Great customer service is essential for your business to thrive, but beliefs around what makes customer service great are changing quickly in the era of the smartphone. The fact that 97% of the U.S. population owns a cell phone creates new customer service issues to manage. Ideas around convenience and preference have shifted, and your business must adjust to the new expectations. The good news? Offering live text messaging to solve your customers' problems is the exact solution you're looking for.
Here are the five top customer service issues that text messaging can solve.
1. Your Contact Format Is Inconvenient
If one of your customers is out and about, they don't want to have to go out of their way to make a phone call. Maybe they're in the middle of a business lunch or catching up with an old friend but need a quick answer. Making a phone call means stopping everything and disrupting their day. The average person agrees—Americans under 50 years of age are more likely to text than they are to make a phone call.
Instead, your customer could send a text message 24/7, in a few seconds, without interrupting their work or their conversation. A text is something you can read on the go and write a response when you're free.
2. Long Wait Times
Calling a customer service line has always been a gamble—you might wait for hours. But during the pandemic, customer wait times have gotten even worse due to larger call volumes and staffing shortages. Anyone would be frustrated waiting on hold for a long time, only to potentially get transferred or experience a dropped call. All of this could annoy your customer enough to leave and go to a different company. Your customers want an option to reach you faster, and text messaging gives you exactly that.
Offering text messaging cuts out the hold time. Anyone can send a quick text message and then go about their day. No more forcing your customers to listen to that awful hold music.
3. Impersonal Communication
Chatbots and scripted phone calls can feel like you're talking to a robot, even if there's a human on the other end. But sending text messages back and forth between a real person feels much more personal. It's what your customers do with their close friends and family. And it's vital to make your customers feel special. In fact, 80% of people say personalization makes them more likely to buy from a company. People want to feel like they're buying from a mom-and-pop shop, even if they aren't.
Plus, no one looks forward to contacting customer service. But when you can use fun features like emojis, photographs, and GIFs, it makes your customers' experience more relaxing and enjoyable.
4. Outbound Calls Can Feel Invasive
Calling a customer interrupts whatever they're in the middle of doing since they have to step out to take the call. Your customer's entire day might get thrown off from an unexpected or lengthy customer service call. And that's if you can get them on the phone at all—80% of people don't answer calls from an unknown number according to Pew Research.
Meanwhile, texting works for both easy and complicated problems alike, without the invasion of privacy. A customer can easily send a screenshot of the issue or explain in detail what's happening. Then they can go on with their day.
5. Ineffective or Unanswered Contacts
Customer service emails can go unread, and voicemails can get lost in the shuffle. However, most people check text messages within 5 minutes of receiving them, so you're more likely to have an open line of communication. That way, you can solve customer issues more easily and decrease the amount of time a ticket is open.
Also, you won't have any more dropped calls or bad transfers to worry about with text messaging. These two issues can lead a customer to give up and take their money elsewhere, but texting solves the problem.
Reach Out The Right Way
Most customers don't want to feel like your business is stuck in the past, which is why you should offer innovative ways for them to reach you. Text messaging should be one choice, and one that your customers are sure to choose as their go-to option.
If you're looking for a customer service choice that's personal, is integrated into your clients' lives, and saves your business money, turn to people-powered text messaging. Meeting your customers where they're at shows them that you care about them and truly want to be quickly reachable. Text messaging can help your business generate those essential five-star reviews because of the amazing customer service. Getting started is as easy as installing a text number on your website and hiring the right team to work with your customers to solve whatever problems come up.
