Meet your customers where they are with SMS 

When your customer hears that familiar ping and looks down at their phone, what notification are they most likely to react to immediately? In all likelihood — it’s a text. With one swipe they can catch up on an order update, a deal your company is offering, or a question one of your Sales reps might have. 

Text messaging offers you a direct, immediate way to connect with your customers. If you’re using app-based notifications, there might be a few pit stops a customer has to make on the way to accessing that information. They might have to log in to your app, remember their password, verify their identity, open an authentication app, and input a code before they can see the content of that notification. 

Airkit gives companies the ability to incorporate text messaging into their customer communication and customer experience strategy easily using an intuitive digital CX platform. You can integrate with Airkit once and use text messaging in the best way that fits your business. Whether that’s sending Two Factor Authentication codes, appointment reminders, or updates — SMS is proving to be a key resource for digital-minded businesses. 

How one Airkit customer streamlined their call center with SMS 

AutoReturn uses Airkit to streamline a rather stressful process: getting your car back after it’s been towed. The biggest factor for all parties involved in car towing, from the government agencies that initiate the tow, to the towing company that retrieves the car, to the car owner, is speed. 

AutoReturn initially relied exclusively on their contact center agents to bridge the information gap between owner and towing company. But, with surging call volumes and only so many agents to field customer calls, AutoReturn wanted to find a faster, more scalable way of reaching out to customers. That’s when they turned to Airkit to add SMS to their contact center strategy. 

Using Airkit, AutoReturn was able to deflect customer calls away from their contact center to reduce cost, while serving their customers faster. When a customer calls AutoReturn, the odds are they’re trying to find out where their car is. Knowing that was the dominant customer need, AutoReturn designed a self-serve way for customers to find their car. Now, when a customer calls in, they can opt in to receive a link via SMS that prompts them to enter in their VIN and license plate to receive an update on the status of their car. 

After rolling out the new SMS-based CX flow, AutoReturn deflected 44% of calls and reported a 20% call volume decrease, giving their call center agents more time to focus on customers with more complex needs. 

SMS is the unsung hero of the contact center 

When you think of your contact center, you probably envision a call center agent on the phone. But, the key to running an efficient contact center is embracing the power of messaging channels like SMS. Here are some of the benefits you can look forward to when incorporating SMS into your contact center strategy:

1. Connecting with customers faster

SMS is asynchronous and instant. Using SMS, your customers can communicate with your company on their own timeline as they go about their day. Instead of finding the right window of time to potentially wait on hold, they can reach out and continue the conversation whenever they’d like. 

2. Cutting down your handle time

Using messaging channels like SMS to serve customers often reduces average time-to-resolution rates because messaging is so immediate. Additionally, agents can manage multiple SMS conversations at once as opposed to being locked into one customer conversation on a call. 

3. Serving more customers at scale

Incorporating SMS into your contact center not only enables you to manage more messaging conversations but it also frees up your agents to take more customer calls. Instead of using vital call center capacity to address low-priority customer issues, you can route those customers to a self-serve flow using SMS and save call center capacity for more complex customer needs. 

Take advantage of SMS in your call center using Airkit. If you’d like to learn more about building better digital CX, get in touch with the Airkit team here.