Your customer’s purchasing journey and communication preferences have evolved over time.  Today, an emerging communication touchpoint between brands and consumers is mobile messaging. 

That’s why businesses large and small stand to reap the benefits of an elegant, effective mobile SMS customer service strategy. 

In fact, data coming from Zipwhip shows that when a business provided the communication channel the consumer wanted, they:

• Made more purchases from the business (40%)
• Recommended the business to a friend or family member (40%)
• Filled out a satisfaction survey (38%) and left a positive review (30%)

Plus, more than one-third (37%) of people say they respond to a business’s communications faster when it provides the type of communication they want.

So, it’s a smart move for businesses to have a multi-channel strategy for customer support. Here are three reasons that texting is a valuable customer service channel.

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1. Your Customers Are Texting

If you have a mobile phone, you’re texting. 

Research shows 62% of consumers want to communicate with businesses via messaging, and  39% of consumers said they prefer SMS/MMS, according to Twilio.

During a business transaction, your customer’s phone number is already supplied during checkout. 

Using SMS for two-way customer service conversations gives customers that instant gratification they crave through informal, casual communication. This is great for your mobile customers on the go.

2. SMS Automation Reduces Customer Service Load



Responding to common inquiries using an SMS chatbot can seriously reduce the workload of your customer service agents while facilitating commerce transactions. Think: repurchase reminders, delivery order status and special promotions or offers.

According to IBM, chatbots can handle 80% of routine tasks and customer questions, resulting in up to a 30% decline in customer support service fees. 

But you must balance things like how urgently a reply is needed and when a live agent is preferred.

For more on this, see: The Role of Live Agents in Conversational Commerce.

3. SMS Can Integrate Seamlessly 

SMS is best used considering that the user may also go to webchat, email or even social media.

An SMS platform that integrates with other messaging channels means your customer service agents don't need to change their workflow too much to support SMS. 

For example, let’s say you’re running an email campaign and you want to include a button that allows readers to start an SMS conversation. A good SMS platform will allow these transfers to happen seamlessly. 

Consider this scenario: A customer sends a text message, and the business uses a chatbot as a first line of defense and to capture more information. 

The system then passes this information to a live agent who joins the conversation. The agent can subsequently use any supported ticketing systems to reply to the user as they’ve always done.

Another way that SMS integrates seamlessly is the fact that SMS apps come default with mobile phone purchases. So consumers don’t need to download another messaging app to use it.