Improving Customer Service with International SMS

Whether you’re running a small business or a corporation, local and international SMS could help you improve your customer service, thereby enabling you to fuel customer retention.

One of the key concerns for many businesses is customer retention. This is especially important following the recession – consumers started exercising discretionary thrift, focusing on price whilst expecting the same quality. In addition, they’ve started listening more to the opinions of friends, family and 3^rd party sources. This provides a problem for those businesses who do not have appropriate customer-facing measures in place. Luckily local and international SMS text messaging can provide businesses of any size with the means to provide an improved customer service at a relatively low cost.

One of the advancing trends among consumers is the expectation of a self-service environment made available by those companies who they transact with. The reason for this is also related to the recession – job losses were a constant fear and subsequently consumers had to work harder, having less time to deal with customer service representatives of those companies they transacted with. Businesses who provided consumers with a low-touch self-service environment gave them what they wanted, thereby standing out among their competitors. How can your business stand out above your competitors with local and international SMS?

Because of the simplicity of text messaging, you can provide your customers with a customer service text messaging interface that can either handle the queries or direct them to a destination where their queries can be handled. This will give customer the opportunity to use the system in their own time and lighten the load on customer service representatives. Companies who expect high volumes and different types of messages, can provide their customers with a keyword functionality – the keyword obviously directly related to their query. Take care to note that it is important to determine which text messaging option will suit your purposes best: local or international SMS text messaging.

Things to consider include:

1. Will you require your customers to respond? If so, then you might need to register a local SMS account and a corresponding short code in each destination country.
2. If you don’t require your customers to respond (for example, if you’re going to direct them to a website) and if the bulk of your customers are local clients, then international SMS messages can be sent from your local account.

For more information, please refer to our international SMS page.

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Tags: CRM, customer retention, customer service, international SMS, local SMS