5 Ways to Improve your Customer Experience via SMS
From increased NPS scores to skyrocketing response rates, our customers have experienced the benefits of integrating SMS into their UX first-hand. To set you on the same path to consistent customer euphoria, we’re sharing our five most popular SMS strategies for keeping customers satisfied.
1. Communicate urgent information
Nothing inspires trust like maintaining transparency with your customers. When situations arise that prevent you from delivering your normal quality of service, text messaging can be a great tool for delivering urgent updates to open a clear line of communication.
From outages to scheduled maintenance to looming overdrafts, your customers will always appreciate a heads-up, and you’ll save your support team a lot of hassle.
With immediate delivery and a read rate of 95% within the first 3 minutes of receipt, SMS is a sure-fire way to reach your customers when it counts.
2. Fortify customer security
Two-factor authentication is the easiest way to add an extra layer of protection for your users.
At logins or specified points within your platform, a message containing a temporary access code gets sent to your user’s number, and upon entering that code, they’re able to proceed. Your customers are left reassured that their data is secure, and your platform is extra protected.
Plus, after a quick and painless setup, 2FA is entirely automated and self-sustaining.
3. Share status updates
Real-time SMS notifications are the perfect way to keep your customers up to date. As SMS offers prompt contact without the risk of being intrusive, it’s the perfect medium to share anything from transaction confirmations to delivery updates to appointment reminders.
4. Provide better support
Phone lines have a tendency to get busy. Of course, calling is often the best option for resolving issues, but by integrating SMS into your support setup, you can save your customers from the infuriation of being forced to listen to elevator music and smooth jazz while they’re stuck on hold.
Create a setup that allows customers to receive an SMS when a customer support representative becomes available, or give them the option to solve their issues via SMS altogether.
By publicizing a contact number and integrating your support platform (Zendesk users: check out our integration!), customers without the time to call can get their problems fixed efficiently. You can even take things a step further and localize your contact numbers per country and region, to create a local presence and evade international messaging rates.
5. Acquire customer feedback
Unless you’ve got a dissatisfied customer on your hands, customer feedback can be pretty elusive. However, SMS comes in handy when you need quick, simple responses from your customers about transactions and interactions.
By asking specific questions (e.g. ‘Are you satisfied with the support that was provided?’ Or ‘Please rate your satisfaction with your new purchase on a scale of 1 to 5 — where 1 = weeping from disappointment and 5 = doing cartwheels in my backyard as I type’), you get rid of any impositions and dramatically simplify the feedback process.
In fact, you can automate your messaging setup to send feedback requests immediately, say, after a payment has been made or a support ticket has been closed.
Ready to take your customer experience to new heights? Learn more about how to reach 7 billion phones worldwide via SMS.
