How to use SMS to boost your business

We had shared earlier a few reasons why you should adopt SMS for your business communication, and if you are sufficiently convinced, read on to get some ideas on how you can apply it to your communication system with your customers.

Hawaiian Airlines has adopted SMS to answer questions from customers, probably the first airline in North America to do this. The results are promising, allowing customer support staff to be twice as productive compared to answering voice calls on the support line. In addition, text message flight notification is also in place to notify passengers of flight changes or cancellations within 24 hours of a scheduled departure.

National Health Service in the UK has implemented SMS for health care appointment reminders. Before this innovative step came along, a large number of patients missed consultation appointments with doctors, costing the NHS significant loss in operating costs. By sending SMS appointment reminder, patients are provided with the option to cancel an appointment by SMS as well. The time slot that has been freed up can then be offered to another patient. SMS is also used to notify patients of test results availability, overdue bills, health information, or marketing campaigns.

Customer Support

Providing prompt and responsive customer service is critical to achieving customer satisfaction. Customer support over SMS can be offered in many ways, such as:

• Use SMS to answer FAQ from customers, something that can be done by employees or chatbots;

• Allow customers to book an appointment by SMS;

• Send an appointment reminder by SMS, with the option to cancel it as well;

• Notify customers of the availability of their test results;

• Send confirmation and flight details over SMS upon flight ticket purchase;

• Inform passenger of flight time changes or flight cancellation over SMS.

Billing

Billing and collecting payments from customers are an integral part of your business, the possibility of doing it over SMS does not only evoke a prompt response but reduces operating cost on paper-based billing and manual payment collection as well. What you can do with SMS platform for billing purpose are:

• Send payment reminders by SMS to customers as their payment due dates approach;

• Send SMS confirmations to inform customers that their payments have been received;

• Send suspension avoidance messages by SMS to customers whose payments are critically overdue and thus face impending service suspension;

• Send payment authorization messages by SMS which contains URL for the customer to make a payment over web-based portal.

Marketing

It is widely acknowledged that it takes less effort to retain an existing customer than to recruit a new one. To reach out to your customer base and engage them in continual rapport, consider interacting with them over SMS communication by:

• Sending periodical SMS for additional orders on consumable goods, such as stationery, disposable contact lenses, medication, household products such as detergents and many more;

• Sending information on sale, discounts, deals, and coupons over SMS;

• Sending SMS notification on merchant’s events and roadshows;

• Sending SMS to notify customers of a change of address, or opening of a new branch.

Just in case the demographics of your customer base does not favor SMS, there is always the alternative option of using voice calls. You do not need additional headcount or extra workload for your existing employees, use text-to-speech or audio file playback of pre-recorded voice messages from our solution library.