November 5, 2018 Posted by Pocketstop in Other Social Share
There has been a significant increase in customer-brand interaction via text messaging over the past years, from keeping in touch with favorite restaurants or interacting with retail brands to political campaigns. With more and more businesses turning to text message marketing for increasing their brand loyalty, sales growth and customer engagement needs, it is only natural that the means by which those interactions take place are in a continuous state of change and improvement. Smartphones and mobile phones are the go-to devices for anyone, at any hour of the day, so why not make the most of it and go one step beyond the usual text message interaction by providing your customers with even more freedom and easiness in interacting with your brand?
Text Message Marketing Meets an Existing Demand
When thinking about why your business should consider employing more text message marketing solutions, you need to first understand why. Knowing how customers interact with your brand, how they are purchasing your products, and how they are handling customer service situations that might arise is a good start when deciding to implement text message marketing for more than brand awareness or promoting sales.
Imagine this situation: your favorite brand is interacting with you mostly via text message marketing, keeping you updated with news about new products or their events, sending you coupons as part of a loyalty program, informing you on new sales, and other interactions. But their customer service support is provided via email, or a complicated chat that requires you to only be logged in from a desktop, or be online for the entire duration of your conversation with a support team member.
Wouldn’t it be so much easier to be able to conduct the customer service conversation via text message? Text message marketing meets an existing demand when it comes to brand interactions of all kind, not just promotional or commercial ones, but also interactions involving customer service. Therefore, implementing a text-to-chat solution is an excellent idea as a next step in the development of your business.
Benefits and How to Use Text Message Marketing for Customer Service
Nowadays, when customers see the phone number of a business, they instinctively assume they can use that number for either calling or texting, given that most businesses are starting to become aware of those possibilities and implementing them amongst their digital marketing and customer service solutions. So there is a possibility that even though you do not have texting enabled, customers are trying to get in touch with you via text messaging.
Modern solutions help you allow your customers to text you, without the message having to reach a personal number or a specific person in your organization. Rather, customer messages reach a portal where they are managed by a designated team. All you have to do is to make sure that customers know the number they can text back in order to get in touch with you, if you are already utilizing a text message marketing solution for promotional purposes.
Here’s why your business should use text message marketing for customer service:
- It saves your business and your customers a lot of time
- It is a much more convenient method of interaction
- Text messaging will add a personal touch to your customer service
- You can automate parts of your customer service with the help of text messaging such as welcome messages, reminders, shipping notifications delivery notifications; also you can create templates or schedule messages to send at a certain time
- It is an easy, clean, and intimate way for one-on-one customer service interactions
- It can generate new leads and help your business maximize sales by keeping customers satisfied with your services
- It improves the way customers see your brand and how they talk about it with their friends, giving it not only a more personal touch, but also a more modern one
- It is cost effective and does not require the use of complicated software or hardware
Tips on How to Use Text Message Marketing for Customer Service
It is not enough to decide you need to implement a text message marketing strategy for customer service and going with the first solution that comes along, as there are a few aspects you need to consider in order to make the most of your investment, but also to be in compliance with industry rules and regulations.
Use text message marketing for customer service the right way by:
- Making sure to offer opt-in and opt-out strategies
- Using text message marketing for time-sensitive situations
- Drafting and implementing surveys based on the text-to-chat customer interaction
- Analyzing survey data and real-time analytics in order to improve your customer service
- Making parts of your customer service automated and available 24/7
- Specifying to customers what phone number to text if they want to reach customer service
- Generating text leads from your website and landline phone
- Automating your messages for time-efficiency
When it comes to customer service, businesses need to consider that implementing solutions without tailoring them to fit the needs of their customers and the objectives they’ve set for themselves is not only a bad idea, but one that will create a lot of problems on the long run. Fortunately, with modern text-to-chat solutions you can be one step ahead of your competitors and offer high-quality services based on your organization’s activity and of course, on the needs of your customers. Text message marketing is a viable solution, one that has proven its worth countless time, therefore implementing it for customer service can be highly beneficial when done right. Also, if you are already utilizing human and bot messaging for your customer service on other channels such as social media, text-to-chat would fit perfectly with your current solutions.
In conclusion, drafting and implementing a text message marketing strategy for customer service is an excellent idea, regardless of your industry or size, as it tailors to the needs of customers, provides you with an easy-to-use and affordable solution, and it allows real time analytics and the conducting of surveys with which you can constantly better your services.
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