The average person checks their phone160 times a day, and nearly half of people say they have to check in on their device before their feet hit the floor for the day. Text message marketing is the clearest route towards customer engagement.
It may surprise you that business texting has a 209% higher response rate than email, phone calls, and even Facebook messages. This is an unmatched level of customer engagement.
For years, marketers have relied on email to reach customers. Email offers a huge user base, a massive return on investment (ROI), incredible speed, stable costs, and the ability to own the relationship with customers. Why make a switch to text message marketing? Because, text messaging enables companies to deliver fast and convenient service. And, it results in an average of 25x more ROI than email campaigns. Crazy, right?
Text messaging allows for faster communication in real time between your business and your customers. This supports your customer service team in reaching customers quickly.
Text message marketing increases sales. People read 95% of all texts they receive, meaning SMS helps you reach a highly engaged audience interested in investing in your company.
That’s all good and dandy. But, how do you know whether text message marketing is right for your company and your customer base? To help you decide, we’ve outlined 6 signs that tell you it’s time to invest in text message marketing.
1. Your IVR is bloated and your abandon rate is sky high.
Research says the average call center picks up ~200 calls per day, ~1,000 per week, ~4,000 per month, and misses 48 calls per month. That’s nearly 50 customers lost each month. No one likes to get stuck in phone call purgatory with holding music on repeat. Most customers in that position just abandon their efforts or spend their time clicking through your IVR system to kill time.
Text messaging gives customers another option. If your IVR is filled to the brim with customers waiting in line to talk with an agent, allow customers to deflect to SMS. Then, your customer service team can help customers within a text thread to answer their questions, provide updates, or schedule appointments fast and flexibly.
2. You want to interact with customers on a human-to-human, 1:1 level.
Text message marketing is a personal form of communication. Think about it: text messages are more relaxed than a phone call and significantly less intrusive. For most people, texting is a form of communication they use with people they know. And, text message marketing is far less stuffy than blasted email campaigns.
For customer service and for marketing teams, text messaging lets you interact with your customers on a 1:1 level. For example, instead of calling your customer to remind them of an upcoming appointment, you can send a quick text message that they can read when it’s convenient for them. Or, send out your promos and coupons via text. This process can even be automated to save you time and money. Then, if a customer responds back, your texting team can be there to help.
Text messaging gives you a convenient way to still maintain a personal relationship with your customers.
3. You need to reach a ton of people, really fast.
Text messages have amazing engagement numbers — we’re talking 98% of customers opening messages within just 3 minutes. Text message marketing is an incredibly effective way to reach a lot of customers fast.
If you’re like me, promotional emails get archived or missed in your email account. Text messages are just hard to ignore. They immediately pop up on your phone screen. And, they sit in the same inbox next to a message from your mom and your best friend. How can you not open it?
Maybe you need to send a proactive blast message about a sale or a promo. Perhaps you want to send out a mass of appointment reminders to customers. Text messaging lets you and it lets you know that you’re actually reaching your customer base.
4. You need to know more about your customer satisfaction.
Your customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is one of the most important indicators of customer intentions and customer loyalty. Knowing your CSAT helps your entire business predict growth and revenue. Your marketing team needs to know where to lean in to best reach customers. And, your customer service team needs to know where there is dissatisfaction with their service level. But, how does text messaging help you track your CSAT score?
Text message marketing, as mentioned earlier, lets you reach a lot of your customers fast. If you’re unsure how your customers feel about your brand, texting customers may be the easiest and most reliable means of collecting that data. Use text message marketing to send out CSAT and Net Promoter Score surveys to customers who have opted into communications from you. Or have your contact center team send them after a customer service interaction.
5. You need a fast and flexible way to chat with customers.
Customers today want fast and reliable customer service that doesn’t interrupt their daily lives. Text messaging allows your customer service team to deliver that kind of service exactly. Texting is immediate, meaning your agents can have a real time conversation with a customer to help them solve an issue.
Over text, agents can answer questions and quickly send helpful self-service articles or how-guides in real time. With texting, customers and agents can send images and videos back and forth to reach issue resolution faster. Yes, the same can be done over a live chat. But, in addition, texting gives customers and agents flexibility.
Customers don’t have to be stuck in front of their computer to get their issue resolved. They can be out grocery shopping or be on a road trip and actively get customer service help. Text message marketing is easily accessible and incredibly fast, pros that no other channel can offer.
6. You need to grow your customer base.
Text message marketing lets you own the relationship with your subscribers. What does that mean? No data privacy issues and no third-party intervention. When you collect a phone number or email address from a customer and have received opt-in permission from customers, you own the information in those text threads. That means you can communicate with your opted-in subscribers at any time without interruption.
Unlike on some email and messaging apps, algorithms can’t get in the way of deciding when or how those customers will see your message to them. With text message marketing, you’re guaranteed to grow your specific customer base and communicate with them specifically.
Imagine if you could send a message to all of your customers at once…and they actually open and respond to it. How? It doesn’t matter how many email campaigns you send to your customers, it still feels like only a quarter of them see the message. What’s another option?
If you’re like me, the Promotions tab on your Gmail account is stuffed full with unread messages from business (nearly 8,000 for me — agh!). But, my text messages are all read almost as soon as I receive them. I’m not alone. SMS marketing texts have a 98% open rate compared to email marketing. And, as many as 60% of customers read those texts within 1-5 minutes after receiving them. That means that when you send texts to customers, all the hard work going into your messaging actually pays off.
Business texting and SMS marketing services guarantee better customer experience. Consumers today want convenience, flexibility, speed, and personal service. Texting answers all of these demands. As many as 75% of clients want to receive offers via SMS and 91% of consumers claim they’d opt-in for text messages from brands. That’s huge!
So, how do you harness all of that potential and expand the power of your SMS marketing services? Read through these 6 tips to boost your customer experience and satisfaction.
1. Send Exclusive Deals and Offers via Text
One of the best ways to incentivize customers to opt into your SMS marketing services is to use texting as a way to deliver exclusive deals and offers. Send out text blasts to send promotions and info on sales. Or, pair your welcome email to a new client with a welcome text. This makes for a nice surprise. Include an exclusive offer as incentive for signing up and send the discount code or link via SMS. Your customers will appreciate the deal and will be more inclined to make a purchase.
2. Let Customer Book or Alter Appointments via Text
I’ve got phone phobia. I hate making phone calls, which is surprising considering I used to work in a call center. But, if I can avoid making a call to customer service or to book a doctor’s appointment, I will. Offer the option for customers to book and alter appointments over text.
With this, you get rid of the hassle of tracking down customers to remind them of upcoming appointments by sending a quick text. You don’t have to deal with no-shows or scheduling phone calls and your customers will prefer the convenience.
Instead, let customers schedule, confirm, cancel, or change an appointment by responding. Use simple keywords for customers to reply “YES,” “CANCEL,” or as the image above shows “C” to confirm and to ensure appointments are remembered and accurate in your schedule. If you offer two-way texting (which you should), your customers can also make edits to their appointment with a few texts back and forth with a customer service agent.
3. Answer FAQs and Offer Service
Use your SMS marketing services to support existing customers. When you onboard a new customer or send out a mass text, give customers a way to reach out to you. Believe it or not, customers today don’t just want to receive texts from you, they want to be able to text you back. At least 78% of people wish they could have a text conversation with a business. Just as you would with booking and changing appointments with customers, extend SMS into your customer service and support.
Assign a texting team to support customers, answer FAQs via text, and be available for help. Help customers know they can reach you by deflecting calls to text through your IVR or live chat software. Your customers will appreciate the ease and flexibility of the service and your call center agents will love the lowered call volume.
It can be pretty scary to make a big purchase, place an order, and trust that the package will make it to your door. Especially with expensive items — a new mattress, a kitchen appliance, a TV — I’m much more anxious about online orders and shipping. You hear horror stories about items never making it, or getting stolen from off a porch. Relieve that stress and open communications with your customers with SMS marketing services.
With an order confirmation, give customers the option to receive confirmation by text and get shipping updates along the way. That way, customers stay in the loop. They can see if that TV shipping from New Jersey is on its way and can plan their life around the arrival of their purchase.
5. Build in a Personal Touch by Recognizing Special Occasions
Texting lets your business reach customers in a personal way. As I said before, customers are much more likely to see and open a message received by text. You can reach that phone that’s always in their back pocket to help them feel seen and remembered by you.
Just as you would with a welcome offer, send out texts to recognize special occasions. Give customers an exclusive deal on their birthday or on the anniversary of their sign up and let customers know about the gift with a text. Show your customers they matter by sending a little love by text.
6. Gather Feedback and Reviews
How can you really support your customers’ experience if you don’t know what they want? Customer feedback and reviews are vital to navigate your future business strategy. You have to see where you can improve and assess customer satisfaction to understand internal operations and goals. And you have to know what they like and don’t like in your product to set your product roadmap. Then you have to know their expectations and future demands to create relevant content. Every part of your business needs customer feedback for future profitability.
Ultimately, reviews not only have the power to influence consumer decisions but can strengthen a company’s credibility. Reviews have the power to gain customer trust, and they encourage people to interact with the company. In fact, according to recent surveys by BrightLocal, as many as 98% of consumers check the reviews of a business before engaging with it. And, 75% of consumers take into account the number of positive reviews before engaging with a business. How do you gather that feedback?
SMS marketing services provide an easy way to gather customer feedback and reviews. Send out a simple one-step survey to assess customer satisfaction. Or, after a customer completes a purchase, shoot out a text with a link to review. Maybe pair the completion of those surveys and reviews with a deal on a future purchase to gain participation. You’ll be more likely to hear from customers and will get valuable insight to improve your customer experience.
Considering the different channels available to customers, phone and email are…well, not so popular. In recent years, live chat has become the leading digital communication method for customers, with 42% of customers preferring live chat compared to just 23% preferring email. And, chat has the highest satisfaction levels for any customer service channel, at 73%, compared with 61% for email and 44% for phone.
But, what about texting? Being so similar, texting and chat can get mixed up. Is there really any difference? Do you really need texting if you already have chat functionality? Don’t they meet the same expectations for customers? Not quite.
To save you time, we’ve made up a comparison of the two to see how they are similar and how they differ. Then, your team can assess where to invest to meet your customer’s preferences.
Chat vs Text: Similarities and Differences
Chat vs Text: let’s cover some of the ways chat and text are similar:
Both channels offer asynchronous communication styles (sort of…I’ll touch on this more later):
With both chat and texting, your customers are able to take natural pauses in the conversation. They aren’t obligated to sit on hold for who knows how long, and then obligated to sit through a phone conversation. With chat and texting, customers have more flexibility to multitask — and so do your agents!
Both channels let agents manage multiple conversations at the same time:
Like I said, multitasking! With both channels, agents can talk with a handful of customers, making for a more productive contact center.
Both channels invite a more casual tone of conversation:
Unlike email, chat and texting cut through the traditional formalities of customer service interactions. Short snippy messages and fewer salutations and signatures make for an all around more relaxed conversation between brands and their customers.
Both channels allow for a quick and efficient interaction:
Think about it — both chat and texting offer customers a way to ask a brief question or get a quick update on an order status. No need to wait on the phone holding line or wait for a solid 24 hours while their email sits unread in someone’s inbox.
Both channels create a clear written record of the customer interaction for internal use:
Even more organized than an email thread, both chat and text provide your team with a clear record of how the customer interacted with your agents, what questions they asked, where communication struggled. All in text form!
Chat vs Text: how are chat and text distinctly different:
Chat and text aren’t really both asynchronous:
This one falls into both camps. Live chat and text both offer asynchronous communication when compared to a phone call… until the chat session times out. Chat, more so than texting, requires much more real-time participation.
Both the agent and the customer have to maintain the conversation in a given window of time and then the timer starts counting down. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve started a chat conversation and as I’m waiting for the agent to answer my question, the chat ends.
Text, on the other hand, is truly asynchronous. It lets the customer flexibly participate — initiating and re-initiating a conversation without losing their place. Sessions live indefinitely, always able to restart.
Chat is bound to a place, texting is much more mobile:
With texting, customers aren’t tied to a computer screen the way they are with chat. Instead, customers can respond straight from their mobile device wherever they are. Whether out grabbing groceries, hitting the gym, or sitting in the school pick up line, customers can send a question at any point, anywhere.
Chat is more formal, texting is much more personal:
I’m not sure about you, but I don’t text many (if any) people I haven’t met personally. Texting is a much more personal form of communication than live chat. Partially, this is because chat is typically done through a company’s website. With chat, there’s always this question in the back of my mind — am I talking to a real person or just a robot? But, when you text a brand directly, agents can add personal flavor to a conversation.
Chat requires customers to repeat themselves more, texting provides a clearer communication trail:
It happens — sometimes you think you’ve asked your last question to the customer service team…but then, oops, another one comes up. When a few hours go by and the conversation between agent and customer has dwindled, your customer may have another question for you.
With chat, the customer would have to re-open a chat, restate their information, repeat the same context as before and then get to ask their question. How annoying! With texting, your customers and the agents can easily stay in the same thread, letting customers and agents alike to see past conversation, gather context, and move onto the new problem with ease.
With all of these similarities and differences, how can you know when chat vs text fits your customer’s preferences?
This or That: How to Know if Chat vs Text Fits Your Needs
So, chat and text have some similarities and differences — so what? Which channel do your customers prefer?
Both channels benefit your contact center. Chat provides your customers a way to immediately reach you through your website. When they seek support, a chat box is ready and waiting for quick help. Because it’s embedded into your website, this lets agents direct customers to pages, help articles, and other resources directly on your site. Chat gives your team a manageable way to juggle multiple customer interactions simultaneously and keep good records about those customers.
Although text messaging isn’t embedded into your company website, texting lets your team easily send media — like images, links, how-to videos, pdfs — to customers. Customers can also easily snap a photo or take a screenshot of a product issue and send that over text. Agents can even add emojis to messages to boost engagement. The experience overall is comfortable and personalized.
When it comes to chat vs text — I think we know which one is more preferable. Allowing customers to carry their customer service help in their back pocket with them wherever they go ultimately offers customers a better customer experience.
In a study performed by Oracle on customer experience, 74% of executives reported that they see a direct link between the quality of their customer experience and the rates of loyal customers. We all know that customer loyalty should be the goal — considering loyal customers spend 67% more than new customers. How does business text messaging fit into that goal?
Let me paint you a picture:
You order a new piece of furniture for your home, wait two weeks for it to arrive, and as you start to assemble it, you realize… it’s missing three vital parts. Great. Now you have to deal with the headache of reaching out to customer service: waiting on hold for an hour, drafting up an email that (hopefully) receives a reply within 3-5 business days. Or, you can pick up your phone and shoot a text right to a customer service agent. Which would you choose?
Business text messaging offers a solution to customers (and not just those with phone anxiety like me). Ultimately, it provides a better customer experience, which lends way to more loyal customers for your business.
Let’s take a look at five specific ways business text messaging improves your customer experience:
1. Texting lets your customers send you product or service questions.
Have you ever gotten stuck in the maze of an FAQ page? Link after link to the next self-service article and you still can’t find the answer to your question. In those moments, you don’t want to have to pick up the phone and call customer service just to ask a simple question.
But, business text messaging gives customers a simple way to send a quick question and get a quick answer, improving their customer experience and saving them hassle.
2. Texting encourages personal and effective communication with your customers.
Let’s be honest. The formality of emailing can get tiresome. When you want a direct answer, it’s a pain to write up an email with all its bells and whistles. You obsess about how to avoid sounding passive aggressive in your request, then you’re paranoid that a misplaced comma will create the wrong impression. It feels less personal and takes more time.
Texting cuts through the formality with your customers. It lets your agents create a friendly upbeat tone as they help customers. And, you can have an active two-way conversation. Texting your customers empowers agents and customers to solve problems, ask questions, and get real-time reactions.
3. It lets you send quick, helpful reminders to assure your customers you care.
Proactive customer service leads to a better customer experience. It helps your contact center avoid pain points with customers and saves customers time and energy by anticipating their needs. How do you proactively show customers you care? Business text messaging lets you send helpful tips and reminders and check in on customers in a non-intrusive way.
86% of small business owners who use text messages to communicate with customers have seen higher levels of engagement. Texting your customers can support your goal to build customer loyalty.
4. Business text messaging makes gathering customer feedback easy.
72% of customers will share a positive experience with 6 or more people. On the other hand, if a customer is not happy, 13% of them will share their experience with 15 or more people. In general, customers won’t tell you they’re unhappy. In fact, only 1 in 26 unhappy customers will actually complain. The rest? They just leave.
Gathering customer feedback is an essential piece of crafting a strong customer experience. And text messaging makes it easy! How many surveys have you sent by email that go to a customer’s spam folder or quickly get deleted? The fact is, customers are 4x more likely to respond to a text than an email and will do so quickly. Use text messaging to gather feedback to quickly gather more responses from your customers.
5. Text messaging customers improves your agent efficiency.
Your contact center agents have a lot to juggle during a shift — maintain their KPIs, avoid abandoned calls, answer x amount of emails, keep customers happy …it’s overwhelming. Imagine how discouraging it is for agents to be on the phone with customers, and then to watch another call come in, go on hold, and maybe get abandoned. In these moments, both your customers and your agents lose.
But, with business text messaging, agents can get a conversation started with a customer quickly and answer questions while also answering phones and emails to other customers. When you can text customers immediately, customers avoid waiting on hold or for a call back. These few saved minutes can save you from a bad customer review.
When businesses think of delivering excellent customer service, accessibility needs to be at the top of that list. Accessibility can mean many things, but we’re looking at creating greater accessibility for individuals with disabilities in this blog.
In our on-demand economy, it’s never been easier for customers to jump from one company to the next. Almost half of all customers have done it due to poor customer service. When it comes to customers with disabilities, companies are losing about $6.9 billion a year simply because their websites aren’t accessible.
Texting is a quick and easy way to provide better accessibility. Texting creates convenient briges of communication that other forms of communication like voice and chat tools lack. Here are a few reasons why and how you should adopt texting:
Greater Accessibility Than Phone Calls
A phone call can be a non-starter for the deaf, hard of hearing, or those with speech disabilities. Teletypewriters (TTY) and Telecommunications Relay Services (TRS) can help bridge the communication gap by translating speech to text and vice versa, but they come with limitations.
For one, when a customer uses TTY mode on their mobile phone, it might prevent other phone functions from operating, which means a customer may not get an important call or message. Agents may think a TRS call is a telemarketer because they hear “Hello. This is the relay service…”, not realizing it’s a TRS provider relaying information for someone with a disability. Lastly, you’re pushing customers to call you, which drives up call volumes – something you are likely trying to reduce.
Texting creates better accessibility for the Deaf, hard of hearing, and those with speech disabilities, because:
There’s no other technology or services required on the customer’s end besides their phone.
The entire conversation is made through text.
Agents can answer multiple texts at once for shorter wait times.
Greater Accessbility Than Webchat
We’ve talked about the pros and cons of webchat vs. text elsewhere, but not for accessibility. Webchat can be a great resource, but it depends on whether your website is easy for those with disabilities to navigate. Webchat also doesn’t help the nearly 25% of disabled respondents who say they never go online. Part of the reason behind this is that those with disabilities are typically seniors who tend to be on the lower end of digital adoption.
The good news is texting creates greater customer engagement even among older populations. And although older customers aren’t sending anywhere near the volume of texts as younger customers, they are more likely to respond to texts if they do receive them.
Greater Accessibility for Everyone
Texting is the most popular form of communication today. By including texting in your omnichannel contact center strategy, you’re giving every customer a convenient way to communicate with your business. Fortunately, adding another channel for support doesn’t mean more work for your agents. In fact, it can reduce your overall inbound support volume. Here’s how:
Use Text IVRs
Text IVRs operate the same way as your usual IVR, except they’re done entirely through text messages. Best of all, customers can see their text history, which reduces repeat calls if they forget anything.
Use Textbots
Textbots act a lot like chatbots. You can set up textbots to do proactive outreach. For instance, Pearson Education implemented Textel’s textbot to reach out to interested students to qualify them before connecting them to an advisor. Their call attempts dropped by over 90%, but they saw their contact rate increase 225%!
Push Calls to Text
Although pushing calls to text doesn’t necessarily reduce your calls volumes, it can reduce your average hold times. That’s because agents can manage multiple text messages simultaneously. Plus, they can send and receive images, documents, and more to communicate faster.
When you receive an incoming call, give them the option to text instead. You can do this easily with your IVR. Follow these steps:
Give the option to text (e.g., “To text with us instead, press 2.”).
Have the IVR confirm the number your agent should text (e.g., “I see you’re calling from 8015551234. Press 1 if we should text that number. Press 2 to enter a different number.”)
Have the IVR end the call.
Send an automated text message that an agent will text them soon.
Pushing calls to text can decrease calls if you’re tackling common issues in your automated text. For example, the State of Michigan was getting overwhelmed with calls due to COVID. They found that many of the calls were asking questions they already tackled on their website. Using Textel, they chose to callers the option to receive a text that included a link to the FAQs on their website. In the first three weeks of implementing Textel, they deflected over 800,000 calls!
Greater Accessibility with Textel
There’s no magic communication channel that satisfies all your customer needs. Each plays a critical role in providing accessibility. Texting adds unparalleled convenience to your customer interactions and more efficiency for your agents. Textel’s texting platform for contact centers gives you everything you need to connect to users on the devices they’re already using and through the way they’re already communicating.
Textel will amaze you on how texting can change the way contact centers reach customers. In this quick guide, we’ll break down six ways Textel does this and how Five9 users can take full advantage of their platform with Textel implementation.
Integrated User Interface with Five9
Providing extended functionality to a contact center platform can be helpful. However, it can also have drawbacks. Some solutions require a new interface, require training, and change how an agent does their job. Textel made sure that this would not be the case. The Textel texting solution integrates within the native Five9 contact center interface. Users access all Textel functionality within the Five9 framework. This integration ensures there are no new screens to manage, no training required, and all functionality looks and feels like all the Five9 solutions.
MMS
The days of using interactive voice response (a.k.a. IVR) are long over. Now, consumers prefer a friendlier and more straightforward way to connect with their customers. Five9 offers a feature-rich communications platform, but Textel gives Five9 customers an edge by providing a more extensive customer experience. By making it possible to send multimedia such as documents, photos, screenshots, GIFs, and videos via MMS to and from your contact centers, customers can get the most out of their support. Just as well, it becomes much easier for your agents to diagnose problems with tangible evidence and clarity.
Today, the native Five9 solution is limited to supporting SMS only, neglecting the advantages of MMS technology. By utilizing MMS, Five9 customers get more from their platform without confusion when implementing another solution.
A Mass Texting Solution
Textel adds the capability for customers to text blast your entire customer base through Five9. Suppose you need to send out branded messaging and automate the opt-out options available to your customers and employees or other groups of people. In that case, Textel Blast can make the process of doing so much more intuitive and straightforward. Textel Blast allows you to schedule your blasts, change messages for different groups, and personalize the messages to individuals.
Showcasing the Names of Agents Involved
Your agents are the most crucial part of your customer support. However, in the current Five9 texting solution, companies are limited in how they address their customers. When you upgrade to Textel, your customers will know when a new agent joins the conversation. Transparency and clarity give your agents an advantage in working with their customers. Showcasing the agent’s name also creates a more personal and natural environment for conversation to take place.
Short Code Support
Textel provides multiple options for you to operate your texting needs. With support for shortcodes, long codes, and toll-free numbers, Textel provides flexibility in your marketing to make it fast and easy to reach your customers in the simplest of ways. You can even keep the phone numbers you currently have or start fresh. Textel offers the most flexibility for what you need to best market your business and communicate.
Call and Text From the Same Number
With Textel, you can offer your customers the convenient option of calling and texting from the same number. Separate numbers for phone and text make it more difficult for the end customers to locate the correct number when reaching out. With a single number for both channels, Textel simplifies the texting experience for all Five9 customers.
Worldwide Reach
Textel is adding texting access across the globe to sixty different countries by the end of the year. This international support is a big deal for businesses that operate online or on a global level. The world is smaller today than ever before, and your phone number doesn’t necessarily match your location. Textel gives you the freedom to reach whoever and whenever without barriers.
