People are busy, often going from meeting to meeting at work, chasing after their kids, running errands, or out and about with friends and family. Moments when they have to get in touch with the customer service call center of a company is met with dread, because they don’t have the time or energy to call, wait on hold, and be passed around from one customer service agent to another to solve their problem. Sometimes, even a simple phone call can seem inconvenient, and the best way to stay up-to-date, or to communicate with a company, is through a simple SMS, or Short Message Service, text message.
Here is why and how your company can implement simple, convenient, and effective SMS call-back technology into your customer service and call center strategy. Continue reading
Text or talk? Voice conversations are still critical, but data shows that the former is becoming a bigger part of customer service interactions. This trend is driven partly by consumer preferences and partly by companies striving to lower costs. Companies are also leaning towards text because of the promise of increased automation, which is easier to do once a conversation has shifted to text.
Big question: How should text-based communication work alongside voice for customer service? In the dark ages, the only answer to this was email, in its own silo, and a call center, in its own silo. Then real-time chat came along. And then messaging, powered by massive platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp, made an appearance. Meanwhile, driving in its own lane, is good ‘ol SMS.
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Some quick history: 10 years ago, I attended a conference called Emerging Communications (eComm). It was an eccentric and inspiring collection of people focussed on the next chapter of voice and telecom technology. (It came on the heels of the “Voice 2.0” movement but with a broader vision.) The shared vision there was that a wave of innovation was coming because communication functionality would soon be as easy to access as web functionality (I’ll circle back to “the vision” at the end of this post).
A year ago, the CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) space seemed settled into comfortable middle-age. Twilio had won the game in terms of “API for sending messages and making calls”. Nexmo had been acquired by Vonage. Tropo by Cisco. Zang by Avaya.
