Reporting and analysis are a vital part of any marketing or customer service campaign, but especially for innovative tools like business SMS. Accurately measuring the success of your SMS campaign or customer interactions with data-based key performance indicators (KPIs) is the best way to assess both your campaign’s performance and your team’s performance. It’s also a great way to continually evaluate and update your business texting strategy.
However, 53% of large businesses state that they are not yet treating data as a business asset, even though the Harvard Business Review notes that “Analytical decisions and actions continue to be generally superior to those based on intuition and experience.” Business texting performance and customer experience data can help measure critical factors like channel success and business impact, and even lead to vital insights that inform business decisions.
Luckily, analyzing business SMS interactions is similar to analyzing results of most other campaigns or channels—with a few twists. Read on to learn how to measure success so you can prove the worth of your business text messaging services and make improvements for future efforts.
Choose Your Business SMS Objective
First, you’ll need to decide what you ultimately want to achieve with your SMS campaign or your services as a whole, depending on what you plan on measuring. This might be something you already decided when you began business texting, but if not, this is the perfect time to do it.
Your goal doesn’t have to be quantitative yet. It can be simple and even multi-faceted. Examples include:
- Example customer service objectives: Improved response times to customers, shorter resolution speed for customer issues, increased customer satisfaction, improved customer service team efficiency
- Example marketing objectives: Higher customer engagement and reply rates, more website traffic, heightened conversion rate, increased texting list size, higher SMS service value
Once you’ve decided on the objective or objectives of your business SMS campaign, you’ll need to determine a quantifiable way to measure your success.
Define Your Business SMS Campaign KPIs
Your key performance indicators (KPIs) should line up with your business SMS objective. Getting your KPIs to match your goals can take some planning, but there are various ways to measure the same thing and common industry benchmarks to utilize.
Customer service use cases: If your goal is to improve customer satisfaction, then first response times and average response times can help with that. Another popular KPI is resolution speed, measured by reviewing how long a chat is active (before it is closed by an agent). You can also measure team performance; with a business texting platform, you can track KPIs like number of chats per team member and response times. With these statistics, you can determine how efficiently your team is working and where they can improve.
Marketing use cases: If your goal is to cultivate a large business text messaging audience, measure list growth rates or customer opt-out rates. If your objective is to increase customer communications, measure incoming message volume as a percentage of overall message volume. If you’d like to increase customer engagement, measure response rates. If you want to ensure your SMS interactions are valuable, measure the opt-out rates—the more valuable the interaction, the lower the customer unsubscription rate.
Common KPIs include:
- Customer service use cases: Resolution time (how long before a chat is closed), first response time, customer response speed, agent response speed, number of chats per team member
- Marketing use cases: Customer subscription rate, customer unsubscription rate, list growth rate, outbound vs. inbound message volume, customer response rate
Track Business SMS Campaign KPIs
As soon as you determine which KPIs to use, you’ll need to figure out how to track them. With a business texting platform, this step is easy. Most top-grade platforms provide businesses with a quantified overview of customer engagement as well as team member engagement.
If you choose to use such a platform or already have one, ensure it can track common KPIs and display the data in a digestible format. The platform should also allow you to review charts based on a variety of parameters, such as by inbox, team member, metric, and timeframe.
Ideally, the platform should also allow you to export report data so that you can analyze it alongside data from other sources.
Without a business texting platform, some KPIs will be nearly impossible to measure—or it will take team members a long time to do so. Outside link measurement, like seeing how many people complete a texted survey, will be possible, and team members can manually count the responses they receive from customers. Otherwise, your team’s ability to measure KPIs would be limited.
In general, a combination of in-platform measurement and outside-platform measurement is best. For example, if your goal is to increase customer satisfaction, you could measure both customer service texting resolution times and the results of customer service surveys.
Comparing Business SMS Campaign Results
Finally, you’ll need to have a benchmark to which you can compare your business SMS campaign’s KPIs.
Avoid choosing a random benchmark based on what you think your team should be achieving. If you need a benchmark immediately for some reason, you can find industry benchmarks from various trade groups and online publications. However, because business texting is a relatively new phenomenon, this may prove difficult. Instead, take an initial measurement, then compare it with a later measurement to see whether your results improve.
For example, if your objective is to increase list growth, measure your list size one month, then measure it the next month to see if it has expanded. If your goal is to increase customer satisfaction, you may want to measure success based on a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey you send to customers. Send a pre-SMS-campaign feedback survey, then measure it against a post-SMS-campaign survey.
By comparing your current and past results, you’ll be empowered to measure success based on your unique, data-based standards.
Want to learn more about KPIs and business text messaging success measurement? We’re here to help.
