A crucial part of growing your business requires good communication with your customers. Good communication also means establishing effective and efficient communication strategies to stay connected. Businesses can achieve this and more using business texting. Let’s explore seven ways to use texting for business growth.
Why Use Texting?
While email is useful, only one-third of emails get opened. It’s not as effective as many businesses might think. On the other hand, SMS is becoming one of the most popular communication channels for businesses, with over 3 billion users predicted by 2022.
Texts have a staggering 99% open rate, and they often get opened within three minutes of receipt. What is even more interesting is that people prefer to receive a text message from a company instead of a phone call.
Some benefits of using business texting include:
It gives customers a direct way to contact a company
A text messaging strategy can grow with your company. Using mass or group messaging, you can easily scale your text communications whenever your customer base grows.
7 Ways to Grow Your Business by Texting
Business texting is easy to implement and well received by customers. Here’s how it can increase your reach and your revenue.
1. Mobile lead generation
Phones have become an essential part of life: communication, entertainment, searching on the internet, purchasing products and services. Most internet traffic is now mobile. When potential clients search for local businesses, it’s ideal if they can text you right from your mobile website. Using a texting platform allows your customers to contact you with a single click.
2. Increase conversions with SMS chat
Attracting visitors to your website is one thing, but converting them into leads and customers is a different challenge. A texting platform ensures a direct connection with people interested in your products and services.
3. Book appointments and reminders
For service providers, it can be a hassle tracking and reminding customers about upcoming appointments. Make booking appointments easier and minimize the no-shows with business texting.
Customers who may be too busy to answer a phone call or an email immediately are likely to respond to a quick text. This makes using text messages to schedule, confirm, and cancel appointments much easier. For instance, sending a text as simple as “Please confirm your appointment on Thursday at 5” can be effective to ensure appointments are kept while minimizing scheduling gaps.
4. Direct promotions
Sending offers and promotions is a regular part of SMS marketing. However, it’s imperative to ensure that promotions get to the intended customers and encourage them to act on that promotion.
Business texting immediately positions your promotion in front of your clients. Moreover, with rich media texting, you can send images and videos to entice customers to click on the promotional link.
For instance, a retailer may send the following text message:
“Hi [Customer Name],
A feast of discounts at the Magnolia website! Purchase two pieces of jewelry and get the third for free! Claim this promotion at any Magnolia store until April 30th.”
5. Cross-department communication
Internal communication can sometimes be cumbersome, and it is not unusual for workers to have dozens of unopened emails. In fact, employees spend 16% of their workweek on email—that amounts to approximately 15.5 hours a week.
Texting can reduce the time spent on communications by providing a quick way to get answers, approvals, and signatures. By reclaiming that time, your business becomes more efficient, and staff can review the message thread instead of asking questions a second (or third) time.
6. Improve customer service
When you answer your customers’ queries and questions promptly or send them a text to let them know their order is ready, you’re giving them a good customer experience. Positive interactions, in turn, increases customer loyalty and satisfaction.
A helpful feature that improves the customer experience is self-service SMS. This feature helps customers to resolve many of their questions quickly without needing an agent.
7. Use it as part of your sales funnel
Quick messages can assist your customers during the purchase journey. Push notifications and abandoned cart reminders can help keep your customer in the funnel, guiding them through their purchase.
4 Steps for an Effective Texting Strategy
How can you ensure your business texting strategy is effective? Here are four steps:
1. Use a business texting platform
Implementing a business texting strategy won’t be very effective if you need to do it manually. A business texting platform can make your work much more manageable. With tools to automate and organize business texting, you can quickly scale your marketing up or down, and you can segment your clients with group texting.
Texting is a great way to communicate with customers, but only if you have their consent. That’s why your next step should be building your opt-in list—add a lead form to your website or ask your customers to opt-in for SMS at the moment of purchase.
3. Create great messages
Once you have your list, it’s time to craft some great messages. Write messages that are relevant to your audience and the stage they are in the sales funnel. Mix your messages to include product awareness, improve purchases, or offer tips and interesting information.
4. Measure and revise
A business texting platform has the added advantage of tracking and reporting. Modern solutions use artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to analyze your business texting activities. You’ll discover how your customers are interacting with you via text and how often they respond. You can adjust your strategy accordingly.
Grow Your Business with Textel
A reliable business texting platform can make your SMS strategy much more effective. Textel is a complete business texting solution that allows customers to text you to your existing phone number. The API and intuitive chatbots seamlessly integrate with your existing CRM and sales solutions to automate repetitive tasks for a seamless SMS strategy.
Learn how Textel can help grow your business by requesting a demo. If you have questions about our leading business texting platform, contact us.
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.
Let’s get down to the basics. If your customers are unsatisfied with your business, your business will fail. It really is that simple. Keeping customers happy is a priority to build a profitable and successful company. But how do you know if your customers are happy with your service and your product?
For a customer service team, customer satisfaction (or CSAT) is one of the most measured key performance indicators (KPIs). Every contact center manager knows — if you don’t measure customer satisfaction, you can’t identify unhappy customers. If you don’t know who is unhappy, you don’t know who will churn, and you can’t figure out why they’re unhappy. It’s in your hands then to understand where unhappiness exists and improve your service to improve your customer satisfaction.
One simple way to boost customer satisfaction? Connect with customers using business texting.
What is Customer Satisfaction and Why is it Important?
First and foremost, we need to understand exactly what customer satisfaction is to know how business texting can help it. Customer satisfaction is the measurement of how happy a business’ customers are with its products and services, and it can be a powerful indicator of where the company is headed.
The future of customer satisfaction lies in greater use of technology, automation, and personalization. With new technology added into the customer experience, though, customers have greater expectations (as seen below).
According to a Deloitte report, customer satisfaction took on an important role during the COVID-19 pandemic, when businesses felt the impact of the pandemic on their bottom line. Maintaining customer loyalty and trust was paramount for survival, so many companies began to focus more on their customer experience. This means, businesses are using customer satisfaction and experience as a means of competition.
It’s time to join in on the competition. How can you meet customer expectations? How can you keep customers happy while keeping your budget under control? Add business SMS to your omnichannel solution to help.
The Importance of SMS for Business
Customers want to know they can reach you in a myriad of ways. If they prefer talking with an agent directly on the phone, they want a phone number to call. If they want the flexibility and low stakes of sending an email, they want to know they can shoot you an email. And, if they want to text you, they should have a way to do so.
Texting is worth the investment. SMS is the most used communication channel, with 4.2 billion people using SMS globally. How does it fit into your business?
Customer Service and Support
Customer service is at the heart of many companies’ success and is the heart of customer satisfaction. Providing an excellent customer service experience makes your customers want to come back. Consumers expect customer support to be fast, effective, and simple. Texting offers a way to give quick responses and start a two-way conversation that can be escalated to voice, if necessary.
Texting integrates well with your other channels with customers to boost customer satisfaction. It helps you lower wait and hold times by deflecting from your IVR. You can offer a flexible form of communication that live chat can’t compete with. If customers want a more personalized access to your help, texting gives them casual and personal conversations that email can’t. Texting, when added to your other channels offered, gives customers more options to reach you how they want to.
Customer Engagement and Sales
A Harvard Business School study found that for a 5% increase in customer retention, you can increase profits by at least 25%. That means that keeping your customers engaged can have a direct impact on your profits. One way to engage your customers is through sending out promotions and discounts. Not only does this potentially increase your sales and revenue, but also gives your customers a reason to remain loyal to your brand.
Use SMS for direct and personal access to your customers and to connect and engage your audience. Keep customers in the loop about new products or upcoming events. Send out personal birthday messages with a coupon to remind customers you care.
Context-Based Marketing
A business texting platform helps segment your target audience. You can send messages according to context. For example, Uber sends a message to airline passengers as soon as they land, inviting them to call a car to pick them up from the airport. Use texting to reach your customers where they are to keep them satisfied with your service.
3 Ways to Use Messaging to Boost Customer Satisfaction
So, SMS can fit easily into your business strategy. But how exactly does it support customer satisfaction? Here are some creative examples of how business SMS can be used to keep customers happy:
1. Send out exclusive content—pre-launch
When you have a new release or launch, why not build anticipation in the group with the highest chance of conversion: your existing customers? Send SMS messages offering your customer base the option of ordering before the launch. Make them feel special! They’re part of the club. Sending a text gives you the chance to target this high-intent group directly.
Yes, yes, I know. Email exists. But with the reliable open rate of texts compared to email, you’re more likely to reach your customers if you shoot them a text. This can create loyalty and enhance conversions.
2. Use gamification
We’re all a bit tired of telemarketers and stock promotional emails. Customers are less likely to open content when it’s pushing a sale on them. But, with gamification, you can creatively engage customers in your latest deals.
Gamification means incorporating gaming elements into a non-gaming context to make the experience more enjoyable for the customer. For example, you can engage customers with a loyalty reward program that is also a game. Like McDonalds’ Monopoly game. Using texts to communicate, let customers accumulate points to cash them in for products or discounts for future purchases.
3. Follow up
How can you keep customers satisfied? Find out if they are first! Send out surveys and questionnaires via text and email that ask customers to rate your product or service. Then, use the responses to guide your CX strategy and grow your business.
Then, use those analytics, insights, and administrative tools built into your text messaging service so you can improve issue resolution. Or look through records of text interactions to help you understand how to address customer concerns better.
Pairing Your Business SMS Strategy With Good Management
A business SMS platform can help meet your customer expectations. But texting can’t fix your customer experience on its own. Pair your SMS strategy with strong management for real growth in your customer satisfaction. There are other factors to take into account:
Prioritize Good Training and Coaching
Customer satisfaction doesn’t come without training and coaching agents to use the technology well. Provide best practice guides and an internal knowledge base for agents so they have resources to grow. Meet regularly with your texting team and collect successful and some unsuccessful texting interactions with customers. Use these to model how agents can more effectively communicate with customers. Support your agents in their work and grow together.
Be Personal
Although automation can save you a lot of time and effort, messages should be as personal as possible. Business texting platforms can help you insert personal details (e.g., the customer’s name) so you can send personalized messages to mass groups. Stay aware of your customer history and use it to create a personalized experience to keep customers satisfied.
Keep in Touch
Customer satisfaction happens when customers feel seen and heard. Use scheduled messages to follow up with customers. Keep track of important dates — like the customer’s anniversary with your brand or their birthday — and send out personal messages to help customers feel known. When you meet your customer where they are, and build the experience around them, you’ll see customer satisfaction soar.
Want to learn more about how Textel can boost your customer satisfaction? Let’s connect.
This article published on March 23, 2021 and was revised on April 14, 2022.
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.
The impact of SMS online texting is often understated. However, texting is one of the most effective methods for reaching customers. 95% of text messages are opened and responded to within 3 minutes of being delivered. And, 98% of texts are opened, compared to only 20% with email. As seen in the graph below, consumers prefer to use their phones to message. It’s time for your business to meet those preferences.
Using SMS online for business has huge potential for contact centers. But, too often, people think SMS is only meant for the marketing team. Spoiler alert: it’s not. Sure, you’ve probably gotten those marketing texts before from business — “Text YES to get in on this amazing offer!” But, beyond boosting your sales, texting your customers can also be used to support existing customers. Overall, texting can improve operations and relieve stress and burnout among your customer service staff.
Typically, people associate business texting with direct or mass communications between a business and its customers. These blast texts can be a way for companies to send out highly targeted, permission-based, opt-in text messages to connect with and engage with customers. You can use these for marketing, service, or sales operations.
Ultimately, texting customers can come in several forms:
Sending promotions: Share product updates, releases, and sales with your customers. Texting is a quick way to catch your customers’ attention about what’s new for your brand.
Sending support texts: SMS online is an easy and flexible way to start conversations with your customers. They give customers a way to ask questions and follow up on an order or appointment. Besides helping solve issues faster, the user gets a better experience.
Gathering reviews, surveys, and polls: A text message is a direct line to the customer. You can use them to request feedback and reviews or prompt the customer to answer a quick poll or survey.
Supporting your sales: Let customers check on item availability. Or complete a sale with customers via text.
Why Use SMS Online Services for Your Business?
SMS online provides quick, cost-effective, and easy-to-analyze communications with your customers. By using texting, you’re saving time for your agents and your customers by giving them a way to have a flexible, to the point conversation.
In general, SMS online text messaging can help to:
A study published by Harvard Business Review showed that the average American spends an average of thirteen hours a year on hold trying to solve problems. And, according to HubSpot, 33% of customers are most frustrated by having to wait on hold, and 33% are most frustrated by having to repeat themselves to multiple support reps.
How can texting fix this? Text messaging values your customers’ time and leaves it up to them when to respond to communication. No more waiting on hold, humming along to some bad elevator music. Instead, customers have the flexibility to respond when it’s convenient in an asynchronous conversation.
Customers prefer the freedom of a text. And it’s less invasive than receiving a phone call from a sales rep or a customer service agent. Plus, agents can manage multiple conversations at once. This reduces stress since agents don’t have a long call queue hanging over their head. Many companies in the last year are realizing that SMS services can improve communication with customers and help all of their internal processes.
Key Features of Text Messaging That Empower Business Processes
A text messaging platform allows for more efficient and effective communications with customers. Invest in some key features to improve your operations across the board.
Instead of your staff writing and sending texts all day, a platform can automate some of the essential steps like:
Creating and maintaining the list of recipients
Scheduling messages
Interacting with your customers using canned responses
With text messaging, businesses can analyze their interaction with customers and improve their communications beyond the initial sales. Some ways text messaging can improve your business processes are:
1. Send out mass texts.
Although it has a bad rap, mass texting doesn’t mean sending unwanted messages. Always always allow for customers to opt into and out of texts with you. But, mass texts, or blasts, can improve marketing communications and start conversations with customers. Use mass texts to:
Create brand awareness: Let customers know more about your business. Include messages about a new website, a re-opening, or a new product release.
Increase interest: Most sales messages go in this category—offers, promotions, season sales. However, you can also craft messages to provide tips and advice, reaching out to targeted customers (e.g., follow-up care instructions after medical treatment, menu recommendations, healthy eating advice, and more).
Request feedback: Surveys and polls allow you to gather valuable information to refine your business strategy.
2. Build customer relationships.
Communicating one-on-one with customers is a way to build a relationship and gain trust. Texting is uniquely personal and allows for a much more conversational tone than email or even live chat enables. Customer service agents also can easily send texts with multiple forms of media, allowing for a flexible way to send helpful tutorials or troubleshooting videos and photo guides. One-on-one business texting ensures a company can maintain a human connection while keeping costs under control.
3. Send automated responses.
Use text bots to have conversations with the user and solve basic problems. Like bots integrated in live chat, bots in texts can answer simple questions, send customers self-service tools, and direct customers to the help they need. Use automated responses to send appointment reminders, product recommendations, product updates, and customer support tools.
4. Integrate with your existing platform for greater efficiency.
Integrate SMS texting into your current customer service platform and CRM system to improve the efficiency. You can automate workflows and get rid of manual and repetitive tasks. Keep communication and client data under a central interface. This makes operations more efficient and customer experiences more personalized. And, lower stress for your agents by keeping everything they need to succeed in one space.
Why It’s Time for Your Business to Add SMS Online
As consumer opt-in rates have increased, so have businesses signing up for text messaging services. In fact, 42% of business owners and marketers say they’ve texted their customers using a text messaging service in the last year. And, 57% say they plan to increase their text marketing budget in 2021. Will you join the trend?
Implement SMS online texting services for your business. It will not only improve your marketing, but also helps operations across the board. Improve your key business processes with Textel’s innovative texting tools. Then, you can connect with customers where they are, using the phone that’s in their back pocket.
This post was originally published on February 23, 2021 and was updated on March 9, 2022.
