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Why SMS Alone Is Not Enough For Your CX Strategy
It’s no question that text messaging is an effective way to reach your customers. But when you need a secure way to engage, educate, or guide them through an important lifecycle event, it may not be enough.
The Benefits of Text Messaging for the Modern Enterprise
Customers today are checking their mobile devices constantly. And as smartphones keep getting, well smarter, it’s no wonder companies are trying harder – and spending more – to integrate mobile messaging and communications into their customer experience and service efforts. Customers today expect easy and efficient relationships with the key businesses in their lives, and a big part of that includes communicating with them on their preferred devices. In fact, 9 out of 10 customers say they want businesses to communicate with them via text.
The allure and potential of text is hard to deny given its high response rates and ability to cut through clutter. But texting by itself has limitations that businesses should consider when designing their customer experience strategies.
The Limitations of Text-Alone Solutions for B2C Communications
Businesses today feel increased pressure to deliver next-generation customer experiences. Paramount to that is understanding when and how to use the right technologies. Here’s a few instances where communicating with your customers may require something more than a text-only solution:
- Security is a priority: Messages and communications sent via SMS are not password protected or HIPAA compliant. Companies in highly-regulated industries like healthcare and banking often need to deliver critical information to customers about claims, products, or account updates, but this type of information is sensitive and requires a level of security that SMS by itself doesn’t support.
- Requires multiple, dynamic steps: For multistep customer journeys – things like application pull-through, account set-up, or service upgrades, a text can feel fragmented and one-dimensional. Add in the need to educate and communicate with your customers at multiple points, and you’ve got a recipe for a customer experience flop. Customers are used to dynamic, personalized experiences that can’t be solved with simple text solutions.
- It needs more than 160 characte: See what we did there 🙂 Now you see how annoying it can be when you try to jam a detailed, important message to your customers into a limited space. As a result, businesses are limited to low-value messages and a heavy reliance on abbreviations when they use text only solutions for customer communications.
It’s no question that text messaging is an effective way to reach your customers. But when you need a secure way to engage, educate, or guide them through an important lifecycle event, it may not be enough. So what’s a company to do? Relay Network, a 2017 Gartner Cool Vendor, offers a different approach by connecting enterprises with their customers on a single, private web app built for guided service. Relay’s mobile customer experience platform helps businesses establish a high rate of connectivity to their customer base and extend their digital reach beyond standard text based solutions. Using Relay’s technology, businesses can design a digital customer experience — individually and at scale — through a series of triggered messages and actions that fulfill these key moments more effectively.
Click here to learn more about Relay and how it can help accelerate your mobile customer engagement efforts and easily solve customer needs, individually and at scale.
