Nearly 90% of customers waste a full 24-hour day on hold with contact centers each year. That’s not exactly a great brand experience, is it? When you buy the best SMS for your contact center, you accelerate response and resolution, creating important competitive advantage.

SMS messaging is also how your audience wants to communicate. 79% of consumers aged 18 – 34 prefer to contact companies using channels other than phone, and 55% of all consumers say they prefer to use messaging.

SMS messaging is the future of contact center success. So what are your options to get started?

4 Tips to Buy the Best SMS for your Contact Center

There are so many options for SMS text messaging in contact centers. Here are a few key things to think about when you’re reviewing SMS applications for your organization.

1. Respond immediately, keep customers up-to-date

Automated text messaging makes it simple to dramatically increase the responsiveness of your contact center. Be sure you can do the following with automated messaging:

• Create a case from an inbound text, then reply to your customer to confirm the case.
• Ask questions about the case so you begin the problem identification process even before a rep gets involved.
• Update customers at every step of the way so they are always informed as to status.

No more frustration with missed calls, slow responses or waiting on hold. Your customers will love it!

2. Maximize rep productivity

When your reps are more productive, you can respond to a higher volume of customer cases without adding resources. For example, reps using Converse handle 10X more cases than those using phone calls. How can you increase performance with text messaging?

• Alerts: Be sure agents receive automatic alerts for new conversations so you never miss a conversation again.
• Worklists: Provide every rep with a worklist of cases they need to respond to so they don’t have to search thru a volume of messages.
• 360˚ history: Be sure reps can review a full history of all conversations with each customer, across all permitted objects. This helps reps hone in on customer priorities to personalize the experience.
• Rapid Resolution: Your reps should be equipped with proven resolution templates to accelerate time-to-resolution.
• Intuitive: Reps need a simple interface for their messaging conversations. Why wrestle with technology when you’re solving customer problems?

3. Be sure your messaging application is seamless with your Salesforce CRM

A lot of applications claim to be native. That doesn’t mean they are seamless or simple. Here’s what to check.

• SImple configuration. No one should have to spend weeks coding to get messaging up and running. Be sure your app offers fast, simple configuration and deployment.
• Seamless data. Having to sync and manage two databases is not acceptable. Be sure your app stores all of its message history, audit trails and other data in your Salesforce database.
• Console integration. Your reps use Service Console or a Salesforce Console. Be sure your messaging app seamless integrates into their environment for fast time-to-messaging and ease of use.

4. Measure, analyze and adapt

There are so many ways to use messaging. Which is why it’s important to measure, then tune your approaches for optimal results.

• Rep and team metrics. Be sure you can track and analyze individual reps, team and overall center activity and performance with messaging, including time-to-resolution, volume handling, team effectiveness and overall messaging ROI.
• NPS or other scoring results. Whichever measurement you use, be sure your messaging app offers a seamless way to measure each customer’s experience then present that in analytics for review and improvements.
• Message performance. Be sure you can track and measure message delivery to optimize carriers and routing, and that you can track budget against results to optimize your message spends.

The Bottom Line

Messaging is the next channel for Service and Support. Yet not all messaging applications can support the needs of contact centers. Be sure you have the capabilities defined above as minimal requirements for your messaging app. You’ll enjoy better results, faster and more easily, when you take a bit of time to align your messaging strategy with the best possible solution.

If you haven’t yet adopted business text messaging for your service or support team and want to learn more,
schedule a demo and we’d be happy to share our expertise with you, answer questions and show you what text messaging can do for your contact centers.