Optimise the customer experience with valuable insights and direct live support via SMS

What does good customer service entail? Being accessible for your customers? Resolving queries? Sharing information? Helping out when there's trouble? Having personalised conversations? Is it perhaps all of the above?

Offering good customer service means offering a good customer experience. Regardless of the reason your customers reach out for support, the experience that they have with your business should be frictionless, fast, effective, and personal. Deploy the right tools, reduce handling times, and be accessible for your customers on their preferred channels.

Why SMS?

SMS is one of the oldest text messaging services. It launched in the 1990's, and it's still going strong today. As of 2023, there are almost 8,9 mobile phone subscriptions worldwide, which exceeds the global population! This is because a growing number of people currently has more than one subscription, often for various different reasons. For example a work versus a private phone subscription. This creates a huge opportunity for SMS messaging, which relies solely on a mobile service connection to send its messages. On top of that, all mobile phones have a native SMS app built in, which gives SMS an extensive global reach and makes it one of the most reliable messaging channels.

Be where your customers are

When providing customer support, it's important to be where your customers are. That means, be accessible on the messaging channels that your customers are already using and are familiar with.

Though the newer social messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram Messaging are incredibly popular (excluding some popular only in specific countries), there are still places where SMS is king. Sweden ranks SMS as the top used messaging channel, and in the US and Canada, SMS is also still widely used as the number one text messaging service. 92 million people use text messages in North America, which is 80% of the total population. The most people who send text messages in the world are located in China and India. China comes first with 1,081 million people and India second with 730 million. Though SMS may not be considered the favourite channel in those countries, these are still numbers to be reckoned with.

Does that mean that SMS customer support is only useful for those audiences? Not at all! SMS has the added benefit of being a native app which gives it an enormous reach. Even if it may not be the favourite or preferred channel of your target audience - not everybody has WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, or internet access. SMS a great fallback channel to make sure your customer service is accessible to the majority of your audience, even the ones without reliable internet access.

SMS customer support

Now, I can already hear you thinking: Customer support via SMS? How does that even work? Isn't SMS a one-way channel? SMS is often employed as a one-way or broadcasting channel, but it also allows two-way communication and support in the same way the other messaging apps do. For customer support, SMS can add value both as a one-way, and a two-way channel.

SMS support notifications

The most popular use case for SMS employs one-way communication: notifications. Sending announcements, alerts, and account updates is a valuable addition to any support strategy. Let your customers know when something changes in their account (settings) and alert them of new launches, security threats, outages - anything that may be relevant for your customers. This way, SMS can inform customers at scale, putting them at ease and relieving some pressure on your other customer support channels.

Live chat via SMS

Direct live customer support via SMS is accessible and quick. But how do you manage this with SMS? Two-way SMS support is often done via an SMS and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) integration, like our Mobile Service Cloud solution. By integrating SMS as a channel into an existing platform, managing the different chats becomes easy.

Live chat via SMS will give customers the experience of an informal, personal conversation and make sure that you offer your customers a personalised connection with your customer service representatives to fully enhance the customer experience.

Text messaging gave our customers a direct channel to our business. It felt like more of a conversation, rather than a series of information snippets.
- Norm Schneider, founder of Cash for Gold USA

Feedback via SMS

Want to improve the services you offer your customers to boost those customer satisfaction rates? Then you need to learn from their feedback. Send SMS surveys to customers and gather valuable insights in how they perceive your business and your services.

What makes SMS the perfect channel for this? It boasts open rates as high as 98% compared to email, which means that your surveys reach the phones of your audience directly. As many as 45% of people admit they will engage with branded text messages or surveys they receive.

With our SMS solution, you can create feedback pages and share the link via SMS. The input received will be added to your Customer Data Platform directly, so you'll have everything in one overview!

Enhance your customer service with SMS

Consider SMS as part of your service communication strategy. Check out CM.com's SMS solutions below, and feel free to reach out to one of our experts to discuss the possibilities for your business.