Effective marketing often involves creating a conversation with the prospect or customer. Interactive messaging allows you to communicate with customers in a variety of ways and through different media to improve return on investment (ROI).
Flexibility of Interactive Messaging
One of the great benefits of this approach is the capability of responding to customers in a wide variety of ways. For example, the conversation can switch from live to text message depending on various real time factors.
With this type of messaging, you can get high quality results with fewer resources by delivering the right types of messages at the right time that are personalized for each customer.
Interactive Messaging Surveys
An SMS survey is great way to gather feedback from your customers and subscribers. Phone and other types of surveys require significant resources without necessarily producing better results.
Using interactive messaging, you can reach larger numbers of people in a highly efficient manner without annoying your customer base. SMS surveys allow you to capture data in real time without the need for call centers or other expensive infrastructure.
Engaging with customers
The interactive approach allows you to handle customer relationships efficiently and proactively. Customer call centers can be expensive and consume valuable time and energy that your company should be using to concentrate on accomplishing its core mission of selling products and services.
With an interactive message system, you can easily handle outbound customer alerts and notifications at lower costs than with other options. Because of the nature of the system, this is a rapid and highly cost effective emergency notification solution.
All communication with the customer is highly personalized creating an excellent experience with high levels of customer satisfaction. The interactive message solution can result in reduction in inbound calls of up to 60 percent. For sales contacts, conversion rates can increase by up to 50 percent, according to some case studies.
One of the advantages of this system is the efficiency in which you can communicate with customers without sacrificing the interaction that is available with a customer agent. The prospect and customer can choose the message and information that they want in real time for effective and quick responses to their needs. The high efficiency means greater reach and effectiveness of sales and marketing campaigns.
Handling Emergencies
Because the client can set up response systems ahead of time, the interactive messaging solution is excellent for quick response to emergency events. The system can act on the fly sending out emergency notifications with two-way conversations for rapid transmission of information.
When an emergency occurs, the system can automatically preempt regular calls with outbound messages. The platform can respond automatically in routing communications so that necessary connections occur with maximum efficiency.
High volume of incoming calls during emergencies can easily overwhelm traditional customer response centers. In many cases, the cause of the emergency may contribute to the difficulties in handling large numbers of calls. The stress levels on customer service agents can also result in poor performance during times of crisis.
With an SMS messaging solution, it is possible to reduce both inbound and outbound call volume. Contact costs are much less expensive when customers can receive information from SMS or outbound voice. By reducing call levels, we can also reduce stress on customer service agents resulting in improvement in customer satisfaction.
Conclusion
The interactive SMS and voice solution works well together with traditional systems used for customer service and customer relationship management. The solution improves performance at lower costs per contact. The high responsiveness and efficiency of the system makes it perfect for emergency situations that tend to overwhelm traditional approaches.