Offer Your Customers a Familiar Experience

Picking up the phone to sort a bill or inquire about something is an inevitable part of modern life. Frustratingly, there are many businesses that have not developed a good system for customer inquiries. After being caught in the dreaded phone tree for possibly hours, customers can end up feeling like a number and not a person. Texting can avoid this because it offers one-on-one personalized and immediate interaction. According to Experian Marketing Services, approximately 50% of people aged 18 to 24 find a text conversation just as meaningful as a phone call. No one wants the day held up by phone calls especially when texting is so time efficient and readily available. That’s why a third of Americans prefer texting to phone calls. Ultimately, texting is preferential because it is more personal to customers than long phone calls or email correspondence. Think about the people you text regularly versus the ones you email. It’s mostly likely that you are closer to the people you are texting—this should be applied to your business in order to create and maintain successful and meaningful relationships.

More Time Efficient and Higher Response Rate

The customer is always right: the quintessential motto of the service industry.  The aim of any service brand is to satisfy and exceed their customers’ wants and needs.  Did you know that 78% of people wish they could have a text conversation with a business? This is largely due to the prevalence of texting in consumers’ everyday lives.  According to the Pew Research Center, texting is the most widely- and frequently-used app on a smartphone, with 97% of smartphone owners using it at least once a day. This makes sense given the ease of communicating via text.  In fact, texting has now become the primary way American under the age of 50 communicate. We don’t really need statistics to show us that texting is commonplace in today’s society, but it is important to recognize that texting is something people are very familiar with and use on the daily.  Adopting this type of common and familiar form of communication with customers is a wise step for any service brand.

Keeping Up With the Times

We live in an exciting time where technology is constantly developing to make consumers’ lives a little easier. In order for companies to maintain success and remain ahead of the game, it’s crucial for them to adapt to new technologies. This includes incorporating texting into their businesses. With technology growing at such a fast rate and being so prevalent in our lives, it makes sense that we are reliant on it in our day-to-day activities and that we are especially reliant on texting. The amount of texts sent each month has drastically grown, increasing more than $7,700 over the last decade. It’s the tech-savvy Millennial generation that is paving the way for aspiring companies. Millennials, for a brief time, lived without SMS. Most Millennials weren’t texting regularly until they were in their teens. Younger groups such as Generation Z, however, have never known a time without texting. It comes as no surprise then that 77% of consumers aged 18-34 and 64% of all consumers are likely to have a positive perception of any company that offers texting.

Texting is More Personal

The greatest convenience of texting is how quick and easy it is to use. 90 % of all text messages are read in under 3 minutes. With an email address, you have to login, prep your message, proofread, etc. and not everyone has their work email address linked to their phone. However, you’re unlikely to find any cell phone without texting capabilities. There’s no need to login to send a text message and most cell phones texting apps come with an auto word fill so don’t even have to type full sentences making your response time much quicker. Additionally, people are far more likely to respond to a text rather than an email with text messages receiving a 45% response rate and email only 6%.

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