It’s not just that consumers want the ability to text businesses. They expect to hear back. Thirty-two percent of consumers in a Zipwhip survey said that they’ve tried to text a business but haven’t gotten a response back. What would you think if a text you sent was never returned?
Instead of having their concerns addressed quickly and easily, those customers likely felt ignored and undervalued—far from a stellar customer experience. If your customers are trying to proactively text you, and they don’t see a response, they’re probably going to feel the same way and decide to take their business elsewhere.
You might think it’s fine as long as you’re answering customer calls and emails, but customers specifically want texting as an option: 60.8% of respondents to one survey would like the ability to text businesses about customer service or support issues. And text monitoring is a customer listening tool that helps grant that ability—it allows you to monitor incoming texts to your business phone number, so you can direct customer inquiries to support agents for a response.
Unknowingly ignoring your customers is not a good look. Instead, help them feel heard and valued by your business by monitoring the messages coming to your brand. Set up a text monitoring system so you can meet customer preferences, better meet your customers’ needs, and deliver a great experience no matter how they reach out.
Monitoring texts shows customers you care.
Text monitoring helps you sift through the messages you’re getting to take in feedback, respond to questions, and offer support—all through a channel that’s convenient for your customers.
Based on what we know about consumer behavior, call centers and service centers are likely already getting text messages from customers, even if you don’t advertise texting as one of your support channels. Consumers may follow up on a customer care interaction with another question or reach out with a support issue instead of picking up the phone. If they miss a call from your number, they might text back, letting you know a good time to call them back.
With every client we activate messaging for, we find texts consistency coming in without any proactive brand outreach. And they’re where-is-my-order questions, attempts to reconnect a call, frustrations after being on hold, and tons more. If you’re not set up to offer support through this channel, you could be missing this context, and you’ll be leaving customers without a response.
Text monitoring is the solution for filling that gap in your communication workflow, so you can create richer, more personalized customer conversations. It helps you:
- Quickly connect customers with the right person. When a customer texts your business, they shouldn’t receive an answer from just anyone. Use text monitoring to comb through the info in their message and direct them to the best agent to help them. Or, use a messaging solution that can tether a customer’s case to a specific agent to make sure they’re always addressed by someone who understands them.
- Gather context in advance for a more seamless experience. Customers strongly dislike repeating themselves to multiple reps. Text monitoring provides your agents with details in advance, right from the customer’s message, so they’re prepared when they respond or are transitioned to a voice experience.
- Create positive customer interactions built on convenience. Customers prefer options that are convenient for them—fair and simple! By monitoring your texts, you’re providing them that flexibility, leading to inherently more positive interactions—and over 90% of customers say they’re more likely to make a purchase after a positive customer service experience.
When done right, text monitoring goes beyond simply reviewing customer messages from one channel and supports a seamless customer journey across every channel. Monitor incoming texts, review message contents, and set up workflows between your team members behind the scenes to handle customer inquiries. Keep a record of text conversations so that they’re easy to refer back to in future interactions.
Monitor and respond to texts to delight your customers.
Proactively monitor all of your incoming texts and pass the conversation along to the right agent in the right channel to best support your customers. Here are three actions you can take to master text monitoring and use your customer communications to create a great service experience.
Implement a text monitoring platform to respond quickly.
Your business may be getting thousands of text messages a day, in which case, monitoring every text manually can be overwhelming for your team, if not impossible. You need an automated text monitoring platform to sift through all those messages and direct customer conversations to the proper channels.
A text monitoring platform is helpful for a few reasons. It frees up your staff to focus less on reading and reacting and more on responding helpfully. It also helps you read through messages faster and respond more quickly—most customers expect a response within 10 minutes when they reach out to a business.
Use a text monitoring solution like Mindful to deliver on that expectation. The tool monitors incoming SMS messages, allows two-way messaging, and can seamless transition the customer to a voice experience, passing all context and scheduling a call for whenever the customer decides is best. Customers will continue to stay in the loop by receiving an automated confirmation, notifications about their upcoming call, and follow-ups—all from the same phone number used to call them.
Respond with personalization.
Cookie-cutter, standardized responses often feel impersonal and can make customers feel like their inquiry doesn’t matter to your business. These types of interactions lack empathy, giving the impression that you’re glossing over the issue they’re experiencing. Personalize text responses and conversations so that your customers know that you’re speaking directly to them, you value them individually, and you’re addressing their specific questions or issues.
Use personalization in your text conversations with customers to:
- Deliver a tailored experience. “Know me no matter where I interact with you” was one of five key recurring themes that McKinsey uncovered from consumers in a 2017 survey. Customers expect you to recognize who they are and tailor responses to them across every channel, between multiple conversations and service reps. You must carry context between experiences! If you don’t have a platform for this, watch this demo.
- Maximize conversions. Over 80% of customers expect a personalized experience from brands, and they’re more likely to make a purchase when they have that kind of experience. Show customers that you value them by addressing them personally, and they’ll be more loyal to your brand.
- Simplify support. You can connect the info you gather from text monitoring with other customer-specific data from your database to deliver the most helpful support. Provide your agents with all the details from the customer’s initial text, as well as other data about their digital journey, so you can equip your agents for a thoughtful and efficient response.
Interact with customers on their preferred channels.
Zipwhip research found that giving customers “options when it comes to how [they] communicate” is the most important factor for customers when interacting with a business.
Be sure you’re giving them different options, starting with your texting platform.
Offering the option to text, along with calling or self serving, is a great start. But providing the option to continue conversation chains across different channels is even more powerful. While a customer may reach out to you initially through text, they may not want the conversation to remain there and instead look to continue it over voice (and even switch back again).
Pro tip: Use a seamless platform like Mindful to integrate those channel experiences together for the customer. Allow the customer to enter via text and schedule a call over SMS, too. And, when you initiate their scheduled call, now you’ll dial them with the same number they’ve been texting. It’s a completely seamless and fluid CX motion that will make a lasting impression.
Your business should offer options to customers to communicate live or asynchronously and smoothly transfer conversations to different channels. To do this successfully, you need to sync up on customer communications behind the scenes using a centralized communication platform—or integrate a solution like Mindful that offers open API connections to transfer conversational data. When every agent has access to previous conversation data, you can create a consistent, helpful experience for customers regardless of where follow-up interactions happen.
Summing up: Hold customer-centric conversations on every channel.
Mindful gives you the ability to seamlessly monitor texts from customers, so you catch important messages and set your agents up for success with contextual insights when they respond. With Mindful, customers can easily transition between text and talk channels to connect with your agents in whatever way best fits their needs.
Along with text monitoring, Mindful also offers automated text notifications, actionable analytics, and valuable integrations across your tech stack to create truly customer-centric conversations at every point in the journey.
Listening to customers is the entry point to a great customer experience, but it isn’t enough on its own. The key to delighting your customers lies in getting personal. Text monitoring might seem impersonal on the surface, but it serves a greater purpose. Deliver a great customer experience at scale by taking action on what you hear from customers, without sacrificing a meaningful human touch.
