From SMS to live chats, messaging is becoming an important part of different companies’ sales and customer service strategy. Many major brands have adopted some form of messaging to assist customers prior to, during, and even after a sale has been made. This powerful feature has the capability to help companies both drive sales and increase customer satisfaction.
Despite the rising popularity of messaging features like SMS, live chats, and social media messaging, it’s important to adopt this strategy in the most effective way. Here are a few best practices to ensure that your messaging strategy helps your customers, your employees, and your revenue. 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.
The world of customer service is ever expanding, making it a complicated and dynamic space to navigate. With new communication channels appearing and evolving every year, it’s a challenge to understand how they relate to each other, and how they should work together. New terminology can help our thought process, if we all agree on the meaning. Conversely, ambiguity about words like “digital” or “chat” or “call” makes the navigation harder.
