How To Boost Your Customer Service Using A Bulk Text Message Service
The cost to acquire a new customer is typically quite high and depending on what you’re selling can take weeks, months or years to actually bring them on as customers.
Because of this it’s essential that once you do bring them on as customers your new goal is the keep them as customers for as long as possible and this is where having a sound customer service strategy earns its keep.
In this article, I’ll share how using an SMS text message service can ramp up your customer service strategy.
Use Bulk Text Messaging To Meet Them Where They Are
A lot of businesses think customer service is purely reaction-based but it’s a really smart idea to find ways to engage with customers, ask them questions, find out what they want, what annoys them, what delight’s them and then bring that data back home to try and embed or remove those things.
Where are your customers?
The problem is, your customers are…everywhere.
These forces businesses to build Facebook fan pages and groups, get Instagram going, Tweet updates, write new content and produce professional looking videos on YouTube which spread your marketing team thin while not really producing any results.
The great thing about text messaging is that 82% of Aussies are connected to their mobile devices.
Wherever they are online you know for a fact that you can reach them anytime you want by sending them an SMS message.
Learn From Customers With Text Message Surveys And Polls
While 10-20% of your customer service improvement ideas may come from the team internally, most of the gold is found inside your existing database of customers.
Inside your customer-base, you will have different types of customers who have different needs and because of this, you can glean amazing new opportunities.
While email is a good channel to use you’ll only get 20% opening the email (at best) by using SMS almost everyone will open and read your request and so you will bet more feedback.
Use bulk text messaging to send out a link to surveys, polls and feedback forms.
Speed Is The New Norm
Customers expect to send in a request at 3 am and get a reply 2 minutes later, it’s crazy but that’s the world we now live in.
It’s not that being fast will win you extra brownie points because it’s expected, it’s being slow will do all of the damage.
The two places where you need to be fast in your response is:
- Questions from potential customers
- Complaints from existing customers
If your customer service team can respond quickly to questions from potential customers your conversion rate will go up because it shows them that your company will look after them when you become a customer.
When a mistake happens, faulty product late deliveries, over-charging etc. it is an opportunity to not only kill the monster while it’s little but endear your customers towards you.
Phone calls can lead to playing phone tag and emails can end up in SPAM but customer service text messages are instant plus will get seen, opened and read by the recipient.
Post Purchase SMS Follow-Up And Surveys
Once a person has bought a product from you one of the smartest things you can do is reach out to them via text message.
This reaffirms that they made a good decision and that you’re available if they need any help.
A “how did we do from a scale of 1-5?” text survey is a good and easy way of measuring and tracking performance.
Order Updates And Delivery Status Reports
When a person makes an order there is always a little bit of doubt that creeps in, usually, they want to know:
- Was the order received?
- How long will the order take to be delivered?
- What happens next?
An automated text message with all of this information is a great customer service tactic because it closes off that mental loop and that customer can move on with other things.
The day before the order is to be delivered send out another text letting them know that their order will be delivered tomorrow at even better give a rough time estimate.
Text Message Appointment Reminders
Text appointment reminders are one of the most useful and profitable strategies and are used a lot by our customers.
For example, hair salons constantly grapple with no-shows, it’s a double-whammy, they lose out on the money they would’ve have gotten and they need to still pay staff who are now doing nothing for an hour or more.
Sending a quick text reminder a day or two before to confirm a chair booking gives them time to re-book another client if the scheduled one cannot make it.
Businesses will also use text reminders to remind their customers about direct-debits that are due to come out reducing default fees.
Property managers set up an automated text messages to remind tenants about inspections.
