Despite the widespread success of SMS and the fact that billions of text messages are sent each day around the world, most people in the business sector still think that SMS can only be used as a marketing tool and not for customer support. 

Based on research by Statista, only seven percent of customers say they’ve used SMS to communicate with a business. 

This means that even though SMS is also a powerful mode of communication for customer services, still many businesses are not taking full advantage of SMS to boost their customer service and engagement.

SMS customer support is any support provided by a company to a customer via text messaging. It is completely virtual and requires no face-to-face interaction of verbal communication. 

A study conducted by Gigaom showed that on average text messages are read 98% of the time, significantly higher than emails, which is only 22%. This shows that customers are comfortable with SMS. 

Therefore it is time for businesses to become familiar and invest in this communication channel too.

Build loyalty from text conversation with your customers

Research conducted by RingCentral shows that 79% of the customers are unhappy with their current customer services available to them, 89% of people want another customer services option, and 78% of people who text wish they could have a text conversation with a business. 

SMS is a quick and convenient way to communicate a problem. Using this channel, your customer service agent can respond to the customers faster than they can do with live calls. 

Not only that, SMS also allows your customer to record the conversation, whereas with live calls, the recorded conversations are only available to the customer service agent. 

Texting puts the power of communication in the hands of the customers, therefore increasing loyalty, satisfaction, and happiness from the customers.

Understand what your customers want by conducting polls

If customers have a bad experience with business, only 1 out of 26 people will decide to complain, a study by GrooveHQ. 

While 91% of others will decide to never use your business ever again. This shows how important good customer service really is. 

SMS A2P technology provides a neutral platform where customers can feel free to express their true opinions about your business. 

You can use SMS to conduct polls to better understand how satisfied your customers are with your business. Not only providing a safe environment for your customers to be honest, 

SMS is also a great tool for two-way communication with your customers, because it has high response rates of 45%, significantly higher when compared to email which is only 6%.

Reduce opportunity loss with reminder messages

If you run a service-oriented business, you can use SMS to send a simple appointment reminder that can help reduce no-shows and enhance customer experience. 

For e-commerce, SMS can also be used to remind your customers to complete their business transactions. 

Life can be busy sometimes and customers will really appreciate a little help from you to remind them of their appointments and necessities.

Overall good service earns customer loyalty and it is critical to your company’s success. SMS can be a great tool to boost customer experience and help you build services that will delight your customer base. 

SMS is convenient, flexible, and personal, allowing you to build meaningful and impactful conversations with your customers.