Did you know that 81% of millennials get apprehension anxiety before summoning up the courage to make a call?
So, if you want to speak to that portion of your customer base (those born between 1981 and 1996), you’re much better off talking to them via text. If you look at the stats, the younger somebody is the less likely they are going to be comfortable having a customer interaction via a voice call. The youngest end of the spectrum is the customer of the future, and that customer isn’t going to want to call you. This isn’t to say that messaging doesn’t help your older customers either, some may be hard of hearing and not be able to comfortably use a phone, some might have anxiety over what they need to talk to you about and feel more comfortable doing so via a message.
In this article, we will illustrate different customer support interactions in a variety of industry verticals, and how the right type of messages can help raise the level of customer service.
Banking — Lowering Costs for Customers
Malik is an account holder with Geronimo Money Services. He’s had to make a last-minute emergency journey to visit his family in Australia and left without making many preparations, such as telling his bank that he’s going to be using his debit card on the other side of the world.
When he lands he tries to buy lunch but his card is declined. Due to suspected fraud, Geronimo Money Services have blocked his card, as they didn’t know he’d be travelling to Australia. Malik needs to use his card ASAP so that he can hire a taxi, but calling his bank internationally will have an astronomical cost — not something he’s prepared to pay after just paying for a last minute flight.
Malik goes to his bank’s website and sees that they offer customer support via Viber, his preferred messaging app. He logs in, authenticates himself with some security questions and is able to get the card unblocked all while using the free airport wi-fi. This turns a big prospective cost for Malik into a free and simple text chat via his favourite app. He’s even able to switch conversations to his family group chat to let them know what’s going on without losing touch with his customer service representative, something that web-based support chats often struggle with.
While all of your costs to your customers are within your control, you can’t control how much it will cost a customer to call you. And if this customer is in a foreign country on holiday this cost could be very high. If you don’t offer another option for customers to contact you if they need to, then you might cause some friction that your customers could do without.
Retail — Don’t Forget the Cake!
Sarah’s partner Lisa has a big birthday coming up. To commemorate the occasion Sarah wants to order a special birthday cake for Lisa with a photograph of their wedding day on it from her favourite store, Good Munchies & Sweets. She checks their website and sees that she’s able to order via messaging, and sends them a message to discuss what she wants. Because both Sarah and her bakery of choice are using RCS messaging she’s even able to send the photo she wants on the cake directly to them. When they complete the order they offer to send Sarah a reminder when it’s time to collect the cake, which Sarah accepts.
Two weeks later and it’s finally cake day. Good Munchies & Sweets sends her an RCS message to let her know it’s time to pick it up, but there’s a problem. Sarah is out of the house doing preparations for the party and has run out of mobile data, so the message doesn’t get to her. Luckily for her Good Munchies & Sweets are using a CPaaS service that has fallback options, so when the RCS message is not delivered the system automatically sends her an SMS with the same information.
Sarah is able to reply to the SMS just as if it was the same RCS conversation she’s been having and arrange a time to pick the cake up.
Offering rich messaging options like RCS, Viber, WhatsApp will allow you to exchange more than just text, like images or links. This is crucial for many businesses. Imagine how difficult it would be to explain a broken computer over text rather than sharing an image of the damage.
Also in this example we talk about using another CPaaS feature, fallback options. This is another vital feature for many businesses. Imagine how much better your customers’ opinion will be of your service if you can always ensure they receive every important message.
Events — No More No Shows
Alex is an account manager for Gold Marketing Solutions and his company is running a big marketing conference that he’s responsible for bringing a lot of clients and prospective clients to. Alex wants to talk to every single contact he can, but it’s just too many people. Instead he works with his IT team to devise a chatbot and plugs it in via an API to his messaging service.
Alex sends out a personalised invite to all of his contacts, but sets it up on his end so that replies are dealt with by the chatbot. The chatbot is set up so that it offers choices to his contacts via keyword and then it has set responses using those keywords. He’s able to give his contacts the information they need, but gives all the more tedious administration elements of reserving tickets, giving directions and recommending nearby hotels to the chatbot.
Finally Alex sets up a reminder for his attendees to make sure that he gets as few no shows as possible. This is key as research shows that.
You can easily see the benefit here. Have hundreds or even thousands of simultaneous conversations without having to actually have those conversations yourself could save you hundreds of hours of administration time, and as we all know, time is money!
While setting up a chatbot isn’t simple, it can often pay huge dividends in time savings after being set up. For more information on chatbots see our article on the same topic.
Increase Customer Satisfaction, Save Time and Money with Two-Way Messaging
It’s all possible with the right two-way messaging approach. But even at it’s simplest and most basic implementation giving your customers more avenues to talk to you and get support or make purchases is only a good thing. Studies looking at customer behaviour when they’re able to communicate across multiple channels show that 62% of consumers who engage their favourite brands on higher numbers of channels make weekly purchases.
If you’ve read this article and you’re itching to get started with two-way messaging and all the other incredible features you get with GMS’ BCS CPaaS solution then you should get in touch with one of our experts today, they’ll be able to answer all of your questions.