Employees and customers like the speed and accessibility of text messaging. Unfortunately, texting through an employees’ personal phone number has limited functionality, forcing sales and customer support staff back to using email. Research shows that 19% of people will click a link in a SMS messaging campaign, compared to just 4.2% for emails.
Add CRM Features with Business Text Messaging
Clearly there’s a need for text messaging that allows business users to do more, and today’s business SMS messaging has the answer. Heymarket’s business messaging integrates with your existing CRM system’s contacts, calendars, and phone numbers. That means you can create contact lists and schedule text messages in advance. An employee can “set and forget” messages during downtime and have them sent at a time most convenient for customers.
To save time, employees can send group texts. To the customer, messages appear to be addressed only to them, with their name in the “To” field and the body of the text.
You can create templates for new-customer welcome campaigns, holidays, or promotions and re-use them as many times as you want. Keeping clients in the loop is simpler than ever, saving employees hours of time.
Advanced Features for Customer Support
With Heymarket’s business text messaging platform, you can assign workers to teams. Each team gets a shared inbox and a single phone number that customers can text. Because the entire team sees the messages, you can arrange for an employee to handle after-hours calls or assign team members to East Coast or West Coast hours, ensuring that customers get a response right away.
If someone goes on vacation, anyone else on the team can instantly pick up the message thread, so the customer never has to repeat a question or problem to someone new.
That could lead to better customer retention. An Accenture study found that 89% of customers become frustrated if they have to repeat their issue to multiple representatives. Ninety-one percent become frustrated when they have to contact a company multiple times for the same reason.
Business texting allows you to include professionally formatted photos, videos, and attachments within a text instead of directing customers to a different application. For example, if a customer has a question about how your product works, you can text an instructional video, increasing the chances that the customer will watch it immediately and resolve the issue during the first contact.
You can also use your calendar to schedule client appointments, providing choices that fit your schedule. The client simply chooses the best time and clicks a link to confirm.
A dashboard allows you to see who has opened messages and which photos or videos they’re viewed, helping you to customize follow-up for maximum effectiveness. You can also store conversations as searchable .txt files, giving you new insights on what your customers want.
You may have a great CRM system, but your employees need to respond to customers right away, and text messaging is the best way to do that. Business text messaging works with your CRM system to drive employee productivity to a higher level while giving customers a first-rate experience.
