- Text messaging services and applications (such as SMS, iMessage, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger) have seen explosive growth over the last decade. They are an entrenched part of consumers’ daily lives. For many demographics, text messaging rather than audio calls is the preferred medium of communication via smartphone.
- Despite the popularity of text messaging services and applications with consumers, organizations have been slow to adequately incorporate these channels into their customer service strategy.
- The result is a major disconnect between the channel preferences of consumers and the customer service options being offered by businesses.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- IT must work with their counterparts in customer service to build a technology roadmap that incorporates text messaging services and apps as a core channel for customer interaction. Doing so will increase IT’s stature as an innovator in the eyes of the business, while allowing the broader organization to leapfrog competitors that have not yet added text-based support to their repertoire of service channels. Incorporating text messaging as a customer service channel will increase customer satisfaction, improve retention, and reduce cost-to-serve.
- A prudent strategy for text-based customer service begins with defining the value proposition and creating objectives: is there a strong fit with the organization’s customers and service use cases? Next, organizations must create a technology enablement roadmap for text-based support that incorporates the right tools and applications to deliver it. Finally, the strategy must address best practices for text-based customer service workflows and appropriate resourcing.
Impact and Result
- Understand the value and use cases for text-based customer support.
- Create a framework for enabling technologies that will support scalable text-based customer service.
- Improve underlying business metrics such as customer satisfaction, retention, and time to resolution by having a plan for text-based support.
- Better align IT with customer service and support needs.