Text Takes Precedence as a Customer Service Preference
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But with that comes certain business challenges, Wettemann warns. "Companies need to be aware of what...the appropriate response time [is]," she says. "When we text, we assume a rapid response will follow."
To manage texts that come in when the company's contact center is closed, companies can set up their text routing systems with an automated response delivery system that lets the customer know that his message was received and that the company will follow up in the morning, Wettemann suggests.
Companies also need to be careful not to overautomate the text process. "You want a level of automation, but you always want to make a live agent available for a voice conversation if needed," Weborg advises.
The new breed of multichannel contact center solutions can help companies provide the right balance. Modern multichannel contact center suites enable organizations to communicate with their customers using a combination of automated and agent-assisted interactive text messaging dialogues. Text chats can transition seamlessly from agent to automation and vice versa, and texts that require special handling can be escalated to telephone agents when needed.
It's practically seamless to add other capabilities as well, Weborg states.
"If you already have skills-based routing, you can just link into the existing system," he says. "All of the analytics and other stuff that you're already using can be tied in and connected through existing systems.
"It's really simple to add text as another channel," he says. "It can be turned on very easily."
Text can also be integrated fairly easily into existing CRM systems.
With some systems, the integrations come built in, but more than likely, a simple third-party add-on will be required. PowerObjects' PowerSMS add-on for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, for example, can integrate a CRM system with third-party text messaging platforms from CallFire and Twilio, enabling users to send and receive text messages from within CRM systems to contacts, leads, or custom lists. They can even use their CRM workflows to automatically send text messages when cases are created or closed, for example. When recipients respond to the text messages they receive, the message can be recorded as a received activity in the CRM system.
Zoho CRM works directly with Clickatell.com to enable companies to send and receive SMS text messages directly from within their Zoho CRM systems. Businesses can see text histories and create text message templates, auto limits, custom internal notes, and more. All responses from customers can even be sent to designated email workflows and saved into the relevant contact histories.
The Cost Benefit
For businesses looking to implement a text channel, there are certain cost benefits. "The cost of texting is much lower than voice calls," Fujita-Yuhas says. "There are real nuts-and-bolts cost savings for businesses with texting."
For businesses that require a variety of voice features, such as voicemail detection, automated speech recognition, and text to speech, for their millions of voice calls per month, phone can cost four to eight times as much as texting.
Businesses can handle 10 times as many incoming texts as calls in the same amount of time. "And it's more efficient for the contact center, because one agent can handle multiple texts at once," Fujita-Yuhas points out.
An added benefit of texting over phone is that text is far easier to track and manage. Most mobile phones automatically store and archive text messages, while getting a transcript of a phone call would require more technology, including a call recording app.
The raw data that comes with text is easier to analyze, Weborg says, "because there aren't the same issues with accents, recognition errors, background noise, etc."
Running analytics on a text platform is much simpler and quicker, too, he adds, because the data is already in text format. For phone calls, an additional layer is needed to convert the voice to text before the data parsing and indexing can occur.
"There is just so much more that you can do with the text channel that you can't do with voice," Weborg says.
Among those abilities is sending photos and other multimedia content via multimedia messaging service (MMS). MMS extends the core SMS capability to enable businesses to deliver news and entertainment, scannable coupon codes, product images, videos, and other information. Unlike text-only SMS, commercial MMS can deliver a variety of media, including up to 40 seconds of video, multiple images via slideshow, or audio files.
The incorporation of MMS "will be a bit of a game-changer for the contact center," Weborg says.
In general, the text channel "could add more contact with the customer in so many ways," he concludes. "When people realize the channel exists, they will use it more often."
News Editor Leonard Klie can be reached at lklie@infotoday.com.