Nine reasons your customers want to be able
to text support
5. More privacy
Anyone who’s been a customer has probably felt that sense of dread knowing when they have to call customer support. They need to plan to be in a private place and potentially wait for a break from work. Texting offers you the option to contact support discreetly at any time.
This added privacy can go a long way in keeping customers happy. Plus, they can text at nearly any time in their day means that they don’t have to plan their call or use their personal break or lunchtime waiting on hold.
6. Texting offers MMS
It’s not only about the words between you and your customers, you can share more than that.
You can share more than just words with your customers. With texting services for businesses, you get MMS too – the ability to share photos and images. This can help you understand the issue better and arrive at necessary resolutions quickly.
A customer might send a photo of a damaged item, or maybe of a job they’re requesting a quote for. Texting makes it easier for them to reach out to you with a small time commitment. You can also send links to bills, or PDFs of invoices.
Take a look at the following example of when it might be helpful for a customer to send a photo:
7. Written record
Customer support is a continuous interaction that requires multiple revisits to previous conversations for maximum benefit.
With a phone call, the closest thing you’ll get to a written record is the notes left by the customer service agent who last spoke with a customer. This can lead to customers waiting while the current agent looks into any previous call records. However, with texting, there’s an actual written record. Of course, there can still be notes to assist the written records, thus offering a richer background to help the customer support team close tickets faster.
8. Texting offers low impact personal connection
Your customers don’t solely want to hear from you, 85 percent of them say they want to be able to interact with you. Texting allows you to have that two-way personal communication without increasing time output or sacrificing relationships with other customers. A benefit that comes with texting is that it’s a familiar form of communication. Your customers are used to texting with friends and family, so you can adopt that friendly tone when you contact them as well.
There are some points of contact that simply make more sense via text than via phone call or an email. Customers are sometimes more open to offering feedback or responding to you through a text.
An example of this is simply following up with a customer after they made a purchase to see how they like it. It also allows for increasing their loyalty or potentially selling them another product. The personal touch which texting offers can go a long way in improving your relationship with your customer.
Look at the example below:
9. Texting is less stressful
When it comes to making a phone call, your customers just don’t want to do it. Nearly 59 percent of customers would prefer to use almost any other channel than make a call. Part of the reason for that is that phone calls can be stressful.
Bad hold music, long wait times, and the potential for being passed from one agent to another are all big drawbacks for customers that can force them to opt for a different customer service provider who prefers texting over voice calls.
Now that we have reached the end of this blog post, we would like to briefly summarize everything we talked about – Texting is a very powerful tool to interact with your customers. When you align your customer support initiatives with topline texting services, you can rest assured that not only customer experience, but your retention rates will also improve.
If you are convinced and would like to know more about text-based services for your customer support, then please feel free to contact us to find out more.
Author: Nina Godlewski
Main Illustrator: Prasanna Bhupendran