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.
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 centers use technology such as business texting to optimize processes and improve communication with customers. However, business texting technology can also increase employee engagement and reduce attrition rates. A high turnover affects the quality of the customer service and ultimately leads to a decrease in ROI.
In this post, we’re going to walk you through the major reasons for contact center employee turnover and tell you about three benefits of using texting technology to keep your staff engaged and improve productivity.
Top Reasons for Contact Center Employee Turnover
The contact center industry is growing as more companies rely on them to communicate with their customers. Businesses use contact centers for sales, customer support, billing, and marketing.
Although the industry is growing, so do contact center attrition rates. According to a 2019 study from Daily Pay, attrition rates average between 17% and 45%, depending on the contact center’s industry and size.
What Causes High Attrition Rates in Contact Centers?
Contact centers can be a stressful place to work. Fortunately, the right strategy can reduce stress levels and turnover rates. There are, however, a few other reasons for attrition in contact centers:
1. Inadequate training
The fast pace of a contact center sometimes means that new recruits may need to start working before being completely trained. However, not training new employees to deal with the different use cases and complex customer situations may lead to frustration. A recruit who is frustrated usually performs poorly and will look for a better place to work.
How do you identify this problem? If you see a higher turnover in new employees, that can be a sign that it is due to poor training. You can solve this problem by providing engaging and comprehensive training for new employees.
2. Employee fatigue
Many contact center employees experience burnout. Lack of support, high expectations from managers, and a high-pressure environment contribute to this situation. Burnout is one of the top causes of employee turnover in contact centers. Multitasking and unpredictable work cause stress and a lack of motivation. According to the American Psychological Association, these factors can reduce productivity by 40%.
How do you identify this problem? Unlike lack of training, burnout affects employees who have been in the organization for a long time. Therefore, if you see a higher turnover rate in long-term employees, it may be due to burnout. You can solve this problem by providing support, allowing for flexible schedules, and promoting a positive work environment.
3. Lack of motivation and limited advancement opportunities
The longer you stay in an organization, the better development opportunities you may expect. Still, contact centers don’t typically offer formal career advancement paths. This can lead to demotivation, especially on top employees. A 2019 Achievers study found that 43% of employees planned to leave their jobs because of a lack of career development.
How do you identify this problem? When you are losing your top performers, chances are, they are looking for greener pastures. Your best employees are the most driven for career advancement, and if they don’t have good opportunities, they can leave. You can solve this problem by establishing a defined career path with a feedback process and clear expectations.
4. Outdated tools
Ineffective software can lead to employee stress, low productivity, and poor performance. For instance, manual dialing or relying exclusively on phone calls may be frustrating for staff and lead to poor conversions. Employees who are aggravated by unsuitable software may turn to other opportunities.
How do you identify this problem? When you see your turnover rates increasing, it’s worth investigating whether one reason is inadequate technology. The right software can make workers’ lives easier and increase productivity.
Advantages of Using Texting Technology in Contact Centers
Adding text messaging to your contact center toolbox can improve your customer service and streamline operations. It reduces on-hold time, provides faster service, and enhances the customer experience. Users prefer to deal with companies that offer text messaging as an alternative.
According to an eWeek study, customers prefer text chat to call when dealing with customer service. (Image Source)
However, there is an added benefit of using business texting: it reduces employee turnover. Here are three reasons.
1. Reduces burnout
Contact centers tend to be teeming with activity and noise when relying solely on phone communication. As mentioned above, multitasking and a high-stress environment can lead to burnout. Business texting provides a fast and cost-effective way for employees to reduce stress by reducing noise volume. Agents can text from the computer—or even on the go, using an intuitive user interface.
It takes care of customers’ issues faster: a quick message can often solve an issue more quickly than a lengthy and draining conversation.
It allows the agents to multitask without stress: agents can carry on multiple conversations at once.
2. Simplifies tasks
There are many ways a company can integrate text messaging into its processes. Texting can be used to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks. Autoresponder texts can take care of follow-up calls, on-hold messages, and auto-replies for frequently asked questions. Texting makes the agent’s work more manageable by reducing average handle time and helping to avoid miscommunication.
3. Increases efficiency
Texting helps your agents to handle more cases without reducing customer service. An agent can see the entire messaging history with a customer and request and receive documents and images within the text feed. Having everything on the same thread helps the agent to have context, respond efficiently, and avoid customer frustration.
Textel’s business texting software allows contact center staff to get messages from different channels (landlines and toll-free numbers, messenger, and SMS) all in one inbox.
How Textel Helps Contact Centers Improve Their Productivity
Texting is a preferred method of communication today for most customers. In fact, 98% of text messages get opened. Textel is a cloud business texting platform specifically designed for contact centers. The solution 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.
