Your mind isn’t playing tricks on you — there’s a ton of people on their phones. In fact, SimpleTexting surveyed 1,400 people to prove it. Let’s just say the results are alarming.

• 81% of consumers check their text notifications within five minutes

• Nearly 30% of people check their texts within 60 seconds

• 90% of consumers text every day, and most check their messages more than ten times a day

• 80% say texting is the most important activity they do on their phones

With this much phone use, is it any wonder why businesses have started adding SMS texting to their marketing strategies?  It makes sense. After all, businesses want to reach customers where they are. And right now, they’re on their phones.

SMS text marketing is great for sending promos, notifying about in-store events, and giving order updates. And it’s seeing some great results.

• 91% are seeing higher conversion rates

• The average click-through rate is between 25% and 35%

• Businesses say that 11–20% of their revenue can be attributed to SMS marketing

SMS texting is expanding beyond marketing tactics. Now, it’s providing customer service and support. In fact, satisfaction surveys and customer service are the primary reasons businesses are using SMS marketing this year. And customers are surprisingly receptive to it. 79% opted to receive texts from businesses (an 11% increase compared to last year).

This is great news for your business! Now, you have an additional customer contact channel to interact with your customers. Let’s dive into some of the benefits of text messaging for customer service and support.

Check out these six ways to use SMS for business.

6 Benefits of Text Messaging for Customer Service and Support

1. It’s What Customers Want

Phone calls used to be the preferred method for interacting with businesses, but that trend is changing as technology evolves. Text messaging has emerged as the go-to method for communicating. Now, only 42% of people prefer phone calls.

According to one report, nine out of ten customers want their business to communicate via text. Another report found that 89% prefer texting with businesses, and 69% would switch to a company that offered text messaging as a communication channel.

Consumers want fast results, and text messaging is by far the fastest way to communicate. They don’t have to wait hours in a call queue or get transferred from agent to agent. Plus, it allows businesses to engage in real-time conversations with customers. By meeting these needs, you can increase customer satisfaction.

2. It Can Be Automated

I know what you’re thinking, “I don’t have the time to create, send, and respond to hundreds of texts a day on top of everything else.” I get it! Luckily, technology has come a long way, especially with AI and automation. Long gone are the days of manually sending and responding to messages from each customer.

Now, you can create templates for responses. And you can automate welcome texts, appointment reminders, shipping and delivery notifications, and more. You can also add a series of automated questions the customer has to answer before they’re transferred to an agent.

This saves time for customers and agents. Customers don’t have to repeat themselves over and over again. And agents have a better understanding of the issue they’re dealing with. You can even automate replies for after-hours inquiries.

It’s an absolute game-changer for customer service.

Bubble by Broadvoice lets you instantly connect with customers over text using your primary business number.

3. It’s Asynchronous

Last month, I started a customer service chat on my phone’s web browser about a shipment issue. I was waiting for a response when my next meeting started. No biggie — I could pick up the conversation when my meeting was done. Thirty minutes later, I opened the web chat only to see that it had timed out because I hadn’t responded in time.

Facepalm.

Customers are busy. Most people don’t have time to wait around on their phone or computer for a full customer service conversation. With text messaging, this isn’t an issue. You can read and respond to messages at your own pace, on your own time. And you never have to worry about it timing out or expiring. Plus, customers can connect with you 24/7, even on the go.

Learn more about why your business needs texting here.

4. It’s Convenient and Saves Time

Speaking of time, nobody likes waiting on hold. This is why text messaging is perfect. It doesn’t require a huge time investment and allows customers to send texts during their daily activities.

Let’s not forget how this benefits your employees. They’re empowered to handle several conversations at once because they aren’t tied to one time-consuming phone call at a time. This allows them to help more customers in a day, which is great for productivity and performance. And issues are resolved faster. It’s a win-win for your operations.

5. It’s Cost-Efficient

As a contact center manager, you’re always looking for ways to improve cost efficiency, reduce costs, and boost revenue. Text messaging for customer support is a quick and easy way to do this.

Did you know the average cost per customer service call is between $2.70 and $5.60? The average SMS message costs between $0.01 and $0.05 per message sent.

See? It’s less expensive to handle customer inquiries by text.

6. It Lets You Collect Customer Feedback

To deliver effective customer service, you have to know your customers. What do they like? What do they hate? Where can you improve? What are their pain points? What do they need?

You have to know what your customers think.

Customer feedback gives you insights into all this and more. You can figure out what you’re doing wrong (and what you’re doing right!). You can see where you need to improve. What steps to take next.

As you can guess, texting is a great way to collect customer feedback. And it doesn’t require a lot of effort on your part. You can automate surveys or schedule templated messages to send on specific days or after specific interactions.

The best part is customers are more likely to read and respond to texts. Research shows that the majority of text marketing messages are opened. And the response rate is nearly 45%. I know, it doesn’t sound like much. But it becomes significant when you consider that the open rate for emails is less than 20%. Now, add the fast response times with text messages — 90% respond within 30 minutes, and 50% respond within three minutes.

Texting is the clear winner.

Schedule a demo to learn more about business texting with Broadvoice.