How to step up your customer interaction game with multi-channel communications

How do you interact with your customers?  Most businesses would probably answer “phone calls or email;” maybe with some social media thrown in. Have you thought about adding SMS messaging to the mix?  With texting becoming more and more the preferred method of communication in our personal lives, companies need to add it as a communications channel by enabling business phone lines to send and receive SMS messages.

Here are some examples of the many ways that combining voice and SMS can help enhance your customer interactions, whether with automated systems, support representatives, or sales and marketing teams.

Customer self-service

Having an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system can help improve the customer experience by making it easy for customers to call your business and self-service their accounts, while also receiving notifications via calls or voicemail. What if you extended these capabilities to SMS messaging?  Now you have another way to deliver those appointment reminders, service updates, or other notifications based on your customers’ preferred contact method.  Your customers also have the convenience of sending a message to check their rewards points balance or reschedule an appointment.

Customers and live support

When customers need to speak with someone for more complex issues, providing them with the option to either call or message the support team can help reduce frustration.  This allows the customer to not disrupt their daily activities while waiting for an agent to respond.  It benefits the support team as well, providing additional time to research the issue and come up with a resolution without putting the customer on additional holds or transferring to another department.  For issues that may be resolved easier through verbal communication, the agent can coordinate a time to call via text or in-progress messaging conversations can easily be switched to a live call.

Customers and sales/marketing teams

Similarly to interaction between customers and support teams, messaging can provide an additional, and sometimes, more effective method of communication between customers and sales/marketing teams. With today’s consumers being mobile-centric, SMS messaging can make business-related conversations feel more personal and timely.

Marketing teams can respond to basic customer inquiries such as pricing or hours of operation while sending out product and promotional information in real-time. Sales teams can cut through the clutter and send messages to follow up on emails or voicemails, contract statuses, or ask if someone is available to chat.

These are just some of the countless ways that having a voice + messaging approach to communications will take your customer interactions to the next level.  With our Messaging solution, you get a cost-effective way to enable your business phone lines to send and receive SMS messages.

Ready to learn more? Contact us to get started today!