Customers have come to expect text messaging with a brand, so a text channel is a must-have in order for your contact center to meet customer expectations. Customers prefer it as well—90% of customers would rather deal with texts than phone calls from your business.
SMS messaging is quick, easy-to-adopt, and widely used. Customer service messaging can help your contact center with text messaging to reduce wait times, help your agents resolve problems quicker, and get to know your customer better. If you’re doing a cost-benefit analysis of customer service texting, explore these hidden benefits to get a new perspective on what you could be missing out on by omitting SMS from your strategy.
1. Boost agent productivity and empathy.
Text messaging’s accessibility and wide use make it a go-to support channel for customers. But it can also increase your agents’ productivity and ability to better serve callers.
Let AI do the heavy lifting.
With AI, you can set up automated, pre-scripted text responses to common issues your customers might be facing. For instance, rather than having agents handle low priority calls for issues like shipping delays, office hours, or appointment rescheduling, AI-powered text automations can empower customers with self-service options— increasing digital deflections and lowering the overhead costs of agent staffing.
Free up the phone lines.
As customers increasingly rely on self-service options for low-lift questions and issues, call queues are shortened and agents have more time to address high-priority customer calls—which generally tend to take more effort to resolve. The result is a more efficient contact center. First Contact Resolution (FCR) and Average Handle Time (AHT) both improve as customers quickly receive the help they need the first time they call for support.
Related: Automated text messaging can assist both the customer and the contact center, elevating the overall experience.
2. Access customer feedback immediately.
There are multiple ways to collect customer feedback after they’ve interacted with your support team, but the quickest way is through text messaging. With an average open rate of 98% and with 82.8% of consumers replying within 10 minutes, text message response times blow email and phone requests out of the water.
Near-instant customer feedback is the key to improving customer service. Businesses can use feedback to better understand their customers, identify areas for product improvement, address customer concerns, and gauge customer satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Mindful Feedback is uniquely positioned to tie a customer’s feedback directly back to their specific experience with the business, communication channels, and the customer service agent they interacted with. And you can program a feedback text to trigger after any event you choose. For instance, you might want to set up a text automation that triggers for customers who bought a specific product or used a particular channel. This way, customer feedback can act as a North Star for your customer service program.
Related: Learn how you can use text surveys to understand your customer.
3. Provide customers with the ability to switch channels.
Text messages provide a minimal-effort support channel for customers, but the reality is text messaging can only go so far when a customer has a complex question or problem to solve. When this happens, a business’s text support system must seamlessly integrate with voice and web support to ensure customers can get the help they need as quickly as possible.
A best-in-class customer experience platform allows you to move customers between channels seamlessly, so they can start online, move to texting, try again to resolve online, and request a call right from text message. This ability to quickly switch between channels puts customers in control of their support journey—translating into quicker service and fewer annoyed customer calls.
Businesses can benefit from this multi-channel approach, as well. With Mindful Handoff, businesses can gather a customer’s context and intent as they navigate support channels and even while they’re waiting for a callback. Then, when a customer escalates their question or issue into the voice support channel, a customer service agent can quickly see their journey so they can better serve the customer.
Related: Learn more about how your business can use texting as a transition between support channels.
4. Resolve problems conveniently and efficiently.
Text message support is convenient for your customers, as they can get the help they need without having to be glued to their phone. Not only does this improve the customer experience, but this extra level of convenience for the customer also translates into efficiency in the contact center.
Automated text support can function as a routing filter for those customer questions that need to be escalated into voice support. As customers interact with pre-scripted text messages, AI can monitor their conversation and step in to provide a callback option when a customer hits a dead end in automated text support. With a text monitoring solution like Mindful, AI can also quickly route those customers to the departments and agents who are best prepared to help—solving the customers problem quickly and reducing the need for department transfers.
Customers no long have to choose between siloed text support or voice support. Mindful enables them to seamlessly transition between text and voice channels, all while maintaining context, receiving notifications, and ultimately connecting with the department best equipped to handle their question or issue.
Related: See how your business can deliver a great customer experience with Text Monitoring.
Summing up: The hidden benefits of texting allow you to optimize your resources.
You may already have a texting platform as part of your customer service experience, but knowing that there are other advantages to texting will help you get the most bang for your budget.
Don’t waste an opportunity to maximize the potential of your text service—with the combination of these benefits and all that Mindful has to offer for implementing a full-service text and notification platform to your business, you can gain an edge over the competition. And, if you’re looking for inspiration, here’s some Customer Service Text Messaging Examples that Will Help Increase CSAT Scores.
