SMS texting is part of everyday communications, as the vast majority of consumers worldwide have access to this capability on their mobile phones and people often send more text messages than voice calls or email. Texting has also changed from a short one-way communication to an ongoing conversation between people, and consumers are now expecting this same fast easy communication with the companies they choose to do business.
Having two-way text messaging to provide effortless service is essential to keeping customers satisfied. SMS/text notifications are ubiquitous—from doctor appointment reminders to credit card fraud notifications, they are commonly used to send messages, alerts, and reminders. All too often, however, the message only goes one-way and the customer cannot reply with a question or text back anything other than a confirmation code or a request to stop receiving such messages. Or, the customer is provided a phone number to dial for further assistance.
With our omnichannel contact center solution, your call center can facilitate engaging, real-time, two-way conversations between the agent and customer. Industry luminaries like Gartner expect ongoing, persistent two-way text messaging (often referred to as “asynchronous messaging”) to actually surpass the chat channel in the near future.
Customer experience management consultancy, COPC, is predicting that mobile customer interactions will increase by over 40% in the near future as consumers are on-the-go and need to connect through mobile channels like text.
Sending notifications messages, alerts, and reminders to on-the-go customers can be an efficient and convenient means of communication. But all too often, consumers experience frustration because they are only offered one-way messaging or extremely limited response options. Examples include the restriction to text back only a confirmation code or a request to stop receiving messages.
Our cloud call center solution overcomes this limitation and enables effortless service by allowing customers to respond back to the business with a question and receive a real-time reply. So that the best resources respond to customers, you can specifically set skills by agent so that consumers are only routed to agents that are skilled at text interactions.
Our user interface blends all media channels—including SMS/text voice, web chat, email, social messengers, video chat, and bots—to provide a true omnichannel contact center solution. All customer interaction requests are routed to our easy-to-use Agent Desktop application. This provides a single user interface where agents can view interactions and communicate with customers on every communications channel simultaneously. A single view of the customer’s journey empowers your agents to offer easy, personalized omnichannel service with the complete journey history at their fingertips. This ensures a consistent experience across all channels, improves speed of resolution, and ultimately improves CSAT and NPS.
Our cloud contact center solution allows SMS/text messages to be routed to agents logged in to Agent Desktop, where they can accept and reply to customer messages in their context and handle multiple interactions at the same time. While waiting for customers to reply to SMS/text messages, agents are able to respond to other interaction requests, resulting in improved productivity.
Text messaging is invaluable for private communications in public (e.g., texting is a good way to pass the time on a train or while waiting for a doctor), for multitasking, or for simply having a conversation at your own pace. Offering customer service over inbound text messaging will increase customer satisfaction and resolve issues faster.
Agents can access a number of easy-to-use capabilities from Agent Desktop to facilitate engaging and helpful responses to SMS customer inquiries. This includes capabilities such as accessing Knowledge Base information, using canned responses, getting AI-recommended suggestions, sending and receiving files attachments, receiving the customer’s location, transferring the SMS interaction to another agent, and much more.
If customers text your contact center after hours, they have the option of leaving a message and receiving a text back.
A number of tools enable supervisors to help agents during SMS interactions. This includes quality management to measure CSAT, sentiment on any channel, grading, screen monitoring, and so forth.
Our cloud contact center software allows you to record SMS interactions and provide actionable data that your team can use to improve services, boost agent performance, and increase customer satisfaction.
IVR automation scenarios also afford the chance to send simple satisfaction surveys to customers after contact, helping your contact center to gain valuable insights into agent and service performance for each interaction across all channels.
Streamline SMS Journeys and Routing to Agents for Enhanced Effectiveness.
The customer journey can be easily configured to gather data before the customer even connects with an agent and a screen pop is provided. Agent effectiveness is enhanced because this eliminates the need to identify the customer and find out what kind of help is needed.
This capability is enabled by SMS services that are configured and managed in our powerful Contact Center Administrator application. The specific details determining which agent receives which messages are handled by Bright Pattern’s advanced journey-building application, Scenario Builder. Using these applications, services and routing can be automated to suit your business’s specific needs, whether that’s for routing priority customers, identifying customers and popping journey history to agents, or directing customers to agents with the skills to handle text messages.
