In-person conversations used to be how businesses built personal connections with customers. But as technology dismantled brick-and-mortars, digital channels – speedy, responsive, seamless – are now the preferred conversational choice for customer support, sales and more.
Chief among them, business texting is a simple, powerful and effective way for businesses to interact with today’s busy, digital-savvy consumer who demands convenience from their customer experience. By texting customers and giving them a chance to respond - in the same, familiar way we already do with our friends and family – you begin to develop a personal relationship, one text at a time.
Business texting does a lot of heavy lifting – engaging customers, building relationships, personalizing experiences, and increasing revenue – without breaking a sweat.
But one overlooked benefit is that texting offers you a safe and coachable way for your employees to interact with your customers, so you can always have the most compliant and productive conversations through text.
In highly-regulated markets operating under compliance measures and a lifecycle approach to customer engagement – think telecoms and financial institutions – knowing and coaching what language to use means safer and more productive conversations that drive long-term relationships and business results.
To help you get the most out of your texting campaign, we’ll explore the best practices of safe, compliant messaging – including some common missteps - and how to leverage your data to make your conversations and strategies more productive.
Words matter
The spontaneous nature of in-person conversations makes it difficult for companies to ensure their frontline employees are having “safe” conversations – that is, using accurate, brand and regulation-compliant language that sticks to a script, provides the necessary legal information and doesn’t overpromise.
Without insight into IRL or over-the-phone conversations, companies have no choice but to blindly trust that their teams are using best practices, not an ideal situation with new employees, complex issues, or troublesome customers.
Leading texting platforms solve conversational uncertainty and discretion by letting you apply language filters and rules across a variety of messaging vectors – per campaign, product, customer journey, employee, and more.
By placing direct control of its specific content in your hands, the message is exactly what needs to be delivered to the customer, at the right time. Business texting ensures your frontline staff have safe, brand-compliant conversations, avoid making unrealistic, inaccurate promises to the wrong audience, and create a positive, satisfying experience that connects with them on a personal, meaningful level.
Track, monitor, coach
Outside of a lurking, eavesdropping supervisor, in-person conversations can’t be tracked or analyzed for compliance and brand language – and therefore offer no opportunities to coach frontline employees.
At best, you can train them before in what to say, but once that conversation begins, they’re left on their own. And you're left in the dark, with no way of knowing what’s said or if protocols are followed.
Going off script is dangerously easy and any misstep can be potentially detrimental to creating the hallowed personal connection that drives everything from CX to bottom-lines.
Texting offers companies the option to track and monitor their staff's conversations with customers in real-time, an excellent opportunity for training and coaching. Trackable conversations can be analyzed for language, tone, style, compliance – any quality you deem coachable – as well identifying a customer’s “life events” from which to further personalize the conversation.
Monitoring is not just about the quality of conversations, but also quantity. Texting platforms give you easy access to a trove of data that can be analyzed to quantify your outreach, establish performance metrics, and show quick, measurable results to motivate and incentivize frontline sales teams.
DOs and DONTs
With language filtered and conversations tracked, business texting gives you better control and coaching over your messaging content and strategy. To help you further refine your messaging, avoid the following common missteps when trying to establish a personal connection with customers:
- Don’t be a blockhead. People tune out long, complicated messages, so don’t send a block of text. Keep your messages short and to the point.
- No sales (just yet). Without knowing what customers want or need, coming out of the gates trying to sell products or services feels transactional and inauthentic.
- No faking it. A generic or impersonal text blast is not a “conversation”. An authentic two-way conversation is personalized, so make every text relevant to their needs and their journey.
- Question mark? Personalized questions engage your customers by enticing them to respond. Full stop sentences, however, are about telling a customer instead of asking, so often go unanswered.
Instead of one-way, generic mass texting that hits a dead-end, two-way, personalized texting elicits a response from your customers. Conversation starters can be anything related to a customer’s current needs, including service updates, check-ins on how a product is working for them, or personalized offers based on their profile. And remember the secret recipe - short, personalized texts that include a question will almost always result in a better response rate.
Let’s talk!
Better data to analyze, consistently safer language and more compliant messaging, real-time trackable conversations, every word a training opportunity - business texting offers clear advantages over in-person and phone conversations.
Whether standardizing language for compliance, coaching your staff for better results, or establishing data-driven performance metrics, business texting makes your frontline conversations both safer and more productive.
Combining control and data with cutting-edge tech for seamless, optimized campaigns, business texting platforms can then scale these best practices across teams, geographies, and time zones to drive long-term growth, all while nurturing a personalized, one-to-one relationship with each of your customers.
Book a demo to explore all the ways you can have safer, more productive conversations with your customers!
