Many brands are underinvested in their contact technology platforms preferring, for example, to concentrate on driving self-service digital channels. However, as marketing professionals we need every tool at our disposal, at the right time, and we need our actions to be “punches in bunches”, i.e. coordinated.
The mantra of the best service is no service is a misnomer, since what it actually means is that you have to be incredibly good at proactive service for the customer to have no actual need to contact you. Publishing your contact number, for instance, is an easy way to communicate to customers that you are open for business, that you are trustworthy. If I cannot contact you, and if I get no confirmation that you have received my message, or if your response takes too long, the tendency is to then go to social media and amplify.
Before it gets to that point, add in a more responsive channel – one which is not manned by multiple customer service agents but which is easy to run, plus the number one means of communication for a lot of your customer base prefers: SMS. The question is why can’t your SMS interaction with a company be modelled on an iphone message between friends? Customers are familiar with the channel, it’s private, and it’s immediate. What’s stopping us from having SMS Conversations with customers?
With two-way text conversations, clients we work with report more 12 to 15 concurrent conversations. By comparison, Web chat is great, but it’s limited in terms of capacity, as you typically can run two or three concurrent conversations at once with this method. That’s far more efficient. Meanwhile, if you can respond using automated, or adaptive templates there are even more efficiencies to be gained. For global operations, templates combined with some simple routing rules can also help you service customers in multiple languages really easily.
With smartphones, SMS doesn’t have to be boring text. A new development called visual touch messaging presents the customer with an instant ‘app-like’ experience, when they click on a link inserted into the SMS message. With a visual message popping on my iMessage with a slider, I can just tap to give a survey score, slide to choose the delivery time slot and make a ‘one touch’ decision. Visual messaging offers dynamic, real-time choice capabilities, which means you can see what choices are currently available making it easy for the customer to commit.
An example of a major brand using SMS with great impact is National Grid Metering (NGM), a subsidiary company of the National Grid that provides metering services in the UK’s regulated gas metering market.
To handle its customer enquiries, NGM offers a busy, 24 x 7 contact centre in Gloucester handling half a million customer queries per year. Strict service levels have to be met for certain urgent cases such as response times for reports of faulty meters, so high-quality, consistent customer service is mission critical for this organisation.
And to provide that service, SMS has turned out to be the most effective tool in its armoury. It has proven to be the most effective way of providing alerts to internal staff, incident communication and resourcing updates for the entire metering operation.
According to the NGM, it’s also a technique more than paying its own way – with operational costs markedly down since its introduction. Experiences like NGM and a growing band of similar organisations shows that SMS works and is good for brands and their customers.
Finally, to end on a ‘best practice’ note, SMS is not that impressive if you just use it as a ‘fire and forget’ option without putting too much thought into it. Being organised so that you can send an SMS containing the right information, to the right person at the right time, takes the co-ordination, capacity, and technology stresses off the table and leads to impressive returns. Thinking about how you could automate ‘conversation cycles’ with your customers over SMS is valuable. Being able to insert a range of Visual Touch options into your communications flow has clear near term Return on Investment.
The future is mobile, and SMS is a clear differentiator in an increasingly competitive marketplace. It is not enough, however, to be just email, or voice, or SMS. We must use all the channels where appropriate and ensure that our ‘traditional channels’ can properly dovetail into our overall Digital Strategy.
