are more likely to open a text than an email. Use texting to follow up with customers near the end of their journey. Send surveys to receive your customers’ information and preferences. Add in a quick poll, for example, for customers to review how a product or service is doing. Or simply train your service agents to ask good follow up questions after each customer interaction.
Why Texting Should be Part of Your Customer Journey
When you use texting with your other portfolio of channels, you add more touchpoints with customers to keep them interested in the relationship. Ultimately, adding texting benefits everyone. Here’s how:
Quick delivery and response: An SMS message only takes a few seconds to deliver and can reach multiple customers with a personalized message. And customers can get quick help when needed.
Convenience: Since it is sent directly to the customer’s phone, texting is a more personal channel. Allowing two-way communication with the customer makes it convenient for them to send questions, inquiries, and ask for support on the go.
Simplicity: No one wants to read through a 1500 word promotional email. Text messaging is simple. It reaches a larger audience since almost everybody knows how to open the app and send a message. And since messages are short, you’ll have a great communication tool that gets straight to the point.
Traceability: Using a text messaging system enables you to track and analyze the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. With reports, you can evaluate how the strategy works and make the necessary adjustments.
Efficiency: Texting helps you to plan your messages in advance, create your campaign, and target groups of people with scheduled texts. SMS software systems also let you streamline processes by using auto-responses. This leads to time and cost savings, and increases your ROI.
ST. LOUIS, May 24, 2022 – Textel, the full-service, cloud-based texting platform for businesses and contact centers, announced a new partnership with RingCentral. Together with RingCentral, a leading provider of global enterprise cloud communications, video meetings, collaboration and contact center solutions, they’ll bring full SMS and MMS capabilities to their customers. And in doing so, they’ll enable human conversations in a familiar, flexible channel customers want to interact on.
Built seamlessly into the RingCentral Contact Center, Textel’s integration lets users have a flexible, two-way dialog with their customers via SMS and MMS from their existing business number and DIDs. Centers can reduce average hold time and improve customer satisfaction ratings with features like skills-based routing, agent-initiated and mass outbound texting, agentless textbots, Interactive Text Response (ITR) call deflection and group texting. And, with full transcript reporting and analytics, managers have the tools they need to coach agents.
“We’re excited to work with RingCentral and bring the benefits of our offering to RingCentral customers through our integration,” said James Diel, CEO at Textel. “As part of the integration, which adds two-way conversational SMS and MMS capabilities as well as one-to-one and mass texting functionality, businesses can experience improved customer service while reducing call volumes and operational costs.”
Textel also integrates with RingCentral’s Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) platform enabling businesses to use SMS and MMS for mobile lead generation, website conversion to chat, booking appointments and reminders, promotions, and cross-department communications via the RingCentral unified app available on desktop, web, and mobile.
“Providing customers with a reliable, secure, and scalable business communications solution is core to our cloud communications platform,” said David Lee, vice president, product management at RingCentral. “The integration of Textel with RingCentral gives customers a platform that’s both easy to use and opens up an entirely new channel of interaction through SMS and MMS texting.”
About Textel
Founded in 2014, Textel is the rapidly growing texting platform for businesses and contact centers that is specifically designed to improve the customer experience, increase customer engagement, improve contact center performance, and drive revenue. With over 1,000 customers across North America, Textel is the texting platform for contact centers that want to communicate faster and more efficiently than traditional channels (email, voice, chat). Visit Textel on LinkedIn and Twitter.
We all text a lot. Globally, we send roughly 23 billion text messages every day. And on average, American adults send and receive nearly 18 billion texts a day, and 6.5 trillion texts a year. Businesses have figured out that texting is one of the most reliable ways to reach customers: for marketing, sales, and customer service.
If you’re sending your customers SMS text messages, you’re already ahead of the game. With texting, you’re able to boost your customer experience by offering flexibility and personalization. Texting cuts through the noise in a way that email and phone support just can’t.
But what if I told you that you could take your SMS customer experience to the next level? MMS messaging takes what SMS has to offer and expands it — giving your customer support team a way to reach issue resolution faster. With MMS — multimedia messaging services — your team can send pictures, animated GIFs, videos, and audio recordings to your customers, adding personality to each message.
We know the cliché — “a picture is worth a thousand words.” But we’re going to show you how this is so true when you add MMS messaging into your CX strategy.
How to Use MMS Messaging to Support your Customer Experience
When Running Promotions and Customer Engagement Strategy:
When compared to standard SMS messages with blocks of text, MMS messages provide a 52% higher click through rate. Customers are also 800% more likely to share an MMS message with friends or family than SMS messages. Why? Because visuals are significantly more interesting and attention grabbing than just text. MMS messaging supports your marketing and sales efforts by helping you cut through the noise.
In general, visuals are incredibly important for retention. When people only hear information, they’re likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. Yikes…that’s not much. But if that info is paired with a relevant image, people retain 65% of the information three days later. When you add imagery into your messaging, customers will remember that coupon message you sent, or the sale promotion you shared at a higher rate than if you just send a plain old SMS text.
Make your messages more eye-catching by adding in images of the specific products that are on sale. Or work with your design team to create attractive graphics for coupons. For a customer, seeing the goods increases appeal and MMS means you don’t have to rely on customers making their way to your website or store to check you out.
When doing Damage Control:
MMS messaging does wonders for cleaning up customer messes. Adding in MMS messaging can improve your customer experience in that it gives your customers a way to clearly communicate about an issue without having to describe it at length in a text.
I’ve got my own mental archive of customer service situations that would have been handled much faster with MMS capabilities. So many situations I experienced as a support rep took about ten back and forth emails just to get clarity from the customer about what exactly was wrong with their product. Not every customer is going to be the best communicator, able to robustly describe what a broken product looks like. And let’s be honest — regardless of our communication skills, trying to describe something with just words is hard.
MMS messaging, though, helps the customer show the support agent what’s wrong, making for faster and clearer communication. Let me give you a couple examples of this:
I purchased a set of bedding from a company last year — a duvet cover and a set of sheets. The company offers a lifetime warranty on their products and I recently noticed a rip in the bedding.
Now, without MMS messaging, it would have been a lengthy process to advocate for myself. Instead, all I had to do was snap a couple pictures and put it into a text thread with their service rep, and before I knew it, a replacement sheet was on my doorstep. In this circumstance, MMS messaging also helped to protect the company’s policy. They don’t have to worry about customers abusing their warranty policy because they can require an image of the specific damage before sending a replacement.
Let me give you another example. Imagine you’ve just gone to the salon to get your hair done. The following day, you notice some inconsistencies in your fresh cut. Thank goodness the salon offers MMS messaging. Instead of drafting a massive paragraph describing the issue, all you have to do is snap a selfie and shoot the salon a quick text asking for an appointment to get the haircut fixed. Your stylist can see the specific problem with your hair and you’ve avoided any possible miscommunication.
When you Need to Cut Down the Steps to Reach Issue Resolution:
MMS messaging makes the customer service process faster. It empowers your agents by letting them send step by step help in videos and audio messages, reaching issue resolution quickly and efficiently. Instead of your agents having to go back and forth with an SMS thread, giving step by step instructions in massive blocks of text, use MMS messaging to cut down on some steps.
Make self-service easier for customers. When a customer reaches out about a typical issue, send pre-filmed videos that show step by step instructions for resolving different issues. Or, create and send some that walk customers through a specific process — like filing a claim or paying an invoice online. Have agents record audio messages in text threads, talking customers through a tricky issue. Ultimately, MMS messaging saves time for your agents and your customers to get complex issues solved over text.
Let me show you what I mean: I’ve moved about four times in the last five years of my life. With each move, I’ve had to replace furniture or add new furniture to fill the space. And with that comes a whole lot of furniture assembly. I’m not a handy person, and let’s be real — instruction manuals are not always easy to follow. After purchasing a new desk for our home office, I was getting stuck on the steps. I pulled out my phone and sent a message to the company I purchased it from.
Within minutes, with the help of MMS messaging, the agent sent me a how-to video, paired with several close-up photos, andan ebook guide to all in one message to get me through. The ease of this process saved me so much time. I didn’t have to put off my furniture assembly for a couple days, waiting on the back and forth emails to get me the help I needed. I didn’t have to wait on hold just to chat with a human being who could walk me through the process.
By adding MMS messaging, you’re giving your customers and your agents a set of tools that simplify communication, making for a better customer and employee experience all around.
What would your business model look like if you put all your focus on what your customers want? This question may put a pit in your stomach. What about this quarter’s profits? How about those new sales leads? What about staying faithful to the product roadmap? Don’t get me wrong — those goals matter. But the data shows that in order to be successful in all your goals, customer experience has to be the focus of your brand. Adding an SMS online platform directly supports this focus.
Salesforce found that as many as 66% of customers expect companies to understand and anticipate their needs. When customers are the focus, your other goals will follow. In fact, customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that aren’t. And it’s become clear in recent years that customers want flexibility, efficiency, convenience, and personalization.
Hmm…sounds familiar.
SMS online texting offers each of these things. The average American spends five hours per day on their cell phone. And, 95% of text messages are read and responded to within 3 minutes of being received. Texting lets you reach customers on their time. And because SMS texting is a much more personal form of communication when compared to email or phone calls, it gives you a unique opportunity to build relationships with customers.
With this in mind, we’ve put together a list of online SMS features that further your customer-centric goals and support your employees. Here’s what to look for in a tool that enables SMS online for a better customer experience:
1. Personalization:
Personalization matters more than ever in the modern market. McKinsey & Co. has found that companies that excel at personalization generate 40% more revenue than the average players. Customers want to feel known. And texting offers this uniquely personal form of communication. Customers don’t give out their phone numbers to just anyone. If you’ve been given the go ahead to text a customer, offer the most personal messaging possible.
Look for an SMS online tool that makes personalization easy for your team. Use the information from your CRM and integrate those personal details into the messages you send. Some SMS tools provide custom fields so your agents can insert names or other personalized details dynamically. That way, your customers view your texts as personal.
2. IVR Deflection:
There are plenty of times that customers call in with a fairly simple question. For example, maybe a customer calls into your salon just to find out their appointment time. But, that customer with the simple request gets stuck in the same call queue as the customers who have a really complicated issue to resolve. And getting stuck on hold kills a customer experience faster than maybe anything else.
But, with IVR deflection, move the customers who are trapped in IVR purgatory to your online SMS tool. Customers can request a text and hop off the call. Then, agents can start a two-way conversation with customers to pass along appointment details, answer simple questions, share self-service tools, etc.
3. Opt-in and Opt-out management:
Perhaps what’s most daunting about adding SMS online is staying compliant. To stay compliant according to TCPA standards, you must get permission from customers before sending them any messages to their phone. This means you can’t message someone until they’ve opted into receiving messages and you can’t message someone who’s opted-out.
Opt-in and opt-out management can be a headache. Manually tracking of every opted in or out contact is a logistical nightmare. But with the right SMS online platform, you can use a tool to manage your opt-ins and opt-outs for you. No more adding or deleting from a contact list or spreadsheet. With opt-in management, any time a customer requests to hear from you or sends a “STOP” message to opt-out, your contact list automatically adjusts, keeping your team free of stress and your customers’ privacy protected.
How can you manage your customer experience if you aren’t tracking your agents’ performance? Metrics are a fundamental part of professional development for your employees and integral to growing a solid support staff. To support your efforts, find an online SMS platform that offers a robust set of reporting and analytic tools.
For a successful customer experience, you want to know what your open rate is. You need to see how quickly agents are responding to customers. And, you want to ensure that your issue resolution is high. Use reporting and analytics to track metrics and to be sure your team is keeping customers happy.
5. Automation:
When you pair automation alongside online SMS, you can manage customer queries without getting agents involved. This leaves more time for agents to handle complicated issues with customers on other channels, lowering your average hold time and boosting issue resolution. Find a platform that helps you automate customer support.
How is automation helpful for your customer experience? Let me give you a couple examples. Feedback from customers is critical for customer experience success. So to improve your customer feedback loop, automate a message with a few survey questions to send after an agent concludes a customer conversation.
Or, maybe you want to send a shipping update to a few customers. Set up an automation to send an update 24 hours before their package arrives. With intentional automation, you’re using your employees’ time to the fullest and you’re supporting your customers to have the best experience.
ST. LOUIS, May 5, 2022 – Textel, the full-service, cloud-based texting platform for business and contact centers, experienced explosive growth in 2021, with both revenue and bookings up by more than 70% year-over-year. This growth was fueled by a 57% increase in new customers, as the company’s advanced texting platform saw accelerated pull-through from its expanding CCaaS partnership base. And, Textel reported a 114% net retention rate for the year, demonstrating the value of the platform and its customers’ add-on usage.
“Textel is in the middle of significant acceleration, and we are excited to be connected to more partners, platforms, and customers than ever before,” said Textel Founder and CEO James Diel.
Today, 97% of people reject or ignore phone calls from traditional outbound dialers, while 95% of texts are read within three minutes of being sent. And texts have a higher response rate than voice and email combined.
Research also finds today’s consumers want the convenience, flexibility, speed, and personal service of texting. As many as 91% of people say they would opt-in for text messages from brands, and 75% are open to receiving offers via SMS.
Reaching people where they want to be reached, Textel is changing how contact centers do business. One customer, Sono Bello, the cosmetic surgery specialists with 60+ locations across the country, struggled with low open, click-throughs, and contact rates. Their no-show numbers were unacceptably high. But by implementing Textel, appointment rates increased by 9%, leading to 500 more “shows” a month and a $1.5M increase in monthly incremental revenue. And they are now generating an additional $250K in incremental revenue per month with Textel-enabled re-engagement campaigns sent directly from their CRM.
And when Pearson, the world’s leading learning company, with 20,000 employees that deliver their educational products and services to students in nearly 200 countries, found their voice-based outreach no longer met their students’ needs, they deployed Textel. Overnight, their contact rate improved by 200%, with a 2X increase from a request for information to the enrollment process. Labor costs were reduced and both students and employees have reported positive sentiment around the experience.
“At Textel, we get excited when we hear about the success of our partners,” continued Diel. “Textel was founded to make it easy and seamless for businesses to adopt texting. But another beneficiary of our services is the people who are no longer tied to their phones on hold waiting to speak to a customer services rep or their computers waiting for a response in a webchat. Our texting solutions bring flexibility to the customer experience, creating refreshing interactions and driving real business ROI.”
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 1,600 customers around the world, Textel helps companies communicate faster and more efficiently than traditional channels (email, voice, chat). Visit Textel on LinkedIn and Twitter.
