Messaging is a great channel for customer service.
Often, the best kind of customer service is silent running, a service that delivers exactly what the customer expects when they expect it – with no ambiguities or interruptions. Clearly, however, that’s not always possible, products and services can be complex to deliver, may involve external parties, may be vulnerable to poor data quality, or to things a customer may inadvertently do. When you need to deliver customer service in circumstances where the product or service is not delivering what’s expected, the way you deliver that customer service is really important. Adding friction or frustration at the moment a customer is not getting what they need from the product or service they are paying for is not a recipe for a long-lived relationship. This is where channels become important.
Pushing customers to channels that require them to stop what they are doing and wait for you to respond to their needs in real-time feels less and less like a contemporary experience. Messaging and social are now ubiquitous and for many their preferred channels for interaction – you need to meet your customers there. The demographics are also shifting with more and more segments of the population using smartphones and messaging apps.
In the UK WhatsApp is the leading messaging platform, followed by Facebook Messanger and iMessage (Apple Business Messaging) with SMS still being used widely, though the volumes have been trending downward for the last couple of years.
Messaging as a customer service channel has a number of advantages, first and foremost the asynchronous nature allows the customer to have a customer service conversation on their terms, at their pace and at times convenient to them. Secondly, messaging channels can be made very secure and can be used to establish identity effectively and then maintain a meaningful long-running (and contextual) dialog with a customer. And thirdly, these channels are great opportunities for automation.
At Utterworks, we love messaging – we built these channels into our Fluent Converse platform from the very start and we think when you start to exploit the benefits you’ll love messaging and most importantly, your customers will too