When your customers feel appreciated, your company reaps real, measurable growth. Growth like a boost to revenue for one. The payoffs for valued, great experiences are tangible. In fact, when you provide stellar CX, customers are willing to pay 16% more on your products and services. And they will be more loyal to you.
What can customer loyalty really do for you?
Retain customers. Repeat customers typically spend more than new customers. They already trust your business and its products or services.
The strategy is simple. To retain customers, spark a relationship. And do that by building experiences that create an emotional connection with your customers. But where do you start? Create a strategy for texting online. As many as 89% of consumers say they prefer texting with businesses over any other mode of communication. So it’s time to build out a strategy to drive your customer loyalty. And make some cash along the way.
Your Step-by-Step Guide to Building Out a Strategy for Texting Online to Drive Customer Loyalty (and Revenue)
Step 1: Build Your Opt-in List
To build a relationship with your customers, you have to know who your customers are. Before you can text your customers, get permission to contact them and build an opt-in list. Opt-in lists establish a list of customers who have agreed to receive communications from you. They’ve already signaled that they want to be loyal to your brand. They make it easier for you to know your audience and target personalized content to fit their tastes.
To create your opt-in list, promote opportunities to sign up for texts in their order detail email or during the checkout process. Provide an online form for customers to sign up for emails and texts from your brand. And consider incentivizing customers to sign up with a coupon or exclusive deal. Make your texting opt-in like joining a loyalty club to engage with and create a stronger bond with your customers.
Step 2: Keep your Audience Engaged with Texting Online
After you have your opt-in list, you have to keep that audience engaged in order to retain them. Texting online gives your business a perfect channel to not only acquire customers but to retain them. Harvard Business Review knows that it is anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive to get a new customer than to keep a current customer. So, what touchpoints are you using to keep your customers close?
Here are some ideas that not only engage your customers, but also increase profit:
Gift your customers right off the bat. Welcome new subscribers with a discount coupon to use in their first 30 days.
Send customers in your opt-in list triggered messages about product updates, exclusive offers, or upcoming deals. Be cautious, though, about not sending these so frequently that they get annoying.
Give customers reasons to make repeat purchases by creating a point system and rewards. Just like with a credit card program, reward the more loyal customers with a discount after reaching a set point number or give them free shipping after spending a certain amount of money.
Send relevant content that interests your customers. Use MMS messaging to send interesting videos or create a newsletter with helpful product info.
Reportedly, customers like to be part of online texting loyalty programs. As much as 90% of participants in an SMS loyalty program have gained value from being a member. With special loyalty rewards and perks for signing up for SMS, your brand can give members the VIP treatment they expect.
Step 3: Customize and Personalize your Content
Personalization increases customer engagement and revenue. According to CMSWire, Amazon gets 30% of its revenue just from personalized recommendations. Today, personalized recommendations are almost as expected from brands as toilet paper is to bathrooms.
Considering that SMS has a 98% open rate compared to email marketing, texting online gives you a direct way to deliver a personalized experience with the guarantee that your customers will see your messaging.
Send texts that are personalized and ultra-relevant to your customers. Include their name in texts to make them feel known. Keep track of important dates — like their birthday or anniversaries — to send them exclusive offers on those days. Use feedback surveys and track customer purchases to make purchase recommendations or notify customers of specific sales that would pique their interest.
When you give customers a personalized experience, you’re more likely to keep them around and continue increasing revenue.
Step 4: Close Sales and Support Customers With Two-Way Texting
To maintain a relationship with your customers, you have to talk with them. Two-way texting online gives your sales and your customer service team a way to communicate directly with customers in a channel that’s more convenient and flexible than others.
Customer service agents and salespeople spend a lot of time on the phone. Texting online gives your teams a flexible and convenient way to cut back on wasted time (without leaving their CCaaS platform). To help your sales team qualify sales, send a text to the potential customer first. Include information that will help them decide if they are a good candidate for your services or not. If you use two-way business texting online, you can let your customers make certain selections to get more information.
Provide proactive customer service by sending messages to teach customers how to use the product well. Give customers an easier way to reach you through two-way texting. This way, they can ask a simple question or request information without increasing your call volume. And they won’t spend unnecessary time on hold.
And if that isn’t enough, here’s an added bonus. McKinsey found that companies that elevate their customer service see employee engagement rocket up the charts by 20% on average. Now, literally, everyone is happy. With these added strategies, you’re building a team of engaged employees and customers, while driving revenue along the way.
This post was originally published on November 8, 2018 and was updated on June 16, 2022.
A good customer service experience can drive success for your company. But a bad one can wreck your reputation. Zendesk reports that after more than one bad experience, around 80% of consumers say they’d bounce, preferring to do business with a competitor. Bad customer service drives customers away.
But a good customer experience means that customers are much more inclined to go easy on you even if another experience goes awry. According to Hubspot, 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases with companies who offer an excellent customer service experience.
We’re rooting for you to see that success in your company. And one of the best ways to improve your service is to learn from others’ mistakes. So we’ve gathered a few bad customer service experience stories to see what went wrong and offer what could have gone differently.
Broken Customer Service Experience 1:
The Problem:When you have really long hold times
Sitting on hold has to be one of the most aggravating customer service experiences. Nobody wants to be put on hold, especially when they need help quickly. Studies even show that 15% of customers will simply hang up after being on hold for only 40 seconds. Plus, customers expect the fastest response to be when they call you by phone. So if that expectation isn’t being met, that’s an issue.
The Scenario: I remember one horrible evening before leaving for my honeymoon, I sat on hold with an airline to figure out an issue with my flight’s ticket for nearly 2 hours. Within those two hours, my anxiety to resolve the issue only increased. After a point, it felt like my issue would never be resolved because I’d never get to actually talk to an agent. The whole interaction deterred me from ever wanting to reach out for help again.
The Solution: Long hold times are the result of a lot of possible issues: lack of training for agents, operational inefficiencies, staffing shortages. But one primary reason companies suffer from long hold times is because they haven’t sufficiently used technology to reduce inefficiencies.
Here are some ways to fix hold time:
Use automated messaging to communicate hold times to customers so they can choose whether or not to wait it out, request a call back or hit a texting service option.
Improve your self-service tools so customers can fix simple issues and get quick answers. With better self-service support, you’ll reduce the call volume coming into your support team so they can focus more on the customers with complicated issues.
Deflect customers to asynchronous channels through your IVR. Customers who need immediate help then have other options to reach you — like via texting — to avoid sitting on hold. Then, have separate teams of agents for each channel ready to help.
Broken Customer Service Experience 2:
The Problem: When you lack empathy and compassion
As a customer service rep, your tone is everything. When your tone of voice on the phone or choice of language in a text, chat or email communicates annoyance or is patronizing, it’s a huge turnoff to your customers.
When customers experience an issue, they’re looking for an agent to be on their side. They want the company to apologize and accept fault. Now, I’m not saying the customer is always right, but it’s important for agents to acknowledge any inconvenience caused. If an agent doesn’t emotionally engage with the customer, that communicates a lack of care.
The Scenario: A few months ago I had an issue with my electric toothbrush. Part of the plastic had begun to crack — an expected issue after nearly a year of use. The toothbrush was under warranty, so I reached out to the customer service department to receive a replacement. I included a full explanation of the damage with photos.
The agent responded to let me know they would send a replacement, but then followed up with a long message in a condescending tone to explain to me how the crack could only have occurred as a result of something I was doing wrong in changing the batteries on the toothbrush. There was no recognition of fault in the product. This really irritated me because I had been very careful to follow their tutorials to care for the toothbrush. There has to be a better way of handling this issue.
The Solution: I assume he was trying to be helpful to avoid future damage to my toothbrush, but the interaction still bothered me as a customer and sure doesn’t make me want to have to contact them again. What could this agent have done differently?
Here’s what:
It’s important for companies to own some of the fault. To make that interaction better, the agent could have started by apologizing for the inconvenience.
Make every customer interaction a learning experience. I discovered that the problem with my toothbrush was a common issue with other customers. So this agent could have made this a learning experience for the product team. For instance, he could have asked for an MMS message with a picture of the broken piece so he could share with their product team. That way, they could further improve their design.
Train agents to specifically start an interaction with compassion and empathy. Perhaps create some templates or scripts to guide agents through different scenarios. Record calls and keep transcripts to show agents good and bad examples of customer interactions to help them see how empathetic responses fit into the real world.
Broken Customer Service Experience 3:
The Problem: When you’re unwilling to receive customer feedback
Customers really hate being ignored. We have so many avenues available to offer feedback to companies. And since customers are aware that businesses are aware of their complaints, ignoring them is always worse than acknowledging them. When you don’t respond to customer feedback, that signals that you not only don’t care about your customers’ opinions, but that your customers aren’t valuable to your business.
The Scenario: One customer’s experience with British Airlines exemplifies what’s wrong with ignoring customer feedback. After the airline lost his luggage, the customer tweeted at the airline to get their attention, even promoting the tweet:
But it took eight hours for their social media team to respond! And then, in addition to this, their response was confusing.
Why would an airline that operates around the clock only provide limited hours for responding on Twitter? When an airline has lost the customer’s luggage, the expectation is that the issue is resolved as soon as possible. Brands are expected to respond to customer feedback promptly.
The Solution: Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. Customer feedback is vital for success. To avoid customers resenting you for ignoring their feedback, be on the front end and seek it out.
Here are some ways to be proactive in hearing from customers:
Use texting to reach out to customers proactively. Texting is an incredibly reliable way to reach your customers. While emails may sit in an untouched inbox or go straight to the spam folder, texts have an open rate of 99%. Send customers surveys or feedback forms via text to get the best response.
Add in a text support line with auto-responders and keywords to begin information collection when live support isn’t immediately available. Customers feel like they’re being proactive in seeking help and your company gathers the info you need to resolve an issue as fast as possible.
Seek feedback after every interaction. Use every conversation as a chance to hear from your customers. That way, customers can respond to the service experience they just had while it’s fresh on their mind. Automate a quick survey to send to customers after any interaction they have with you.
For a while now, it’s been clear that texting isn’t just another way to connect with old friends and family. Texting has also become the preferred channel for customers to reach businesses and vice versa. Primarily, businesses and customers alike are seeing how reliable texting is for efficient and effective communication. As many as 60% of customers read texts within 1-5 minutes after receiving them. And the average SMS open rate is 5x higher than your typical business email. Customers are eager to reach you and hear from you via text.
In a world where communication remains a crucial part of any business’ strategy, texting can be an effective way to build business, improve consumer-to-business relationships, and enhance your brand. But it can be tricky to know what works in business text messaging. We need examples.
As the youngest in my family with three older siblings, I spent a majority of my life looking to my older family members as examples: What’s cool to wear? What music should I like? What should I not do to avoid getting in trouble with mom and dad? We naturally look for examples to understand how to grow and thrive. The same goes for our businesses. We look to good examples for how to grow and thrive with our customers.
So we’ve gathered a list of some of the companies who are leading by example. These are some of the best business text message examples out there. Ready to get inspired?
Suntrup Automotive Group has been servicing and selling cars in the St. Louis area since 1957. As a reflection of their amazing customer service, Suntrup was honored with the Women’s Choice Award for being one of America’s Best Car Dealerships for customer service and continues to strive for excellence in every aspect of their business. One way Suntrup maintains excellence is by opening communications between their service team and their customers with business texting.
To streamline communication at their dealership, Suntrup uses business texting to keep customers in the loop. Here’s how:
When a car gets serviced and is ready for pick up, the service advisor sends a text out from their computer to the customer notifying them that their car is ready or asking for approvals. The customer then has an easy way to chat back and forth with the service advisor — able to ask questions, give approval for work, or schedule a pick up. There’s no need to play phone tag or get bogged down with emails. With online texting, Suntrup can shave off over 40 hours of work every month, cut back on interruptions, and build customer trust.
I love to travel, but the process of flying stresses me out. I know I’m not alone in this. Every time we prepare to get on an airplane, there’s a lot to keep track of: security lines, boarding passes, baggage claim ticket, boarding time. I’m getting stressed just thinking about it. So as soon as I book a flight, I’m quick to download the app of whichever airline I’m on so I can check-in as soon as possible, look up my boarding time, check my gate, etc. Delta, though, relieves stress and helps me to be a step ahead in how they use business text messaging.
Delta Air Lines continues to earn accolades from customers for its outstanding customer service in the U.S. and around the world, frequently dubbed the best overall customer service airline. One way they stand out is through meeting their customers on the go. Here’s how they do so:
Delta keeps customers up to speed with any changes during the customers’ journey. When you sign up for texting from Delta, any time a flight change or gate change occurs, you’ll get a text from Delta with all the info you need immediately, no matter where you are. Customers can avoid showing up to the airport to find their flight delayed. Instead, they’ll know as soon as the airline makes the call, saving customers stress and time.
Delta also made another industry-leading move with business texting. To connect with customers in their channel of choice, Delta integrated messaging in their app with Apple messaging, letting customers connect with a live Delta representative to get in-the-moment assistance. Instead of sitting on hold for two hours after a flight gets canceled, customers can text a Delta rep using the phone in their back pocket.
Ginger Bay is dedicated to providing the best salon and spa experiences for men and women. In fact, they are so good at it that they’ve been named a Top 200 Salon & Spa in the nation from Salon Today Magazine for 21 years.
With no change to your existing phone service, Ginger Bay implemented business texting to stay in contact with scheduled clients, send alert notifications, and send out call-to-action marketing:
Ginger Bay uses texting to communicate with customers. But aside from just using it to schedule and manage customer appointments, Ginger Bay drives customer engagement as well. Using Textel, Ginger Bay sends texts to customers to offer promotions, keeping customers loyal and interested. To do so, they release a keyword for their guests to text their salon phone number by a certain time to receive seasonal gift card promotions, bonus points related to a loyalty program, or discounts on products. During one promotion cycle, they received over 300 texts in 45 minutes! With this example, we see how one business text message keeps customers coming back to your brand over and over.
I have horrible eyesight. And for years, I’ve gone from one pair of glasses to the next, trying to find the right pair that I will actually want to wear. But then I tried Warby Parker. Warby Parker makes buying glasses easy — offering Home Try-On so customers can give five pairs of glasses a trial run before committing. Warby Parker has also made it their mission to offer a cohesive omnichannel experience, adopting business text messaging as a customer service tool. Here’s how they use texting to assist their customers:
Glasses are an expensive online purchase with a lot of details involved: health insurance, prescriptions, returns, exchanges. Making that kind of purchase online means customers need access to help at nearly any time of the day, and quickly during their purchase. Warby Parker has made it incredibly easy to get help, offering live chat, email, phone, self-service, and text support. When you need someone to answer a question, customers can just click on the “text” icon on their website and open a text thread within their phone or laptop’s messaging app.
The brand also has some fun with their SMS support. Back in 2017, Warby Parker invited customers to text their “Costume Council” to get ideas for what to wear for Halloween that year. In using text message support in this way, Warby Parker inspired interest in their brand and kept current customers engaged.
This post originally published on June 29, 2018 and was refreshed and republished on June 2, 2022.
Texting is part of our everyday lives. Even as I write this blog, I’m carrying on a texting conversation with my sister and my college friends, and just minutes ago used texting to verify my bank account. We’re so used to SMS messaging that most of us expect businesses to communicate with this channel too. In fact, 69% of all consumers want to communicate with a business via text.
Texting gives businesses a distinct advantage — it lets you interact with customers on a personal and convenient channel. To see how SMS messages fit in a business, we’ve imagined how the quintessential American office of Dunder Mifflin would have used business texting. What if the characters of NBC’s The Office had the texting technology we have today?
How Michael Scott would use SMS Messages
Ok, so maybe the “World’s Best Boss” would misuse access to SMS messaging at times. But even with Michael Scott’s (often stressful) craziness, we can imagine some practical uses for business texting.
Sending out Discounts and Coupons
What if Michael could have avoided the “golden ticket” debacle entirely? Instead of giving out a massive discount all to one client, he could have used SMS messages to connect with each winning client about their golden ticket coupon. Maybe it could have gone something like this:
Fundraising and Event Communications
Michael Scott’s Fun Run Race for the Cure would have been a bit more successful if he could have promoted the event to all of his clients simultaneously. Whether you’re fundraising or sharing info for an upcoming event, an SMS message is a reliable way to reach all of your customers at once. Instead of relying on the sales reps to ask incoming callers for donations, he could have contacted his clients using a mass SMS message and maybe could have raised more than $340. It could have gone something like this:
How this translates to your brand:
You don’t want to pretend to be Willy Wonka for a day to reach your clients. But use an SMS message to reliably reach customers selectively or on mass. Text messages have a significantly more successful open rate than other channels of communication, with a 98% open rate as opposed to just a 20% open rate with email. This lets you successfully reach your customer base when you run promotions or fundraisers.
How Kelly Kapoor would use an SMS Message in Customer Service
Kelly Kapoor — the queen of customer service — is a master at handling any customer stress that comes her way. She’s the go-to in the office when it comes to navigating complicated conversations. And you know she would be on top of the latest trends with SMS messaging. So we’ve imagined some ways that Kelly would use SMS messages to build relationships with customers and handle customer support. Here’s how:
Two-Way Customer Conversations
Kelly Kapoor is not wrong. When customers text you, they want you to text them back. Two-way conversations is one of the biggest benefits of using SMS messages. When you text your customers, you create a relationship that encourages flexibility and shows that you’re available to help them. We can count on Kelly to add in a bit too much personality. But if Kelly were to use two-way SMS messages, it would go something like this:
How this translates to your brand:
According to a recent survey, 63% of consumers would switch to a company that offers texting as a communication method. As Kelly showed us, business SMS messages make for an easy way to address follow-up questions or requests from your customers. It’s fast, personal, and can help to resolve inquiries quickly using the channel of communication we all feel comfortable with (especially Kelly).
When you offer text as a support option, you add convenience and flexibility. Customers can text with support departments while they’re at home, in the office, or running errands. With SMS customer support, the customer is in control.
Texting is also an extremely helpful asset for companies that have long-term client relationships — companies like Dunder Mifflin. Texting keeps a solid record for customer service so you can verify details from recent conversations or double-check important information like invoice numbers and address changes.
How Pam Halpert would use SMS messages
Every office needs someone sane to deal with the craziness of incoming communications and appointment and meeting schedules. Pam Beesley Halpert has to handle all the details and put up with whatever Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute are up to that day. That’s a lot of multitasking. For a receptionist, SMS messaging makes that multitasking simpler, allowing you to juggle all kinds of incoming and outgoing office communications simultaneously. Here’s how Pam would use an SMS message:
Scheduling Meetings:
SMS messaging can be useful for scheduling meetings and appointments — something Pam has to do a lot of for Michael. To avoid having to repeatedly answer phone calls, imagine Pam could use an SMS message to schedule those meetings. Maybe it would go something like this:
How this translates to your brand:
An SMS message system isn’t just useful for support or sales. It can be incredibly useful for managing business operations. As we can see with Pam, SMS messaging makes for a flexible way for your operations team to juggle meeting and scheduling communications in a way that integrates easily with your existing systems. Plus, since an individual person can have multiple text threads going at once, SMS messaging is more efficient than taking one phone call at a time.
Add business texting to reach customers effectively. And hopefully you’ll end up a bit more efficient than our friends at Dunder Mifflin.
What would your business model look like if you put all your focus on what your customers want? This question may put a pit in your stomach. What about this quarter’s profits? How about those new sales leads? What about staying faithful to the product roadmap? Don’t get me wrong — those goals matter. But the data shows that in order to be successful in all your goals, customer experience has to be the focus of your brand. Adding an SMS online platform directly supports this focus.
Salesforce found that as many as 66% of customers expect companies to understand and anticipate their needs. When customers are the focus, your other goals will follow. In fact, customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that aren’t. And it’s become clear in recent years that customers want flexibility, efficiency, convenience, and personalization.
Hmm…sounds familiar.
SMS online texting offers each of these things. The average American spends five hours per day on their cell phone. And, 95% of text messages are read and responded to within 3 minutes of being received. Texting lets you reach customers on their time. And because SMS texting is a much more personal form of communication when compared to email or phone calls, it gives you a unique opportunity to build relationships with customers.
With this in mind, we’ve put together a list of online SMS features that further your customer-centric goals and support your employees. Here’s what to look for in a tool that enables SMS online for a better customer experience:
1. Personalization:
Personalization matters more than ever in the modern market. McKinsey & Co. has found that companies that excel at personalization generate 40% more revenue than the average players. Customers want to feel known. And texting offers this uniquely personal form of communication. Customers don’t give out their phone numbers to just anyone. If you’ve been given the go ahead to text a customer, offer the most personal messaging possible.
Look for an SMS online tool that makes personalization easy for your team. Use the information from your CRM and integrate those personal details into the messages you send. Some SMS tools provide custom fields so your agents can insert names or other personalized details dynamically. That way, your customers view your texts as personal.
2. IVR Deflection:
There are plenty of times that customers call in with a fairly simple question. For example, maybe a customer calls into your salon just to find out their appointment time. But, that customer with the simple request gets stuck in the same call queue as the customers who have a really complicated issue to resolve. And getting stuck on hold kills a customer experience faster than maybe anything else.
But, with IVR deflection, move the customers who are trapped in IVR purgatory to your online SMS tool. Customers can request a text and hop off the call. Then, agents can start a two-way conversation with customers to pass along appointment details, answer simple questions, share self-service tools, etc.
3. Opt-in and Opt-out management:
Perhaps what’s most daunting about adding SMS online is staying compliant. To stay compliant according to TCPA standards, you must get permission from customers before sending them any messages to their phone. This means you can’t message someone until they’ve opted into receiving messages and you can’t message someone who’s opted-out.
Opt-in and opt-out management can be a headache. Manually tracking of every opted in or out contact is a logistical nightmare. But with the right SMS online platform, you can use a tool to manage your opt-ins and opt-outs for you. No more adding or deleting from a contact list or spreadsheet. With opt-in management, any time a customer requests to hear from you or sends a “STOP” message to opt-out, your contact list automatically adjusts, keeping your team free of stress and your customers’ privacy protected.
How can you manage your customer experience if you aren’t tracking your agents’ performance? Metrics are a fundamental part of professional development for your employees and integral to growing a solid support staff. To support your efforts, find an online SMS platform that offers a robust set of reporting and analytic tools.
For a successful customer experience, you want to know what your open rate is. You need to see how quickly agents are responding to customers. And, you want to ensure that your issue resolution is high. Use reporting and analytics to track metrics and to be sure your team is keeping customers happy.
5. Automation:
When you pair automation alongside online SMS, you can manage customer queries without getting agents involved. This leaves more time for agents to handle complicated issues with customers on other channels, lowering your average hold time and boosting issue resolution. Find a platform that helps you automate customer support.
How is automation helpful for your customer experience? Let me give you a couple examples. Feedback from customers is critical for customer experience success. So to improve your customer feedback loop, automate a message with a few survey questions to send after an agent concludes a customer conversation.
Or, maybe you want to send a shipping update to a few customers. Set up an automation to send an update 24 hours before their package arrives. With intentional automation, you’re using your employees’ time to the fullest and you’re supporting your customers to have the best experience.
