CSAT scores are great measures of how delighted a customer is after a single experience with your company. Measuring customer satisfaction is a must for most industries.

The first place our customers use text messaging is in sending satisfaction surveys. When they’re measuring customer-service interactions or conversations, our customers tend to send out surveys by text immediately after the interaction. With products like furniture, they may wait several weeks to give the customer time to enjoy the new additions before sending a satisfaction survey.

The surveys often consist of only one question or just a few carefully chosen questions. If our customer needs responses to a longer survey, they can link the text message to an online survey form. And with text, the response rate goes up almost immediately.

The greatest benefit to sending any survey by text is that your customers will read it and respond. We know that globally we send 5 billion texts a day, and we open 98 percent of them. Conversely, we only open emails 22 percent of the time, according to Gigaom. Research from Asurion shows that we look at our phones 96 times a day or once every 10 minutes.

If you want to know what your customers are thinking, ask them via texts. You can use text-only SMS messages or multi-media MMS messages. Visit our recent blog to determine which is best for your use.

In addition to sending surveys via text messaging, you can improve your customer experience with text messaging. Here’s an insider secret from one of our customers – consider using the SMS-Magic Mobile App.

One of our customers is a property management company, and needed a way for tenants to reach property managers during an emergency. The PMs weren’t always at their desks waiting for the calls to come in, and tenants were frustrated by what they perceived was a lack of concern.

Nothing could have been farther from the truth. Often during working hours, the property managers were out visiting properties. After hours, they weren’t in the office, but relied on a dedicated phone line to handle emergencies. The only problem was that tenants texted the company instead of calling, and no one responded to them. The system wasn’t set up to respond to texts.

So, the company deployed the SMS-Magic Mobile App. A tenant could text the company about emergencies, and the PM on call could field the text on a personal mobile phone. The text would even be recorded in the company’s CRM as if it had come through the desktop computer in the office. You can imagine how much happier the tenants are – their emergencies are getting prompt attention. And how much happier staff members are because they can handle emergencies away from their desks.

Another of our customers is a disrupter in the world of travel accommodations. The company works with condominium and apartment developers to identify properties that are empty during the construction phase in major U.S. cities. They design high-end interiors, stage the empty condos and apartments with furniture and accessories, and rent them to travelers looking for luxury accommodations in highly desirable neighborhoods, mostly in downtown areas.

SMS-Magic helps the company’s customer service reps easily reach out to the right people to resolve issues. For example, if a guest is arriving late and has a question about checking in — they can call, email, or text customer support. The inquiry is logged in the support center and any customer service rep who checks that guest record later can see the complete interaction. It makes solving guest issues easier, especially when handing off open cases during shift changes.

Connecting a guest and a customer service rep via text is an important functionality needed to resolve issues. Text is also likely to be a guest’s preferred method of interaction since messaging is the fastest growing conversational medium on the planet.

We can help you set up automated responses to incoming texts. With an automated system in place, your customers will have an immediate response that often can provide the information they need. You have the option to switch to live responses when you need to.

We’ve also thought about the customers who use more than the native SMS capability in their phones. You can receive, track and respond to multichannel queries such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, text and MMS.

Security is always top of mind for us. With all our products, we ensure data privacy and regulatory compliance while you’re using text messaging to manage your customers’ issues.

It’s a competitive world and if you’re able to respond to your customers faster than your competition, you have earned an amazing competitive advantage. Your customers may not expect much from customer service, but you can earn new customers, while keeping your existing customers, by delighting them every time they contact you. Quick responses to their emergencies or inquiries can help you develop the positive customer relationships that drive your business.

We’d like to help you wow your customers with outstanding customer service. Contact us for more information about the SMS-Magic family of products. We have a solution that’s right for you!

Many different organizations – companies, healthcare systems, financial institutions, higher ed, just to name a few – need to communicate with the people they serve. But the people they serve aren’t responding to phone calls, voice mail or emails. It’s so quiet out there, you can hear the crickets.

What results is a company spending hours of staff time trying to send reminders for appointments or deadlines, frustrated customers having to repeat their stories to rep after rep  or everyone playing phone tag for days. Older ways of communicating can be difficult and ineffective.

It’s nobody’s fault, but it is an indication of the world we’re navigating right now. We (as consumers) are changing what we respond to. Here are a few statistics to put it in perspective:

• In 2018, 73 percent of online traffic came from mobile rather than desktops, according to Parse.ly. The percentage has grown since then.
• We only open emails 22 percent of the time, according to Gigaom.
• Globally, we send more than 5 billion texts a day, and we open 98 percent of them.
•  Asurion’s research shows that Americans look at our phones 96 times a day or once every 10 minutes.·      In a recent survey cited by Nathan Eddy in eWeek, “Over half of respondents (52 percent) said they would be likely to text with a customer support agent. Similarly, 52 percent would prefer texting customer support more than their current preferred method of communication.”

In short, as customers we like texting, and we respond to text messages quickly. As companies trying to serve customers, messaging allows us to interact in personal, memorable ways. Mobile phones give us ideal access to our best customers, and messaging gives us access to those phones. By using messaging, you can reach your customers wherever they are. With thoughtful planning, you can provide interactions that are both helpful and just in time.

Messaging is applicable to almost all industries because every business needs to interact with its customers. Positive interactions are critical to engaging customers, understanding their needs, and keeping them loyal to your brand. Engaged customers lead to higher sales, more applicants, more qualified buyers, stronger leads, and better attendance, just to name a few benefits.

How Can You Get Started?

If your customer engagement is currently based on emails, phone calls, or direct mail, we suggest you try messaging as a new channel. We offer automated text messaging, so your customers get the attention they need, but not at the expense of your customer service team. Our conversational messaging is just that – conversational. Your customers can respond to your messages if they have questions or want to give you more information.

Our system, working with your CRM, can keep track of all your customer interactions in one place. It can also keep track of messages sent from a variety of platforms like Messenger, WhatsApp, SnapChat and native phone texts, so you don’t sacrifice anything to help your best customers when they have problems.

SMS-Magic offers a free trial so that you can get a feel for our product. If you’re as pleased as we think you will be, you can choose the level of service that’s best for your company.

Contact us to set up a demo or to start your free trial. Let us show you how you can engage your customers in a new way!

She immediately contacted the manufacturer. Here’s what happened:

1. The company asked for proof of purchase.
2. She found her Amazon receipt and sent it.
3. They asked what was wrong with the machine.
4. She explained the display was flashing.
5. They agreed the machine was dead and sent her instructions for submitting a claim.
6. She cut the cord on the machine, took a picture of the machine sans cord, and sent it in.
7. The company replied that her replacement machine would be shipped that day, and she could expect it to arrive in two or three days.
8. Her new machine arrived, and her caffeine addiction was saved

Our colleague was amazed. She expected the interaction to be time consuming and unpleasant. Instead, it took only minutes to report a warranty issue and have a new machine on its way to her. She didn’t have to argue or justify or complain or talk to multiple customer service reps.

For all she knew, she was dealing with a chat bot and that was fine. She didn’t necessarily need human interaction to solve the problem. All she needed was instructions for getting a new coffee maker ASAP.

Kudos to the manufacturer for making their warranty service process so customer friendly. They couldn’t have done it without a technology commitment.

Bring Quick, Easy Problem Resolution to Your Customer Service Team

You, too, can bring results like this to your customer service department by using automated text messaging. It’s a win-win for you and your customers.

Customers say they’d like to communicate with customer service using text and prefer texting to other methods of contact. Using text messaging, your customer service team can automate routine interactions, saving human interactions for more complicated issues. Your team won’t have to send repetitive responses to your customers, both saving time and making their jobs more interesting.

It will take some thought to set up your automated text sequences, but once it’s designed and tested, you’ll save your team hours on the phone or email.

Let SMS-Magic Help You

We think SMS-Magic can help you reach your customers with less time and effort than you’re spending on emails and phone calls. We offer automated text messaging, so your customers get the attention they need, but not at the expense of your customer service team.

Our system, working with your CRM, can keep track of all your customer interactions in one place. It can also keep track of messages sent from a variety of platforms like Messenger, WhatsApp, SnapChat and native phone texts, so you don’t sacrifice anything to help your best customers when they have problems.

We’d love to help you handle repetitive customer service requests, just contact us to set up a demo or to start your free trial. Let us show you how SMS-Magic can help you easily respond to routine requests while freeing up your reps to handle more complicated issues.

According to a recent study, 81% of consumers get frustrated being tied to a phone call or desktop chat to wait for customer service help. With text messaging you’re able to help them no matter where they are. The convenience and speed of messaging creates a positive and memorable support experience.  

If you’re not already using text messaging, now is the time to get started. Research shows U.S. consumers prefer companies that offer messaging as a communication channel. Almost two-thirds (63 percent) of respondents would switch to a company that offered text messaging as a communication channel. Besides being the preferred method of communication, there are several other benefits of using text messaging for your contact center. 

Benefits of Using Text Messaging for Contact Centers

1. Immediately start a relevant conversation.

With text messaging you can immediately assure customers you have received their request and are working to help them. You can set up automatic case creation and response messages so that you never miss a message. This way your customers are never wondering what the status of their claim is and will be happy to know you’re working on it right away. You can then pivot to 1:1 conversations with agents. Agents are able to enter any automated message thread to immediately answer questions with interactive conversational messaging. 

2. Reduce average handle time.

Over 75% of customers expect customer service to be faster. People are tired of sitting on long hold times and expect quick responses to their questions. Text messaging allows you to have those fast responses, ensuring a positive conversation and quick resolution. 

3. Increase volume of cases handled by 10:1.

Messaging enables your agents to handle multiple customer requests simultaneously. Today, your contact center might be having to work with less resources, so the ability to still handle a high volume of cases is important. You don’t want to lose business because customers are upset that they are unable to get help. Serving multiple customers concurrently increases efficiency and responsiveness to customer issues. And with the ability to see the entire messaging history with a customer, your agents will always have the necessary context. 

4. Ensure customers never have to repeat themselves.

One sure way to lose a customer is to repeatedly ask them redundant questions where they have to ask the same question over and over. It’s a waste of their time and they’ll be sure to take their business elsewhere. With text messaging you can save the entire conversation history so agents can quickly know exactly what the problem is and jump right into solving the problem without asking the customer the same questions that have already been asked. Customers will appreciate the personal conversation and timely resolution. 

5. Manage messages from multiple channels.

Omnichannel messaging capabilities allow agents to receive messages from all channels, such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and SMS, all in one inbox. Conversations never get lost and you meet the customer on the platform that they prefer, ultimately increasing satisfaction and gaining loyal customers. 

The Bottom Line

Customers prefer short, interactive, and mobile-friendly communications. Text messaging does just that. It’s quick, intuitive, and is their preferred channel for customer-to-business communication. Messaging also makes sense for your business, as it boosts your agents’ productivity and reduces their workload through self-service and lower call volumes.
If you haven’t yet adopted business text messaging for your team and want to learn more, schedule a demo and we’d be happy to share our expertise with you, answer questions and show you what text messaging can do for your contact center.

First, let’s talk about what is Omnichannel vs multichannel. These two similar terms have different meanings.

• Multichannel refers to a business reaching out to their audience on several channels. Each channel sends the same content or message, with the goal of attracting as many responses as possible.
• Omnichannel refers to a business seamlessly communicating with buyers across multiple channels. These channels are able to interact with each other.  Your reps are able to have continuing conversations with Individual prospects and customers, no matter what channel they are using.

They simple difference? With Omnichannel you get seamless conversations blended together across channels.

These are just a few results that show why you want to adopt Omnichannel.

• Marketing: A recent study shows that marketing campaigns using three or more channels resulted in an 18.96% engagement rate.  Compare that to single channel campaigns that only get 5.4% engagement.
• Sales: When interacting with three or more channels, customers bought 250% more frequently than customers who communicated with only one channel. Even better, Omnichannel customers were 90% more likely to come back for another purchase.
• Service/Retention: Customer retention for Omnichannel support teams reached 66.12%, compared to 34.8% for a single-channel

What is Omnichannel in Messaging?

Omnichannel in Marketing

Omnichannel is most often thought of in relation to marketing. An Omnichannel marketing strategy means that every channel is integrated. Each channel responds to and updates customer data. Which means that each rep or user on different channels can use that data to be sure they are sharing relevant information, based on the conversation history of each individual.

In Omnichannel messaging, that means delivering seamless, continuing conversations,across all messaging platforms. For example:

• A prospect receives an SMS message with an offer and responds.
• The same prospect sends a new inquiry via Facebook, or WhatsApp.
• Omnichannel messaging lets your business users see both interactions as a continuing conversation. S they can respond with relevant questions or information, using the appropriate messaging channel.
• All of the above is done in a way that’s seamless for both your audience and your internal marketing users or sales and service reps.

Omnichannel for Sales

Increasingly, buyers are toggling between online sites and offline brick and mortars to research and buy products and services. In a recent study, Deloitte found that digital experiences influence 56 cents of every dollar spent in physical stores.

Omnichannel for sales eliminated the traditional barriers between channels, weaving all communications together and sharing data between them. This empowers  customers to conduct business with sales reps and companies however they want, and whenever they want. Reps can see every interaction, from marketing to prior sales conversations to service conversations.

Omnichannel messaging in sales empowers reps to see all messaging conversations across the entire buying journey, across all messaging platforms. For example:

• A prospect starts an interaction with a company via their Facebook page.
• The rep can immediately check for any other conversations across marketing sales and service. Reps quickly increase their knowledge of the prospect’s history, so they engage them with relevant questions or responses.
• If the prospect then decides to send an SMS to sales and that same rep is unavailable, another rep can respond to their request. The new rep can see the entire messaging history, so the prospect doesn’t have to repeat themselves to continue their buying conversation.

By implementing an Omnichannel messaging strategy for sales, your reps handle more buyers (6:1 over phone calls), and research shows you’ll close 40% more sales with messaging as part of the sales cycle.

Omnichannel for Service

Omnichannel for service allows your customers to reach out to you on any platform, blending all of the conversations around one case so reps can respond with relevant resolution options. True Omnichannel eliminates the need for customers to wait on hold and repeat themselves to multiple reps.

Omnichannel messaging in service empowers agents to send and receive case messages from multiple messaging platforms, such as SMS, WhatsApp and Facebook. For example:

• A customer can start a case through the business’s Facebook page or Whatsapp account.
• The customers can then ask questions via SMS when they’re on the go.
• At any time, they can move back to Facebook or WhatsApp.
• Reps see and respond to a single, continuous conversation.

This speeds time-to-resolution and increases rep productivity, since they can handle 10x more cases with messaging than with phone calls.

The Bottom Line

The question everyone should be asking probably isn’t simply “What is Omnichannel?” The true question is “What is Omnichannel messaging and how can I quickly use it?”

Omnichannel doesn’t have to be complicated. When you have the right messaging platform, all of your messages are seamlessly integrated into a single CRM record. Then, permitted users and reps  have the visibility they need, across the entire buying journey.

Going to Dreamforce ‘19? Be sure to stop by booth #210 to see Converse Omnichannel messaging in action. We’ll be demonstrating the use of Omnichannel messaging in service, blending SMS, MMS, Facebook and Whatsapp into seamless, full-visibility, customer service conversationsss.

SMS messaging is also how your audience wants to communicate. 79% of consumers aged 18 – 34 prefer to contact companies using channels other than phone, and 55% of all consumers say they prefer to use messaging.

SMS messaging is the future of contact center success. So what are your options to get started?

4 Tips to Buy the Best SMS for your Contact Center

There are so many options for SMS text messaging in contact centers. Here are a few key things to think about when you’re reviewing SMS applications for your organization.

1. Respond immediately, keep customers up-to-date

Automated text messaging makes it simple to dramatically increase the responsiveness of your contact center. Be sure you can do the following with automated messaging:

• Create a case from an inbound text, then reply to your customer to confirm the case.
• Ask questions about the case so you begin the problem identification process even before a rep gets involved.
• Update customers at every step of the way so they are always informed as to status.

No more frustration with missed calls, slow responses or waiting on hold. Your customers will love it!

2. Maximize rep productivity

When your reps are more productive, you can respond to a higher volume of customer cases without adding resources. For example, reps using Converse handle 10X more cases than those using phone calls. How can you increase performance with text messaging?

• Alerts: Be sure agents receive automatic alerts for new conversations so you never miss a conversation again.
• Worklists: Provide every rep with a worklist of cases they need to respond to so they don’t have to search thru a volume of messages.
• 360˚ history: Be sure reps can review a full history of all conversations with each customer, across all permitted objects. This helps reps hone in on customer priorities to personalize the experience.
• Rapid Resolution: Your reps should be equipped with proven resolution templates to accelerate time-to-resolution.
• Intuitive: Reps need a simple interface for their messaging conversations. Why wrestle with technology when you’re solving customer problems?

3. Be sure your messaging application is seamless with your Salesforce CRM

A lot of applications claim to be native. That doesn’t mean they are seamless or simple. Here’s what to check.

• SImple configuration. No one should have to spend weeks coding to get messaging up and running. Be sure your app offers fast, simple configuration and deployment.
• Seamless data. Having to sync and manage two databases is not acceptable. Be sure your app stores all of its message history, audit trails and other data in your Salesforce database.
• Console integration. Your reps use Service Console or a Salesforce Console. Be sure your messaging app seamless integrates into their environment for fast time-to-messaging and ease of use.

4. Measure, analyze and adapt

There are so many ways to use messaging. Which is why it’s important to measure, then tune your approaches for optimal results.

• Rep and team metrics. Be sure you can track and analyze individual reps, team and overall center activity and performance with messaging, including time-to-resolution, volume handling, team effectiveness and overall messaging ROI.
• NPS or other scoring results. Whichever measurement you use, be sure your messaging app offers a seamless way to measure each customer’s experience then present that in analytics for review and improvements.
• Message performance. Be sure you can track and measure message delivery to optimize carriers and routing, and that you can track budget against results to optimize your message spends.

The Bottom Line

Messaging is the next channel for Service and Support. Yet not all messaging applications can support the needs of contact centers. Be sure you have the capabilities defined above as minimal requirements for your messaging app. You’ll enjoy better results, faster and more easily, when you take a bit of time to align your messaging strategy with the best possible solution.

If you haven’t yet adopted business text messaging for your service or support team and want to learn more,
schedule a demo and we’d be happy to share our expertise with you, answer questions and show you what text messaging can do for your contact centers.