A crucial part of growing your business requires good communication with your customers. Good communication also means establishing effective and efficient communication strategies to stay connected. Businesses can achieve this and more using business texting. Let’s explore seven ways to use texting for business growth.
Why Use Texting?
While email is useful, only one-third of emails get opened. It’s not as effective as many businesses might think. On the other hand, SMS is becoming one of the most popular communication channels for businesses, with over 3 billion users predicted by 2022.
Texts have a staggering 99% open rate, and they often get opened within three minutes of receipt. What is even more interesting is that people prefer to receive a text message from a company instead of a phone call.
Some benefits of using business texting include:
It gives customers a direct way to contact a company
A text messaging strategy can grow with your company. Using mass or group messaging, you can easily scale your text communications whenever your customer base grows.
7 Ways to Grow Your Business by Texting
Business texting is easy to implement and well received by customers. Here’s how it can increase your reach and your revenue.
1. Mobile lead generation
Phones have become an essential part of life: communication, entertainment, searching on the internet, purchasing products and services. Most internet traffic is now mobile. When potential clients search for local businesses, it’s ideal if they can text you right from your mobile website. Using a texting platform allows your customers to contact you with a single click.
2. Increase conversions with SMS chat
Attracting visitors to your website is one thing, but converting them into leads and customers is a different challenge. A texting platform ensures a direct connection with people interested in your products and services.
3. Book appointments and reminders
For service providers, it can be a hassle tracking and reminding customers about upcoming appointments. Make booking appointments easier and minimize the no-shows with business texting.
Customers who may be too busy to answer a phone call or an email immediately are likely to respond to a quick text. This makes using text messages to schedule, confirm, and cancel appointments much easier. For instance, sending a text as simple as “Please confirm your appointment on Thursday at 5” can be effective to ensure appointments are kept while minimizing scheduling gaps.
4. Direct promotions
Sending offers and promotions is a regular part of SMS marketing. However, it’s imperative to ensure that promotions get to the intended customers and encourage them to act on that promotion.
Business texting immediately positions your promotion in front of your clients. Moreover, with rich media texting, you can send images and videos to entice customers to click on the promotional link.
For instance, a retailer may send the following text message:
“Hi [Customer Name],
A feast of discounts at the Magnolia website! Purchase two pieces of jewelry and get the third for free! Claim this promotion at any Magnolia store until April 30th.”
5. Cross-department communication
Internal communication can sometimes be cumbersome, and it is not unusual for workers to have dozens of unopened emails. In fact, employees spend 16% of their workweek on email—that amounts to approximately 15.5 hours a week.
Texting can reduce the time spent on communications by providing a quick way to get answers, approvals, and signatures. By reclaiming that time, your business becomes more efficient, and staff can review the message thread instead of asking questions a second (or third) time.
6. Improve customer service
When you answer your customers’ queries and questions promptly or send them a text to let them know their order is ready, you’re giving them a good customer experience. Positive interactions, in turn, increases customer loyalty and satisfaction.
A helpful feature that improves the customer experience is self-service SMS. This feature helps customers to resolve many of their questions quickly without needing an agent.
7. Use it as part of your sales funnel
Quick messages can assist your customers during the purchase journey. Push notifications and abandoned cart reminders can help keep your customer in the funnel, guiding them through their purchase.
4 Steps for an Effective Texting Strategy
How can you ensure your business texting strategy is effective? Here are four steps:
1. Use a business texting platform
Implementing a business texting strategy won’t be very effective if you need to do it manually. A business texting platform can make your work much more manageable. With tools to automate and organize business texting, you can quickly scale your marketing up or down, and you can segment your clients with group texting.
Texting is a great way to communicate with customers, but only if you have their consent. That’s why your next step should be building your opt-in list—add a lead form to your website or ask your customers to opt-in for SMS at the moment of purchase.
3. Create great messages
Once you have your list, it’s time to craft some great messages. Write messages that are relevant to your audience and the stage they are in the sales funnel. Mix your messages to include product awareness, improve purchases, or offer tips and interesting information.
4. Measure and revise
A business texting platform has the added advantage of tracking and reporting. Modern solutions use artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to analyze your business texting activities. You’ll discover how your customers are interacting with you via text and how often they respond. You can adjust your strategy accordingly.
Grow Your Business with Textel
A reliable business texting platform can make your SMS strategy much more effective. Textel is a complete business texting solution that allows customers to text you to your existing phone number. The API and intuitive chatbots seamlessly integrate with your existing CRM and sales solutions to automate repetitive tasks for a seamless SMS strategy.
Learn how Textel can help grow your business by requesting a demo. If you have questions about our leading business texting platform, contact us.
Studies show that text messaging is the most used data service in the world. With over 560 billion text messages sent every month, text messaging is here to stay.
Companies of all sizes are using business text messaging to reach and engage with their customers. Juniper Research predicts the volume of automated text messages will grow 20% by 2022, passing 2.7 trillion, up from 2.1 trillion in 2017. That’s because text messaging gives companies a quick and direct way to reach their customers.
At Textel, we’ve learned that law firms can achieve 8X better response rates by using business texting compared to traditional methods such as email and phone.
How can law firms maximize the benefits of business texting? In this post, we’ll go over the top 5 reasons law firms should implement business texting.
How Texting Helps Law Firms
A text message has a sense of urgency. More people will answer a text from their attorney than an email. Law firms can use texting to:
Generate new clients: initiate conversations and provide support directly from your website
Manage billing: send automated bill reminders
Save time on calls: on average, a law firm that receives 50 calls a day can save an hour and a half utilizing business text messaging
Schedule and confirm appointments: send appointment reminders
Integrating business texting into your communications allows your law firm to conveniently stay connected to customers. Here are five ways text can be used to grow your business, make it more efficient, and improve your response rates:
1. Schedule and Send Out Reminders
Traditionally, law firms call or send reminder emails to their clients regarding important upcoming dates. However, this involves the risk of human error or clients not seeing their messages.
A texting platform automatically sends all reminders for payments, court dates, and appointments, reducing the time staff spends writing emails and making reminder phone calls. Automated messages also reduce the human error factor.
Prevent bill leakage by integrating business texting with case management and accounting systems. This automates the messages into the system, creating a detailed tracking that streamlines billing.
2. Create a User Audit Trail with Conversation Records
Every text that is sent and received via a texting platform is permanently recorded. Since messages cannot be deleted, there is an immutable audit trail. Conversations can be printed or downloaded for your records.
A texting platform provides a trail of proof without paper and keeps your law firm compliant with TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act) regulations.
3. Centralize all Business Texts through Your Firm’s Contact Number, Maximizing Brand Recall
Using a texting platform such as Textel allows you to grow your business and increase brand recognition. Conversations can be started with prospects right from your contact number, reaching people on their mobile devices.
These messages allow for two-way conversations that can lead to converting prospects into clients. The convenience of text messaging gives them the reassurance that you’re taking care of their issues quickly, resulting in a better experience for them. Customers come to recognize and use the same number you promote every day.
4. Collaborate among Team Members through Co-managed Conversations
A texting platform can also improve collaboration. Staff can text as a team using a multi-user feature and communicate with clients in co-managed conversations without using their personal phones. Text responses can be forwarded and automated, simplifying the workflow.
The team functionality that business texting software offers prevents BYOD issues. By keeping everything inside one platform, your firm protects clients’ private details, preventing potential privacy issues—especially critical in a legal setting.
5. Meet a Customer Demand that is Also Naturally Effective
As mentioned in the statistics above, most people prefer businesses to text instead of calling. SMS has an open rate of 99%, compared to the appalling 16% open rate of emails. Case management becomes easier when a firm can immediately reach its customers.
Even better, texting platforms include rich media text, meaning you can request and send documents, images, and video via messaging. Texting creates better and streamlined communication.
Why Textel?
Law firms spend considerable time tracking dates and communicating with customers. A text messaging platform can help make processes more productive, resulting in less time spent on daily phone calls and more time on case management.
Textel’s powerful business texting platform is helping law offices increase productivity and client response rates, saving hours daily by using automated text messaging. Communicate easily with clients, streamline case management, and improve efficiency with Textel. Ready to know more? Book a demo today.
Companies, plagued with unanswered outbound calls, have quickly figured out that phone calls are, well, intrusive. But, they’re realizing online texting is both welcomed and informative.
Imagine this: you have customers in your auto shop who’ve taken time to drive to talk face to face with you about an issue with their car. As you’re talking through the complexities of their engine, the phone is incessantly ringing in the background. Call after call is interrupting your conversation. You know that each missed phone call is potentially a bad online review. And, more than likely, it’s just a customer calling for an ETA on their repair.
But, with online texting, service departments can shave off over 40 hours of work every month, cut back on interruptions, and build customer trust.
Building Customer Trust with Online Texting
The auto service industry measures success by the level of customer trust. What do you do if, as you’re inspecting cars coming in, you discover more issues? Giving your employees’ the ability to effectively communicate these issues is key to profit.
Don’t feel discouraged. Customer service-oriented businesses, like auto service providers, can increase sales and improve customer satisfaction by adding online texting. When you integrate online texting solutions with your existing business number, your text-enabled teams have direct access to your customers. Think about how much easier it is to keep customers up to date if your employees can text pictures or questions to customers.
The reality is that phone calls and email are slow and inconvenient. Customers and businesses are more inclined to dodge phone calls. Why?
You’re busy when the call comes in and can’t answer immediately
You and your customers just don’t have time for the small talk that precedes the issue
Let’s be real, for everyone involved, phone calls can be annoying — especially if it’s just a call about something simple. I can personally say I’ve let many phone calls go to voicemail to avoid the awkwardness. But, what does online texting offer?
Texting Case Study Example: Big O Tires
In a recent survey, Textel client Big O Tires proved how much time could be saved and profit won by switching customer outreach from phone calls to online texting.
On average, Big O Tires services around 1,064 cars per month. They determined that 40% of those customers weren’t present during repairs, forcing their service department to contact them twice on average. That’s two phone calls for every customer just to get approvals on next steps or provide updates. And just think about how many of those went to voicemail and wasted more time for their employees.
Big O Tires compared sending a text vs. making a call when contacting these 435 absent customers. Here’s what they found:
The average customer responds to a voicemail in 37.5 minutes
The average customer responds to a text message in 14.35 minutes
Average time spent calling a customer: 3 minutes
Average time spent sending a text message: 1 minute
In addition to those findings, after reviewing each tire center’s Textel usage reports, we found these gained efficiencies with online texting:
Textel saves 26.82 hours a month on average in gaining customer approvals
Textel saves 13.3 hours a month on average in sending repair updates
The bottom line? Online texting saved Big O Tires 40.12 hours a month and they were praised for a “quicker response and easier selling” in their outreach to customers.
Putting Customer Service in the Fast Lane
Not only does online texting benefit your business by saving time and making for easier upsells, it also has a huge benefit for your customers. Here’s how:
1. Online texting keeps customers in the loop.
Customers want to be involved. Especially when businesses work closely on their property — like tech repair, building contractors, or auto service providers — customers want to see firsthand what you’re doing.
With online texting, you can keep customers informed on the issues and send real-time updates on progress made. And, if you use a business texting platform, you have a historical record of past customer interactions. So, your service team will always be able to refer to the account and conversation history for customer context.
2. Send appointment reminders with online texting.
Configure auto-triggered texts in advance to remind customers of upcoming appointments or schedule changes. Then, customers don’t have to remember when it’s time for their appointment, like their next oil change. With that, you can avoid costly no-shows by allowing customers to reschedule via text. Your service can stay busy and fast for customers at all times.
3. Promote new deals and offers with online texting.
Dealerships can use keywords and send mass blast texts to generate new sales and promote new offerings. SMS messaging lets your team reach way more potential customers than phone calls ever could.
Speed of service is closely tied to customer satisfaction. Customers want a resolution to their issue or an answer to their question right here, right now! And, there’s a clear correlation between customer satisfaction — for virtually any type of customer service — and First Call Resolution (or FCR). Your customers want to know that they can reach you and reach issue resolution quickly.
Contact centers strive for high FCR rates so they can prove to customers they’re able to prioritize and handle their problem fast. Oftentimes, you can improve FCR through focused coaching for agents and strong internal support. But, with some additional technology in place, you can watch your first call resolution skyrocket. Then see your customer satisfaction soar.
First: What Is FCR?
To understand how texting fits into your path to customer satisfaction, we need to define First Call Resolution. Contact centers use this metric to represent how often agents are able to resolve an issue for a customer on the first call or interaction.
According to ICMI, FCR is a metric that reflects how effective your contact center is. A strong FCR rate boasts the experience of your agents and the quality of agent training. It’s the clearest metric for measuring customer satisfaction and agent efficiency. The more issues your agents solve in the first contact, the happier your customers will be. In fact, for every 1% improvement in FCR, there is a 1% improvement in your customer satisfaction.
So, how do you measure FCR? The most accurate way to track the metric is to take the total number of calls resolved in the first attempt and divide that by the total number of first calls. This way you’re not factoring in every single call coming into your center.
When you measure issue resolution, you get a sense for how satisfied your customers are with your service. And when you boost your FCR score, your bottom line will benefit. But how do you improve your FCR easily and affordably?
Integrate business texting into your contact center to improve issue resolution and customer satisfaction.
6 Ways Texting Helps You Improve Issue Resolution
Texting provides an opportunity to solve simple issues during the first interaction without tying up your agents or your customers on a long phone call. Believe it or not — customers want to text your business. According to research, customers prefer communicating with businesses through text rather than on the phone. So how does texting boost your issue resolution? Here’s how:
Texting Helps your Prioritize Issues
With business texting, use automated responses and bots to support your agents and lower call volume. How many calls come into your call center that could be solved with a brief answer, with an article from your FAQ page, or with a stock message? With texting, your customers can request help and receive basic instructions or helpful articles, getting their answer from automated messaging or mass texts.
This way, you triage the most common issues that don’t require a live agent. Funnel the simple requests into texting threads. How does this help your FCR? Your agents are then freed up to take time with the customers who have more complicated issues. They can sit on a single phone call for some time without feeling the stress of an overwhelming call queue.
Texting Increases the Number of Issues Resolved
Many contact centers still focus on handling issues via the phone. But let’s be real — not every issue requires a drawn out phone call. Appointment booking, reminders, and other simple procedures can be done via text very easily. Be preemptive and set up scheduled texts to customers. This proactive customer service decreases the number of customers that have to reach out to you in the first place.
When you add business texting, set up automations to handle low-level issues like sending appointment reminders, scheduling details, or shipping updates and support your issue resolution rates.
Texting Boosts Collaboration and Streamlines Team Operations
With texting, your team can collaborate with ease. The flexibility of a texting conversation lets your team talk about solutions for customers together without the pressing need to answer the customer in real time as on the phone. Let’s take this scenario: your agent, Heather, is on the phone with a customer who has a complicated issue. Heather needs to speak with your finance team to approve the solution for the customer. So, she asks the customer if she can call him back. There goes your FCR.
But, imagine instead that Heather is texting with the same customer. Instead of needing to end the conversation with the customer to reach resolution, she can collaborate with your finance team as she simultaneously talks with the customer. Now, she achieves issue resolution on the initial conversation with the customer and she keeps team operations moving smoothly.
Texting Improves Frequent Caller Satisfaction
Texting solutions save customer data, so agents have the case history at their fingertips when starting an interaction with a customer. This makes frequent callers feel recognized, increasing loyalty. It also provides faster service, improving the rate of issue resolution.
Send Post-call Surveys for Better Customer Feedback
Post-call surveys can help identify the most common issues facing your customers. And, through gathering customer feedback, you can more accurately track customer satisfaction. With texting out surveys, you get access to understand your customers and gauge your agents’ performance.
Multimedia messaging (MMS) lets you send images, documents, and videos via text to aid in quick issue resolution. Your customers can send documentation, forms, take a picture of an item they want to replace, or send a video. And you can do the same!
With MMS, enhance the customer experience and reach issue resolution faster. Using audio and visuals, you improve a simple text, resulting in higher engagement and response from customers. MMS gives customers what they want—convenience—by giving them access to images and audio to complement the text. This way, you support your customers’ satisfaction and achieve FCR.
Improve your FCR with a business texting platform. Solve customer issues, address their concerns, and answer their questions quickly within a single text thread.
Contact center managers are reluctant to bulk up IT infrastructure because they expect minor returns. However, once they get on board, they soon discover the benefits of integrating an A2P solution to see that it doesn’t disrupt operations.
More than 60% of customers want to text with businesses regarding customer support.
The wide acceptance of this communication channel means organizations can’t afford to overlook it. SMS allows contact center agents to engage customers using a channel that they’re used to—and most times prefer to use. Text interactions can also be managed via automation for lower costs and improved customer satisfaction, which is where an A2P solution comes in.
What is A2P?
A2P texting (application-to-person)—sometimes referred to as enterprise SMS or business SMS—means text messages sent from a business application to a person. And unlike P2P messaging (person-to-person), A2P texts allow organizations to automate text messaging for sales promotions, alerts, appointment reminders, two-factor authentication, customer support, and a lot more.
3 Reasons Your Contact Center Should Integrate A2P
While there are so many benefits of integrating A2P messaging into your IT infrastructure, here are three primary reasons you should do so.
1. Increase Customer Satisfaction
Technology is helping to boost customer experience, and this results in customers increasing their expectations.
A particular study even showed that customers have higher expectations for customer service than they do in previous years.
If there is a general fact about customers, it is that they hate waiting. People expect customer service to be fast, and one of the things a business can do to frustrate a customer is to place them on hold for extended periods, as is common with call queries.
However, with A2P, contact center agents can manage more than one conversation at the same time, which reduces the average hold time. Moreover, managing more than one conversation simultaneously improves customer satisfaction, as each query can be answered almost immediately.
2. Reduce Costs Associated with Contact Center Performance
The cost of a support phone call ranges between $6 and $25—an average of $15.50 per interaction. That’s far above text chat, which by comparison, ranges from $1 to $5. With automation, it can be brought as low as 25 cents.
Automated texting sets up questions for the customer to answer before they’re transferred to a live agent. When the contact center agent understands the needs of a customer beforehand, it speeds up the interaction.
This reduces the time that the customer and the contact center agent interact with each other, which ultimately saves costs.
An A2P solution takes advantage of automation throughout the entire interaction and is even capable of utilizing multiple channels for complex customer needs.
For instance, American Express fraud prevention engages customers with text messages asking about the kind of phone they’re using when they call in. If the caller has a smartphone, they are sent a text that contains a web page link where they can check all their transactions.
Because the system is aware of the phone associated with the account, the customer is already signed in. This eliminates the need for the customer to explain themself over and over again to an agent, thereby reducing voice costs.
3. Guarantee a Tech Stack Addition that Generates Returns and Doesn’t Overburden Your IT Infrastructure
Integrating an A2P texting solution generates returns without overburdening your IT infrastructure. For example, an A2P text solution does not require additional hardware and can be activated in one day. It offers insights, a centralized management dashboard, and many more features that allow for complete control.
This is hugely beneficial because most contact center agents use up to three different software systems to manage voice conversations and the same number to manage voiceless interactions. However, by establishing one platform for omnichannel ability, contact centers can better handle customer interactions. Fortunately, texting can be managed from a single platform like voice or web chat, and agents can switch between channels on a single platform.
How Textel Helps Contact Centers Attain the Benefits of A2P Texting
Textel is a cloud business texting platform specifically designed for contact centers. The solution doesn’t overburden your IT infrastructure, reduces customer interaction costs, and enables omnichannel communication (having two-way text conversations with your customers) or sending a text message to multiple customers at once.
You can learn more about how Textel can improve your contact center productivity by contacting us.
