If you’re letting your customers wait for more than 24 hours before they receive a response from your customer service department, you’re making a big mistake.
Did you know that more than 90% of Americans consider customer service to be one of the most important factors in deciding whether they want to work with a business or not? While the quality of customer service is dependent on numerous factors, one of the most important ones is response time.
In today’s fast-paced world, customers don’t want to wait—they hate slow response times and they expect a fast response.
It’s true in every industry. Whether you run a B2C eCommerce store selling leather bags or a B2B SaaS company offering HR software, if your customers find themselves waiting for hours before they’re able to connect with one of your customer service executives, they’ll find themselves frustrated pretty quickly.
If your customers consistently complain about long response times, you need to make some serious changes—otherwise, you may end up losing business to your competitors.
And that’s where texting comes in.
A critical part of delivering great customer service is ensuring that you’re letting your customers reach out to you via their preferred communication channel.
90% of customers have reported that they prefer texting a business over other forms of communication. It’s a no-brainer: you should allow your customers to text your business.
When implemented right, texting can help you save time and increase sales and revenue.
To help you understand how texting can benefit your business, we’ve put together this blog post. We’ll be covering why response time matters, how texting can save you time, and how texting can increase your sales.
Let’s dive in.
Why Does Response Time Matter?
Imagine this scenario:
You run a premium shoe brand and your target market resides in California.
Let’s say someone recently purchased your brand’s most expensive pair of shoes but, upon receiving the product, found the shoes to be covered with scratches and abrasion marks.
Disappointing, isn’t it?
To report the defect, they head over to your website and find out that they don’t have the option to request a replacement. Next, they visit your website’s Contact Us section and are told to submit a form about their issue.
As soon as they submit it, they receive an email that states:
“Thank you for reaching out. Our experts will review your form and reach out to you in 2-3 business days.”
If someone purchases an expensive pair of shoes from you, they expect the product to be of superior quality. In the unlikely case that a product does arrive in less-than-perfect condition, the customer will expect a speedy response from your team. If they see that they’ll have to wait 2-3 business days for a response, their level of frustration will be off the charts.
Customers want to feel valued, and a slow response time will leave them feeling like they’re at the bottom of your priority list.
Over 69% of customers base the quality of customer service on whether they received a quick response or not.
Many companies, including some of your competitors, don’t have dedicated systems and processes in place to deliver a lightning-fast response. Lowering your response time is a way to separate yourself from the competition, position yourself as a customer-centric brand, and earn customer loyalty.
And as we’ve already mentioned, a great way to do that is with text.
How Can Texting Your Customers Save You Time?
You can reach a lot of people via text. Over 66.9% of the global population are unique mobile phone users and over 5.34 billion people have access to smartphones.
Furthermore, text is fast. So it makes sense that rather than dialing in or emailing your customer service department, your customers would rather fire off a quick message from their phone.
And maybe best of all? Text fits in seamlessly with your daily activities. No matter what someone is doing, stopping for a quick second to read and respond to a text is much easier than stopping for a few minutes to send an email or make a call.
Let’s say you want additional information from a customer to help them with their problem. What if they’re on vacation and not checking their emails? In that case, you’ll have to wait for days—or maybe even weeks—for them to get back. And until then, you’ll have a pending ticket under their name. Text eliminates that issue.
Furthermore, allowing your customers to text your business will reduce the number of calls your customer service team needs to answer. The problem with phone calls is that they require your undivided attention, so you can only handle one at a time. That’s not the case with texting. When you allow your customers to text your business, your customer service executives can assist multiple customers at once, which saves time and increases customer satisfaction.
How Can Texting Your Customers Help You Increase Your Sales?
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Your consumers want you to text them and they want to text you back. But how does offering texting translate into more sales?
Allow us to explain.
Giving your customers the option to reach out to your team via text will help you make a great impression. When your team delivers quick, high-quality customer service, your customers will feel more loyal to your brand and your customer retention rates will skyrocket.
But a higher retention rate is just the beginning. With text, businesses can set up automated campaigns to nurture their customers at different stages of the customer journey. For example, if one of your repeat customers hasn’t purchased from you in the past month, you can send them a text message that says something like: “Hey [Name], we miss you, so we’re offering you an exclusive discount. Use [code] this week only for [% off] all purchases.”
With the right tools in your toolkit, you can tap into a customer data platform and integrate it with a text message marketing platform to send automated text campaigns that’ll allow you to roll out promotional text messages based on triggers and conditions decided on by your team.
More Ways to Save Time
Texting is great, but there are other things you can do decrease response time and increase productivity. For example, businesses can create a dedicated knowledge base to help them address FAQs. Once you’ve established a knowledge base, you automate chatbots to direct your customers to those resources. Having a dedicated knowledge base to address common customer queries will not only help you increase customer satisfaction but also unburden your customer service department.
Add Podium to Your Marketing Toolkit
Podium makes it easy for local businesses to decrease their response time and increase productivity.
With Podium on your side, you can manage all your messages in one place, build powerful SMS marketing campaigns, cut down the number of customer service calls your team needs to hop on, collect payments seamlessly, and more.
Ready to see what all the hype is about? Start a 14-day free trial today.
