Why Home Services Companies Are Switching from Phone Calls to Business SMS

Home services workers using business SMS on phone

The on-demand home services market is booming. Currently estimated at $400 billion, this industry includes everything from cleaning to furniture assembly businesses—and continues to expand as entrepreneurs develop new ideas for modern consumers. As home services businesses grow, they’re experiencing new challenges, like overwhelmed administrative teams. Realizing that traditional customer communication methods, like phone calls, aren’t working, they’re turning to business SMS for help. 

While phone calls are useful for certain tasks, like managing complex customer issues, business texting is overwhelmingly more efficient at day-to-day tasks, like sending out notifications, confirming appointments, or managing home services scheduling. 

Why exactly are so many companies switching from phone calls to business SMS for their primary client communications? Read on to find out. 

Business SMS Is More Convenient for Clients 

Texting is an astonishingly popular channel with customers. Because most Americans carry their phones with them all of the time, texting is, naturally, the best way to get in touch with them. Ninety-eight percent of SMS messages are read, 90% of texts are read within the first three seconds of receipt, and the average response time for a text is 90 seconds. Comparatively, email has an average open rate of 20%, a response rate of 6%, and an average response time of around 90 minutes. In fact, clients specifically want to use business SMS when contacting their favorite brands: 89% of consumers want to use a messaging channel to communicate with businesses.

Business SMS Offers a Personal Touch—Without the Hassle

Phone calls are undeniably personal, which is great for communications that require an extra amount of delicacy or tact. (Think: conflict resolution and confidential information.) However, this personal touch comes at a huge cost—time. Alternatively, business SMS platforms use merge tokens to incorporate custom fields, empowering businesses to personalize each outgoing message. With this tool, home services administrators can send key messages like notifications and reminders including personal information like names and dates of service, making it seem like they were sent individually. 

Business SMS Offers Varied After-Hours Management Possibilities

Home services teams can set up voicemail recordings for those customers who call after hours, but these messages are often general. When the business line is busy, clients calling in have no idea when they can expect to receive a reply. Business texting services offer home services companies the opportunity to offer varied responses for when their teams are busy. For example, teams can set up a during-business-hours auto reply that responds to incoming texts with a polite message listing average response times. After-hours replies can be set up based on keywords. Clients sending a text with the word “reschedule” can be redirected to a scheduler, while clients sending a text with the word “late” can be redirected to an operations manager. After-hours replies can also respond to clients reaching out at specific times; for example, businesses can set up a holiday-themed reply for those who text in on July 4th each year.

Business SMS Saves Time for Administrative Staff

Woman on ladder.

An employee can only make so many calls in a single day. Not so with business SMS: many routine texts can be sent in a simple one-to-many message, which allows administrative staff to create a single text template and send it to a list. Advanced business SMS platforms then automatically customize each message with merge tokens based on the custom fields. With this useful tool, each client receives a personal text. For administrative staff, this can be a huge time-saver. While a team member can call around one hundred clients for notifications in a day, the team member can easily text those clients in about ten minutes with a mass text.

Business SMS Is More Manageable for Scaling Companies

Home services companies are scaling at unprecedented rates. This means that administrative teams have to manage more scheduling, customer questions, and other vital tasks than ever before. While the only way to scale phone calls is to hire more employees to make those calls, business texting empowers administrative teams to scale with ease. Administrative teams can send unlimited mass texts at once, manage incoming messages from all channels (including third-party apps) in a single, shared inbox, and save those messages for later review if needed. This empowers home services companies to scale with ease. 

Business SMS Provides a Convenient Channel for Requesting Reviews

When 91% of people regularly or occasionally read online reviews and 84% of people trust online reviews just as much as personal recommendations from friends, it’s important for home businesses to prioritize getting reviews. However, it can feel inappropriate to call a client to ask them to leave a review. Alternatively, texting a client with a link to an online review site is fast and appropriate—as well as more convenient for clients. 

 

Ready to make the switch to business SMS? Try our business texting service for free today.

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