From SMS and iMessage to WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, messaging has become an invaluable aspect of everyday life, significantly changing how we communicate with others. Over 2.5 billion use Facebook every month, Instagram has over 1 billion users, WhatsApp boasts over 1.5 billion users, and Twitter has over 330 million users.
In addition, over 5 billion people still use SMS. Therefore, we cannot ignore the significance of conversational messaging for keeping in touch with family, friends, and colleagues. We cannot also ignore the fact that these communication tools offer an array of increased engagement and differentiation opportunities for businesses of any size.
Here are a few benefits of conversational support for your business.
Messaging Improves Customer Experiences
Every client’s journey starts with discovering a new service or product that fulfills a specific desire or need. Clarifying product features, answering questions, or addressing concerns enables you to guarantee the client that they’re making the right decision. Once they have bought your product, they may need help to navigate through discounts, delivery, or warranty options.
When onboarding, they may need assistance with the configuration or set up, finding and fixing issues, or usage. In these examples, text message marketing is an easy, seamless, and quick way for customers to engage with you, irrespective of the phase on their customer journey. Allowing customers to become a part of a two-way conversation using the tool of their choice makes communication more engaging and improves customer experience, helping you develop relationships with your clients.
Messaging Increases Engagement Regardless of Location
Your customers want you to respect their time. They don’t want to make a queue and wait to communicate with an agent unless it’s crucial. They don’t want to listen to messages telling them to call back another time when you resume business operations. Conversational support eliminates these problems and allows the conversation to begin immediately. Although phone and email have been the go-to mediums for customer service, most people perceive them as asynchronous, slow, or overly formal.
Combining messaging with current channels reduces outbound and inbound interactions. It means customers can engage with you from anywhere at any time. Whether they’re at home, in a restaurant, or on vacation, they can get in touch with you immediately, give you all the required information, and find the answers they’re searching for in real-time.
Messaging Improves Agent Experience
Besides increasing customer satisfaction, text message marketing can improve agent experience. Businesses can provide messaging channels incorporated into their website or a mobile app. In addition, you can automate conversational messaging channels, with messages giving self-service options or triggering automatic actions depending on consumer response.
As a result, the work of your customer support team will become optimized and streamlined, alleviating the pressure of addressing customer queries or solving issues in a specified timeframe. This will allow your customer support team to focus on nurturing relationships and building your brand.
Messaging helps Cut Down the Cost of Support
Implementing conversational support is an investment. However, over time, it can help your business reduce customer service costs by cutting down on hiring staff that requires additional training, infrastructure, and salary expenses. This will allow you to direct your money to other crucial areas of your business without affecting the customer experience.
Messaging helps Attend to more Customers
When using phone and email, managing several clients simultaneously can be challenging. This makes your clients wait longer and increases stress levels among your employees as the number of tickets increases. With a messaging system, your customer support team can attend to several people at the same time without worrying about the rising number of customer calls and chats. As they wait for a response from one, they can check another chat and respond promptly to that client’s problem. This will result in a smoother operation with many clients assisted.
In conclusion, conversational support helps redefine the customer experience and make your business operations more efficient. When you automate processes through messaging, there’s less to no room for errors. In addition, your brand can increase its appeal to consumers by establishing an interactive chat experience and ensuring clients get the answers they want in real-time. As a result, your customer support team will address customer issues quickly.
