Would you text a customer service desk?
How do you choose between direct mail, email, and multiple social media platforms? Email is still the most commonplace method to connect with customers and has seen a resurgence with email readily accessible via smartphones. However, once you have navigated junk, clutter, unfocused, and ever more sophisticated filtering to reach your customers inbox, your message finds itself in good company with more than 100 billion consumer emails sent each day and office workers receiving an average of 121 emails a day.
Social media has become a double-edged sword. On the one hand, companies use social media to build sophisticated brand identities and personalities. On the other, uncontrolled negative social media comments can do more damage and outweigh the benefits of all that brand building in the first place. Social media campaigns can be costly, complex and difficult to measure. The first question being, which social media platform is the one for your brand, or should you attempt to maintain a presence across multiple platforms? So, what is the answer?
Engage Australia, believe that mobile messaging is one of the key ingredients to successful customer engagement. Both of the tech giants, Facebook and Google, seem to agree, launching new Business Chat initiatives, whereby customers can mobile message businesses with customer service enquiries. When either of these two companies do anything, it is prudent to sneak a peek.
Dig a bit deeper and you will find that simple SMS messaging is still king. Natively operational on all mobile carriers, phone operating systems and mobile handset brands, without having to download an application, when it comes to customer engagement, SMS is simple and ubiquitous, and the stats are impressive:
- the average open rate for SMS is 98%
- 90% of SMS are read within the first three minutes
- 82% of respondents say they open every SMS text message they receive. **
- 64% of consumers believe that businesses should use SMS messages to interact with customers more often than they currently do. *
Customers also stated that SMS services helped them to ‘feel like they are cared about’ and ‘feel in control’ of the services they received*.
About Engage Australia
Engage Australia is part of the Oxygen8 Group. The Oxygen8 Group was formed in 1999 UK and was one of the pioneers of interactive services for the media world, such as competitions and voting. Visit www.engage-au.com
Sources:
*The SMS Advantage Report by SAP & Loudhouse Research, September 2014
** Shift Communications Consumer Survey, September 2015
*** Forrester Report – SMS
