With crowded mailboxes and inboxes, it can be hard to get a customer’s attention. Customer preference has changed over the years, but most still want to stay in the loop of current events. That’s why thousands of companies across the world use business texting to reach their audiences.
Texting is a powerful communication channel. A recent study showed that 98% of SMS messages are opened, compared to just 22% of emails. Whether you’re a major tractor outlet, or a small-town business, there’s plenty of reasons why you should consider business texting integration.
Here are our top 5 ways to use business texting
Reminders and Scheduling
One of the most useful startup business text integrations is giving folks the ability to schedule something and set reminders through text messages. Some business owners rely on their staff to manually make phone calls to remind customers of upcoming appointments, or to ask if they’re going to be late. With an automatic text-based scheduling, you can remind customers of an upcoming service appointments and allow customers to confirm upcoming appointments automatically.
Your contacts would probably prefer to text than pick up a phone call from a stranger, anyway.
Payment and Billing
People are switching to online and mobile payment methods for everything from their bank accounts, car payments, insurance, and even daily shopping. If you offer financing where a customer can set up a regular payment to come in, an automatic text reminder can help them avoid late payments. They can also inquire on their remaining balance through SMS. Keeping things easy and transparent makes your business look more trustworthy.
Time Sensitive Alerts
Event planners have been wildly successful using SMS messaging to engage and entertain their attendees. You can send reminders before the event, last-minute updates, and even request feedback after all your guests go home. If you’re selling big-ticket items, you can even schedule reminders to ask them if they need an oil change, or a reminder that a factory warranty may expire soon.
In the case of promotions, it’s better to wait for the biggest, hottest deals of the season to reach out in a text. Making that text shoutout is still a valuable attention-grabber.
You can even send out job alerts!
Text-based Customer Service.
Since so many are on mobile these days and often prefer texting to calling, so there’s a good chance people are already trying to text your landline for customer service questions. With a good text-to-landline service, you can have those texts forwarded to a web browser. You’ll catch questions that were previously lost, and invite possible customers to reach out with SMS instead of by calling directly.
You can also just offer customer service via text message. Instead of keeping them on hold on the phone, let them text a question and send an answer as soon as you know exactly what you want to say. If you’re a better speaker than writer, you always have the option of using the voice-to-text feature offered on most smartphones to dictate your replies. All the convenience of texting without having to poke at a screen.
Order Confirmations and Delivery Updates
While massive multi-national giants like Amazon have the ‘Order Tracking and Notifications’ thing down to an art, small businesses can also do their part in keeping their customers informed. If your inventory shipment schedule is a generally small, this could be a manual process. However, certain inventory systems allow you to integrate with business text messaging services to provide automatic updates to your clients. Anything to make the process easier for you and less stressful for your customer.
Business texting services may take a bit of getting used to, but they’re a valuable asset for any size business.
If you’re interested in learning more about the business texting services we offer, or you want to schedule a demo, we’d be excited to hear from you! Schedule a demo here, or just give us a call.
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