Business leaders beware: a great product and an effective go-to-market strategy aren’t going to cut it in today’s highly competitive markets. To stand out from the pack and stave off competition you need to do more than service your customers — you must delight them. This means providing an unforgettable customer experience.
Having happy customers seems like a no-brainer, but a superior CX generates much more than likes on your Facebook page.
- Increased revenue: Customers are eager to weed through businesses that haven’t mastered customer experience. Research shows that 55% of consumers are willing to pay more for a guaranteed positive experience, and 86% of consumers are willing to pay more for an upgraded experience. To put it simply, people will spend more on your brand if it promises an exceptional experience.
- Loyal customers: 66% of run-away customers cite poor service as the reason for switching brands. Retaining your clientele largely relies on your ability to prevent a bad CX — or more appropriately — your ability to provide an exceptional one. Loyal customers mean more opportunity; 65% of companies are able to successfully upsell or cross-sell to existing customers.
- New referrals: Unsurprisingly, when people are upset with a business, they’re quick to broadcast their cautionary tales. 13% of frustrated customers tell 15 or more people if they’re unhappy with a business’s CX. Fortunately, happy customers chat even more, with 72% of them sharing a positive experience with six or more people.
- Competitive edge: Keep your CX a top priority or you can expect to have the 84% of organizations that are embracing customer experience breathing down your neck. To maintain a leading CX, your focus should always be your customer’s holistic experience and level of engagement.
And when it comes to engagement one tool stands out from the rest: text. Here’s a look at some of the things text can help you do when it’s integrated into your customer experience.
Master Multi-Channel Marketing
61% of people report that they check their smartphones within 5 minutes of waking up, and the average person touches their mobile device a staggering 2,617 times a day. Clearly, the opportunity to get your message to customers and prospects through text is tremendous.
That said, only 14% of organizations say they are currently running coordinated marketing campaigns across all channels. While it’s surprising that so many organizations are falling behind when it comes to leveraging text as part of their marketing strategies, it means you have an opportunity to differentiate yourself by doing so.
Not only does text have a broader reach and higher engagement than any other form of direct marketing, it gives you the ability to tap into a trend that has reshaped how companies do business today: personalization.
Create a personalized ‘text’perience
From tailoring content to meet the unique needs of individuals, to creating robots that understand how to interact with different personalities, companies are putting their money into creating personalized experiences.
Creating a personalized CX is impossible through one-way channels of communication like email. With problems that arise at a moment’s notice and the need to receive information just as quickly, channels like email simply don’t cut it.
Texting provides real-time, genuine dialogue with your customers, allowing you to service their individual needs in a more timely, more personalized manner. Companies that can meet this demand for personalization are able to generate a 60% higher profits than their competition.
Streamline the customer journey
Text messaging’s versatility allows it to be incorporated into each step along the buyer’s journey.
- Awareness: During the initial research phase, potential consumers can use text to directly message a business. A click to text message extension can be used with Google Adwords, so customers can instantly start texting a company to find out if they are right for them.
- Purchase: Texting enables you to update your customers on deals and incentivize purchases by texting real-time text coupons that are almost guaranteed to be seen considering text messages’ 98% open rate.
- Loyalty: Texts provides a great way to personalize and deliver loyalty programs. In fact, 90% of smartphone users enrolled in SMS loyalty programs with companies feel like they benefit from the interaction.
- Retention: One of the best ways to ensure retention is through customer service. As issues arise and customers need to speak with someone inside your organization, text messaging gives you the ability to service them in easier, more efficient ways.
- Advocacy: Text also provides a great way to promote happy customers to share their experiences with their spheres of influence and spread the word about the excellent customer experience they had with your brand.
With text messaging being such a powerful tool, it enables you to optimize just about every area of your business. The key to providing an exceptional CX is already in the palm of your hand.
Hi Ford: I was unclear how texting would be initiated until I read toward the end of your article and discovered what I think is the answer: vendors offer the texting option to consumers, who then make a choice to begin the conversation via that channel. If that’s true, then I like the approach – if (big IF!) vendors don’t abuse the outreach.
Your article doesn’t discuss self-imposed restrictions. My experience has been that absent circumspection, the texting tactic could backfire hideously. Anecdotally, if I reached out to a vendor by text message with a question or inquiry, and began to get text-spam with promotions and coupons, that would end the relationship the same way I immediately unsubscribe when email gets over the top. In this case, one too many texts would mean no purchase, no loyalty, no retention, and no advocacy. The process would stop dead at inquiry – at least for me.
In my view, over-texting is a more heinous marketing transgression than over-emailing, and vendors should be exceedingly careful how they use it. Consumer appetite for text outreach should never be assumed. How do you recommend that vendors avoid the risks of alienating customers?
Great question, Andrew. I think texting is a very personal thing and I agree it’s worse than email spam when abused by businesses. In my opinion, businesses should only text with customers for relevant and important things that help them achieve what they need and minimize its use from a mass marketing standpoint. Any marketing message via text or any channel for that matter should be personalized to each customer based on their expressed preferences and history with the brand. Businesses need to make sure they are not annoying their customers by first getting their permission to receive text messages the same way they would with emails and always immediately remove them when they want to opt out.