When the rate of abandoned calls in your contact center is high, you’re likely to see other success metrics take a hit — like customer satisfaction and retention. We’ve all been there as customers ourselves: the looped recording of hold music is slowly making you lose your mind, and you’re just over it. So, you hang up. Your question is left unanswered and you’ve wasted a chunk of your day. It sure doesn’t leave you with the best impression of that company’s service.
But, how do you even begin to reduce abandoned calls in your call center?
Globally, the average call abandonment rate is around 5-8% of calls abandoned. But unfortunately, COVID-19 made it worse. Staffing shortages paired with increased ecommerce during the pandemic has contributed to more calls coming into call centers, and more calls abandoned.
Implement Business Texting to Exceed Customer Expectations
We’re all pretty tied to our phones. In fact, the average American spends a little above 5 hours daily on their mobile phones! To get even more specific, the top 10% of heavy phone users have an average of 5,427 touches on their mobile phones every day. And, 91% of Americans keep their mobile devices within arm’s reach at all times. Any time our phones light up, we’re quick to check out whatever the latest notification could be.
Within customer service, consumers are much more inclined to communicate through text on their phones with businesses than via email or phone calls. Specifically 85% of smartphone users prefer mobile messages to emails or calls. Why?
Recent studies show customers and leads respond to a text faster than anything else. On average per channel, you’ll see:
Overall, businesses are discovering the power of texting because it’s what customers are wanting!
Just think about it — texting is fast and personal. It lets customers send direct and specific questions to agents without interrupting their own day. And, it gives agents the freedom to respond to a customer’s question or problem while taking on several other texts, resolving more customer interactions, faster. The conversation is likely pretty casual, giving agents a chance to take a personalized approach with each customer.
Texting Erases Call Center Abandonment
It’s logical really. If you provide easy to use and accessible texting technology, your customers will likely choose texting over calling. In turn, you’re reducing the volume of calls even coming into your call center. When you provide customers a way to connect with you over text, you’re more likely to see your abandonment rate plummet.
We’ve seen it firsthand at Textel. Our friends and customers over at Vera Bradley switched to a two-way texting model to give their customers the option to text back and forth with agents using their existing business line. The result? Vera Bradley experienced a 0% abandonment rate while communicating over text.
Another pro of texting in your contact center is cutting down the overall inbound support volume. By a lot. Instead of calling or emailing in and hoping to get a reply – eventually – customers can text in and start an interaction with an Agentless SMS. You can pre-program automations to run when your customers text in, whether they’re sending a specific keyword or just general text or picture-based questions. Agentless SMS is getting greater adoption because:
It deflects incoming calls to text, which reduces your center’s average handle time (AHT) and calls on hold.
It doesn’t shift volume from one channel to another. Instead, it lets customers resolve their issues via text without requiring an agent.
So, then your phone support becomes cheaper and customer retention rises. Your agents can optimize their time while your call center helps more customers. Strengthen your two-way texting capabilities and see it benefit every aspect of your call center.
Abandon a Call-First Approach To Change the Game
Give your customers the freedom to decide how quickly and easily their interactions with your business will be. Give them what they want — the ability to text you. Customers are sick of waiting on hold. They’re tired of taking tons of time out of their day just to get a question answered. When you embrace the right channels and text-enable your call center, your call center team can reduce abandoned calls and retain customers.
This post was originally published on March 26, 2021 and was updated on February 2, 2022.
Customer experience is everything. It’s the ingredient that sets you apart. It sparks business growth and promotes customer loyalty and retention. A positive CX ultimately affects your bottom line. In fact, customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that aren’t. So, how do you support your customer experience in your call center? Add business texting.
Ok, maybe I’ve lost you. Let’s walk through how adding texting to your customer service will refresh your customer experience:
Every interaction between a business and its customer is a conversation. As a result, customers more and more prefer to reach companies through messaging. According to surveys conducted by Zendesk, messaging by text and live chat are the future for building a successful customer experience. Why? Well, shockingly enough, your customers don’t actually want to sit on hold with your agents. And, they definitely aren’t thrilled when they’re stuck waiting a day or two to get an email back. They’re looking for fast and responsive service.
Conversational messaging is more effective than email, showing significantly higher open and response rates. Customers today want a personal, 1:1 conversation when they reach out to a company. But, what if you already have chat integration? Why should you need to add texting as a channel in addition to chat when chat seems to offer your company and customers the same benefits?
While live chat offers fast, real time service, it has its limitations. Let’s break those down:
Common Challenges Call Centers Face with Live Chat
Live chat is bound by operational and physical restraints that ultimately can harm your customer experience. Here are some challenges call centers face with chat:
1. Live chat is inflexible for your internal operations.
Chat sets the expectation that the customer will receive a response in less than 30 seconds to be considered a success. So, it requires an agent to be ready and waiting to immediately answer a customer. When a customer fills out a chat request and is told no representatives are available, it leaves a bad taste in their mouth.
But, hold up — have you been in a call center? This kind of flexibility is not always possible when phones are ringing off the hook and your team is understaffed. Chat establishes expectations with customers that realistically cannot always be met, thus negatively affecting your customer experience.
2. Live chat is inflexible for your customers.
Just as live chat requires your agents to be sitting ready and waiting before a computer screen, it also requires customers to wait. Let’s say it’s one of those days — your team is swamped. Customers are getting stuck talking with a bot on your live chat.
Customers choose live chat because it’s supposed to be quick and easy. It’s not convenient then for customers to get stuck sitting in front of their computer waiting for an available agent. On a bad day, live chat removes any form of convenience or possible flexibility for customer service.
3. When a chat is closed, it’s gone.
Chats are incredibly temporary. Once a conversation ends, your conversation’s history disappears. That means a new agent can’t pick up the conversation at a later date as easily. You don’t have as clear a record of your customer interaction. And, your customer can’t go back to reference their previously asked questions. Basically, everyone’s left in the dark, making crafting a customer experience tricky.
4. You’re stuck without much customer context.
In order to build a solid customer experience, your agents need to know your customers. It’s vital that every customer interaction, no matter the channel, can funnel its data to the same place. But, live chat is not always tied to your CRM. This means that your call center agents don’t have the same easy access to customer history or relationship context that occurred over chat.
Chat just cannot support your customer or your call center’s needs on its own. Add business texting and see a huge impact on your customer experience.
How Business Texting Helps Support your Customer Experience
At this point, nearly every American consumer owns a smartphone. According to Pew Research, as many as 97% of Americans now own a cellphone of some kind. And, as of 2021, the share of Americans that own a smartphone is now 85%. What’s the effect of this on your customer service and experience?
Customers want to be able to use that phone that’s in their back pocket to reach you. Text messaging hits customers right where they live, offering flexibility and ease unlike any other channel.As many as 78% of consumers wish they could text a business. That’s 78% of consumers telling you one way you could give them a better customer experience.
But, what makes it a better solution than live chat? Easy – Texting. In fact, texting is replacing live chat for your competitor’s on-the-go customers who want to connect when (and how) it’s convenient for them. Think about it: texting offers flexibility and accessibility in all the ways live chat can’t.
With text messaging, customers can communicate directly and conversationally with your business. The conversation stays logged for you and for the customer, retaining helpful details about the customer relationship and history. And, it gives your customers a place to go back to to find helpful guides, links, and media to answer their questions.
The channel offers more grace to your agents and customers, allowing for more natural pauses between replies. Customers can leave their computer to cook dinner or run to the store and still keep up the conversation. Agents get a breather between interactions, allowing for better internal operations, less stress, and more collaboration.
Integrate texting into your omnichannel solution for a more flexible way to support your customer base. Reach your customers where they are to provide a stronger customer experience.
Contact center leaders often only have time to think about the present: Who’s going to answer that phone? How many seats do I need to fill for tomorrow’s shifts? What am I going to say to that one angry customer who just keeps sending us emails?
There’s almost never any time to think about how you’re going to invest in the future of your contact center. I get it. But, let’s play a little game. Take 30 seconds right now to think through all the hurdles you have to jump this week. Got ‘em? Good. Now, what if you were able to connect to customers more effectively and efficiently – without adding to the crazies of your day-to-day? How many of those problems would still exist? And, how much more time would you have to dedicate to the other, bigger issues?
Enter a text messaging software.
Text messaging software lets customers connect where they want, when they want. And, even better, it gives agents flexibility, more efficiency and more autonomy. Not to mention, it makes agents more effective in solving real customer problems.
It’s What Customers Want
Each year, the CMO Council collects customer feedback from +2,000 participants to release their Critical Channels of Choice report. The survey asks consumers to identify which channels they expect and prefer a company to support and use. Recently, when survey participants were asked what communication channels they expected companies to provide, the top five channels named were:
Email (86% of respondents)
Telephone (65%)
Website (53%)
Text (52%)
In person (48%)
That means over half of consumers want non-voice communication channels to contact businesses. In an earlier study by the CMO Council and SAP Hybris, survey participants were asked to identify the attributes of an exceptional customer experience. The top three choices were:
“Fast response times to my needs and issues” (52% of respondents)
“Knowledgeable staff ready to assist wherever and whenever I need it” (47%)
“Rewards for my loyalty and recognition of how long I have been a customer” (42%)
That means, customers want experiences that save them money (77% of respondents), save them time (49%), or make their lives easier (47%). Adding text messaging software responds to these desires. Business texting software reduces time on hold, improves communication processes, and is critical for keeping with the times.
Time to Upgrade your Contact Center
It’s time for your contact center to keep up with current technology. More consumers are using email, webchat, social media, and self-service channels to reach customer service departments than ever before. Why? Because it’s way more efficient and accessible. If you’re like me, your phone is pretty much always within arms reach and you’re likely checking it any time you feel a buzz.
According to a survey from February 2021, nearly half of the respondents said on average they spent five to six hours on their phone daily, not including work-related smartphone use. It’s time for contact centers to acknowledge how customers prefer to communicate through the channels they naturally use every day, primarily through non-voice communication channels.
Ultimately, there are three main goals in updating your contact center tech:
Efficient service and reduced cost. Shifting customer interactions to automated channels like text and chatbots make services more efficient and saves time. With fewer phone calls to handle, you need perhaps fewer agents on a shift a time, reducing costs for your contact center.
Happier customers and employees. See better retention from customers and agents, alike. Digital solutions let you improve customer experience, reduce time on hold, and increase self-service. Tools like text messaging software help make the agents’ jobs easier.
Driving your overall digital transformation. When your contact center is more up to date, this has a waterfall impact on all your business processes. Automation may start in your contact center, but soon, operations across the board get more efficient.
Three Reasons Your Contact Center Should Offer Texting
So, where should you be investing your new modern tech? You already know customers are more likely to choose channels that are accessible through their phones, and typically non-voice channels. According to a study by the Northridge Group, 44% of consumers consider SMS/Texting to be the easiest customer service channel. Here’s why:
1. Text Messaging Software Improves Customer Service
The greatest benefit to business texting is that it cuts way back on waiting time for customers. Customers expect fast service, and when calling, sometimes they need to wait until an agent becomes available. This results in time on hold and frustrated users. With texting, agents can manage multiple conversations, providing a faster response. No more abandoned calls if a customer has the option to text you for a quick question or request.
Texting software eliminates the barrier between mobile and web. Texting gives customers the convenience of contacting customer service from wherever they are. This mobility allows the agent to continue the conversation with the user on the go.
2. Text Messaging Software Reduces Costs
Texting is cost-effective. In a study conducted by Forrester, it’s estimated that the total cost per contact of a chat session is approximately $5, while a call can be between $6 and $25 for highly complex issues.
But, more automation further cuts costs. Automating texting services can streamline operations. For instance, you can screen users before sending them to a live agent or send customers automated reminders and order details so they don’t need to call in.
3. Text Messaging Applies to Different Customer Requests and Needs
Chances are that in your contact center, there is one type of use case that drives most of the communication. For instance, maybe customers often call in about account details, order statuses, or shipping reminders. This type of communication can be automated or solved quickly via text messaging software.
Letting the customer self-serve can reduce the time of a call. And then, if an issue is too complicated to solve over text, customers can click the phone number and call into the agent they’re texting with. .
Three Steps to Take to Transform Your Contact Center
Hopefully you’re a bit more convinced about the need for text messaging software in your contact center. It’s time to catch up with your competitors to match customer preferences. But, where can you start taking steps towards a modern contact center?
Understand your customers’ needs. Every transformation starts with understanding your customers’ needs and preferences. Talk with your customers, send out surveys, and get their opinions on what they want. Every customer base is unique, so this knowledge can help you understand how to improve the customer experience and which aspects of the communication process can be optimized to fit your particular group of customers.
Identify why your customers reach out to you. Once you know your customers, it’s important to identify and prioritize the customer issues and questions that most frequently arise. Define what’s the best way to handle communication for each use case. Oftentimes, much of your troubleshooting can be handled at first via text and escalated if it is more complicated.
Automate the contact center. Automation enables customers to self-service, streamlines operations, and improves process efficiency. Text messaging software allows users to quickly send documents, photos, and videos. Consider how texting can smooth over workflows, where it can be automated, and how you can build it into your customer experience.
Having a strong customer experience strategy impacts way more than just your customers. In fact, more often than not, it drives net new and growth revenue, higher employee engagement and satisfaction and, of course, brand loyalty. Take a look:
84% of companies that work to improve their customer experience report an increase in their revenue.
73% of consumers say a good experience is key in influencing their brand loyalties.
Companies that excel at customer experience have 1.5x more engaged employees than their less customer-focused competitors.
Clearly, your customer experience strategy matters. How do you shape the customer’s journey to reflect this? In
Call deflection with IVR is an important piece of the customer experience strategy, reducing wait times, repeat calls, and costs. But, imagine this: there’s a call queue with 15 customers waiting on hold. They’ve been punching numbers into your IVR to be directed to a customer service rep… only to be left waiting and enjoying your (I’m sure lovely) hold music.
Your IVR is supposed to be a tool that’s supporting your customers. But when call volumes are just too high for your agents to handle, it does little on its own to alleviate stress for your agents and reduce hold times for your customers.
However, when you include texting in your IVR strategy, you’ll be able to salvage your customer experience and lessen the load on your contact center’s call volume.
What is IVR
First — a little refresher. What is IVR? IVR, or Interactive Voice Response, is an automated system built into your phones. When customers call in, IVR requests information from your callers, either by voice or through their keypad. Then, it routes them to the necessary department or generates basic info for them — like their shipping status, bank account balance, hours of operation, etc.
Why use Texting to Deflect IVR Calls?
Traditional IVR systems have their shortcomings and can negatively affect your customer experience strategy:
It’s not personalized. IVR is an incredibly limited interaction between company and customer. That means, it’s a pretty impersonal experience. Think about it, if your first experience with a brand is a bot, how does that impact your lasting brand impression?
It offers no record of the interaction.Customers are calling to get information from you, but when that info is shared verbally from a bot, it can be hard to remember. I’ve certainly sat on calls with IVRs, waiting for them to go through all the number options a couple times because I can’t keep track of which one fits my needs. And, when I’m done with the call, it’s easy for me to lose track of everything the voice said. But, IVR offers no written record of the interaction for customers. Customers shouldn’t have to keep a pen and paper in front of them to recall their questions and info.
It’s slow and inflexible. IVR on its own is a pretty slow process. Customers have to sit through the IVR as it lists a whole menu of items and repeats its message over and over. They can’t multitask because they may miss something. And, truly, customers grow impatient. This kind of inflexibility discourages customers from calling for help, and ultimately drives them away.
But, when you add texting into your IVR, all three of these shortcomings are resolved. Here’s how:
How does Texting fit into your IVR system?
Add texting into your IVR script by prompting customers to request a text from you. If they do, they’ll immediately drop out of the call queue and open a conversation with an agent or a bot devoted to answering texts from customers. Then, they’ll start a direct conversation through their phone’s messaging. This makes for a much more personal conversation. Customers can ask questions, send media, add in emojis, in a two-way conversation.
Adding texting into your IVR also creates a record of communication for customers and for agents. It establishes a thread between your business and the customer. So, if your customer forgets anything you’ve shared, all they have to do is pop open the text thread to see the information. Best of all, when texting is part of your contact center solution, your agents can see the text history for better context on the customer relationship.
Texting is more flexible for everyone. Customers have a simple way to reach out to you from the phone in their back pocket. They can be cooking dinner, picking up their kids from soccer practice, or be in the middle of the work day and still can carry on a conversation with a customer service agent. Texting makes things easier on agents, too. An agent can handle multiple simultaneous text conversations and use things like auto-replies and canned responses to be more efficient.
Texting as Part of your Overall Customer Experience Strategy
How then does texting fit in your overall customer experience strategy? When you give your customers the option to text you, you’re giving them an easier, more efficient way to reach you. Customers today prefer fast service over anything else. Actually, 71% of consumers believe that a quick response from a service team can drastically improve their customer experience. Texting lets your customers receive that quick response and lets you serve more customers in a day.
With texting, customers don’t have to wait through an outdated IVR or wait a few hours to receive an email from you. They’re saving time out of their day by picking a flexible form of communication. And, your agents are maximizing their time by handling multiple customers at the same time.
Modern contact centers must support multiple channels of communication to make it easy for customers to engage with them. While everyone provides phone and email support, some contact centers are just beginning to explore other channels like live chat and texting.
Messaging More Important Than Ever
Phone and email have led customer contact strategies at contact centers for decades, but nowadays organizations must be available via live chat and text message. This ensures they provide an omnichannel experience to their target audience. Messaging can close the generational divide in your buyer personas by appealing to their preferred method of communication at the moment of interest.
Contact centers are quickly learning that voice-only support isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Massive increases in call volume due to things like COVID are making it difficult to provide a quality customer experience. With email rendered ineffective by a mountain of spam emails, messaging has shown itself to be a must-have communication solution for capturing and engaging a contact.
Not all messaging is created equal
While messaging is critical to a modern contact center, it’s important to understand that not all messaging is created equal. There are subtle but significant differences between live chat and texting which a contact center should consider as they pursue omnichannel.
Perhaps the most important consumer habit to consider is impatience. 81% of consumers find it frustrating to be tied to a phone or computer screen while waiting for customer service help. This is interesting considering that live chat requires being tied to one screen. When you’re online at your desktop that’s ok, but often this is not the case.
How is texting different? Think about it, when you’re at a computer live chat is easy. But on your smartphone, chat is a little clumsy. You’re required to stay on your mobile browser until the chat session is over and most of us don’t operate our phones that way. We bounce around between apps or send a message and set our phone down as we multi-task constantly.
Texting provides an easier mobile experience than live chat. You can send a text, navigate to other apps, or set your phone down and when a text comes back in you’re notified with a sound/vibrate and banner so you don’t miss it.
With consumer data now showing over half of all customers visit websites from their mobile devices, providing mobile-friendly messaging is more important than ever.
Comparing Live Online Chat vs. Texting (SMS)
While both live chat and texting provide excellent alternatives to email and phone calls, there are important differences to consider. Keep in mind that live chat was designed to solve problems in an online environment not necessarily a mobile environment. Let’s look at how live chat compares to business texting.
There is value in both texting and live chat as they relate to customer communication. A true omni-channel solution should have both. However, using live chat alone to fulfill your messaging strategy ignores consumer’s need for immediate accessibility. Texting delivers the same value as live chat but it also provides on-the-go access without being tied to one screen.
With a business texting platform from Textel, no customer messages will get lost in the shuffle at a contact center either. Best of all, Textel integrates seamlessly within NICE inContact and Genesys Cloud‘s chat windows to allow your agents an easy to use way of texting through the tools they use every day.
Contact centers are all learning one thing – when it comes to pandemics, flexibility is the name of the game. Remote work coupled with daily regulatory changes across state, county, and city boundaries are forcing IT decision makers to re-evaluate the systems they depend on to keep employees connected to each other and their customers. Texting should be at the top of their list. Here’s why:
Voice Calls are an Unacceptable Bottleneck
COVID-19 disrupted every facet of human life. Travel plans were scrapped, education was turned on its head, and virtually every service provider from healthcare to supply chains changed how they operated overnight. With disruption comes the need for help and contact centers were overwhelmed by a tidal wave of customer calls. In fact, as recently as July 15th contact call center call volumes jumped to over 800% of their normal levels!
If we consider that the industry standard for average handle time (AHT) is 6 minutes and 10 seconds (including wait, talking, and wrap time), an 800% increase in call volume will absolutely destroy AHT if a contact center isn’t adequately staffed.
Texting is 4x faster than a voice call which means agents can quickly handle more interactions in less time. Texting also distills down a sender’s main points due to the friction of writing out their thoughts. With voice calls, customers tend to add a lot of unnecessary filler into the conversation which drags the interaction out and may lead the agent to focus on the wrong thing.
Texting Increases Agent Capacity
Voice calls monopolize agents’ time. It’s because the interaction requires full engagement as both customer and agent listen and respond to each other. While acceptable pre-pandemic, the previously mentioned increase in call volumes due to COVID-19 means contact centers must either:
Frantically increase headcount (while sweating over onboarding requirements) or
Risk losing customers with long wait times, a massive callback list, and burnt out agents
Texting changes all that. Because texting doesn’t command an agent’s complete attention to hear every word, the agent can answer additional customer texts. Texting can be asynchronous, meaning, there’s a slight delay between when the customer reads the text and responds. This can be advantageous for an agent who wants to manage multiple text threads and can respond to Customer B while waiting for Customer A to reply.
Texting Gets Better Read and Response Rates
It’s said an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Some contact centers have taken this mantra to heart and are proactively reaching out to customers to notify them of changes due to COVID-19. Others are trying to get the word out as their businesses re-open with promotions to re-engage their customers. The problem is that budgets are tightening and businesses are facing major financial struggles due to the pandemic. Contact centers must invest in technology that has the highest chance of success.
Phone calls typically only create a meager 5% response rate.
Email is worse at just 3%.
Texting Solves Issues Faster
Texting removes barriers to communication which makes it easier for agents to resolve issues. Features such as MMS allow customers and agents to send and receive images, video, emojis, and documents can often say more than a 6-minute phone call.
Texting Can Create a Better Experience for Everyone
Texting creates a better customer experience in general simply due to the better responsiveness of agents who can handle more texts faster. It’s a better experience for contact center teams as well since they get happier customers and can resolve issues quickly.
Best of all, in many cases it doesn’t require a large effort to train agents on how to incorporate texting. Many major CCaaS vendors like NICE inContact and Genesys integrate seamlessly with texting platforms like Textel that allows agents to utilize the same tools they rely on for chat to manage texts.
Texting – An Essential Tool for 2020 and Beyond
The pandemic will end but pinpointing when is impossible. Contact centers that will survive and thrive are those that are able to take an unbiased look at how they’ve done things and adopt new technology, like texting, to change the way they do business for the better.
