I have been talking to you about a great innovation we have been working on with our customers – SMS Conversations, a way to reach out and establish a working relationship with customers who have stopped responding to contact centres standard outbound contact processes.
We view SMS dialogues as the next step the collections process will take – and I want to explain a bit more about that today.
Organisations operating large contact centres, like Clarity Credit Management and Vanquis Bank have started to use this our text messaging service, reporting boosted efficiency, markedly improved collection ratios and a significantly improved relationship with clients.
Text messaging is a highly effective way of doing in business what we often do in our private life – send short messages saying we are on the way, will be late, asking where the other person is, etc. The fact it’s not using voice, is a limited bandwidth conversation, and is not employing non-verbal communication cues means it’s ideal for having “pressured” conversations – e.g. about payment delinquency – that may be too negative for some people to have by voice.
The fact is text works. A large business with 10,000 customers compared three ways of interacting with customers: outbound dialing (with 30 agents), interactive voice (10 agents) and
text conversations. The latter team consisted of two people and achieved the same results in terms of collections and promises to pay as the other two contact media.
I should also say that using SMS as an interactive, rapid-response mechanism to connect agents with defaulting customers is only one benefit of this service. It is also a brilliant way to engage with customers and deepen their interest in new goods or services. We’ve worked with one innovative enterprise that texted customers during the various manufacturing and assembly stages of a product, telling them where the product was in its completion cycle (“your requested red paint is being applied now” and so on).
I think these examples show that we are only at the beginning of maximising the power of SMS in business and contact centres Why aren’t you taking advantage of the Power of Short Messaging?
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