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At a time when social media and smartphone applications seem to dominate the conversation around customer contact and engagement strategy, customers are busy with good old-fashioned texting. Is your company taking advantage of person-to-person text messaging?
A Pew Research Center study conducted in 2015 showed texting is the most widely and frequently used feature on a smartphone, with 97 percent of Americans texting at least once a day. (Read the full study.)
A customer support preference study conduct by HeyWire Business in 2014 found that 89 percent of respondents report “it is important to have different options such as phone, email, text and chat for customer support.” (Read the full study.)
At Clark Pest Control, we are always looking at new technologies in the pursuit of improving communication with our customers. We have deployed a robust contact center telephone solution and live web chat. In addition to the phone and live chat, existing and potential customers can email us or complete a form on our website.
In late 2014, we introduced person-to-person text messaging on one of our most publicized toll-free numbers. Without even advertising this to our customers, we started receiving text messages right away. In fact, the first customer to text us wanted to add an additional service to her account! Our customer just assumed she could text us. Imagine finding out that customers (and potential customers) were calling you, but you had no way of answering, or even knowing that they were calling. That’s where we were with texting.
As we’ve enabled texting on more of our phone numbers, we have seen the same effect: Customers have been texting us all along. It seems that customers don’t need to be told they can text us. Many customers have our phone number saved in their phones, and texting to a number already in their phone’s address book seems perfectly natural.
How does it work? When a customer sends us a text message, it is delivered to our team members in the office via their web browser. Anyone on the team can respond, follow along or step in to help if the first person who responded is away from the desk. To the customer, the experience is just like texting a person — because that’s exactly what it is, a customer texting a person. There are many solution providers that offer easy-to-use web-based tools to view and respond to texts, and most providers can text-enable your business number within a day or sooner.
Like most pest management companies, our phones (and our phone numbers) are our lifelines. We wouldn’t be in business without them; we want our phones to ring. It’s easy to text-enable your existing and already publicized phone numbers. Plus, you can maintain the voice routing of your calls, and you don’t even need to change your telecom carrier.
So, what are you waiting for? Customers may already be texting your business. Are you there to respond when they do? Don’t let another customer slip away.
Contributor Matt Beckwith is contact center director for Clark Pest Control, Lodi, Calif., and can be reached at mbeckwith@clarkpest.com.
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