You Can’t Serve Customers You Can’t Reach: Try Conversational Text Messaging

Are you frustrated because your customers or clients or patients or applicants seem to be ignoring you? You’re not alone.

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!