It’s no secret that next-gen consumers like to text with friends and even family rather than phone them. At Fonolo, we’ve been wary of reading too much into channel preference data and cohort studies, but there is no denying that SMS is becoming a more significant part of customer service interactions. In fact, by 2020, around 50 million consumers will opt-in to receive business SMS. According to CTIA, there were 1.5 trillion text messages sent in 2017 alone.
While consumer-to-consumer SMS is already ubiquitous, the medium is gaining rapid popularity for B2C and B2B interactions, including for customer service. Businesses are getting the message, pun intended, and are starting to engage and serve customers through this channel. Despite the popularity, SMS remains a relatively new domain where the dos and don’ts for its success are just beginning to emerge.
To help you keep any SMS faux-pas to a limit, we’ve put together these five customer service messaging do’s and don’ts.
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.
Everyone involved in customer service wants to understand consumer channel preference. Otherwise, how can you allocate resources between phone, email, chat, SMS messaging and social channels?
Over the past year, there has been growing attention paid to the role SMS might play as part of the contact center mix. One reason for this is there are now several cloud services that provide easy platforms on which to develop SMS-driven interactions, e.g. 
