Text Messaging for Customer Support – How to Improve It

In our previous write-up, we discussed what text messaging for customer support is and why a business should use it. Here our focus is to give you an idea about the three major areas you can make use of texting to improve the customer service experience.

SMS is Great to Resolve Problems Faster

When it comes to customer service, customers nowadays have set high expectations for themselves and want to directly chat or speak to customer care agents within a minute or less. While live chat and phone provide nice ways to serve your customers’ needs, they are not so effective due to relatively longer wait times. For instance, if we consider phone service, statistics show that there are only fourteen percent (14%) calls, made by customers to the businesses, which are answered right away, without being put on hold.

Texting, on the other hand, is quite an immediate way that allows the customers to get in touch with your company anytime they want. Your customer service representatives, when trained and equipped with the latest technology SMS cell broadcast solution, can get hold of customers faster while providing them an engaging, personalized experience. The need for waiting times on hold will be eliminated, making customers happier with your service. A large number of businesses are also automating response messages for questions and requests that are generic, such as welcome texts, business hours, delivery information, any cancellation or refund policy notifications, etc. The benefit of these automated messages is that your customer service representatives will now be able to solve customers’ problems that are relatively more complicated.

Text Messaging Can Help in Keeping Customers Happy and Engaged

The successful problem-solving in an important part of excellent customer service, but what makes a difference lies in keeping customers happy and engaged. You can keep your customers informed by communicating with them effectively through personalized text notifications.

Further, due to the fact that text messages are delivered fast with about no spamming at all, you can use them to deliver important information promptly to enhance the shopping experience of your customers. For example, if one of your customers needs a time-sensitive package to be sent, then instead of delivering an email notification - which may cause certain issues like go to spam folder and missed or could not be accessed due to internet problem, your customer care agents can serve him or her a real-time notification through a simple text message. Another way possible to keep customers informed is by sending them text alerts about bill payment reminders, bank account activity notifications, appointment reminders (medical field), and things like limited-time promos and voucher codes.

Texting for Customer Service Lets You Take an Instant, Unbiased Poll

If you are looking to improve your customer service performance and way of providing services, getting feedback and ratings from your customers is the key indicator of it. A vast majority of clients who have a bad experience with any business never complain which means they are not going to get back to you again and you don’t know the reason either – a big loss for your company. Sending feedback surveys is, therefore, vital for your existence and to know the true opinions of your customers because it offers them a neutral platform to do so.

By investing in an SMS broadcast machine and integrating it into your customer care platform, your business can take an instant, unbiased poll or customer feedback survey via text message. This will help you quickly identify the happy (satisfied) and unhappy (dissatisfied) customers with your service, thanks to high response rate (45%) of SMS especially when compared to the average email response rate of 6%.