Text and SMS messages have meant quite a bit to customer service, but mainly only in one direction: the outbound. While it's becoming increasingly common practice to use text messaging systems as a means to keep customers apprised of the status of orders or similar issues, it's much less common to see customers sending text and SMS messages to a company in a bid to obtain customer service information. Now many are calling for just such an option to be put into place, and ultimately, may prove to be a move that shakes up customer service as we know it.
As is so often the case in technology fields, there are some major changes happening in terms of SMS and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) services, and one of the biggest—according to Bandwidth's Jason Sommerset, who provides SMS and VoIP services for companies like Google and Skype (News - Alert)—is that toll-free numbers are starting to come with the ability to send and receive text messages. That's not going to automatically open up the ability to start texting companies and expecting responses, but it is going to make such a move a possibility for those companies who do want to add such services.
Indeed, this poses some great opportunity for businesses by making a customer service staffer as close as a simple text message. While there's certainly value in having an interactive voice response (IVR) system to help funnel users unsure of just what help is needed to the right departments, sometimes users know exactly what's wrong and need to jump right to the end of that funneling process, something that the customer base would likely find welcome. With such tools in place, companies could actually offer up the option to text immediately in certain cases and get just the results that are needed.
Of course, it's easy to see how some might be hesitant to put such systems into place. Opening up the contact points that far might result in a lot of static, and this isn't the kind of thing that could easily be run with automated systems in its current form, really. There would likely have to be a human element involved in intercepting and responding to those text messages, and that means adding someone to payroll. That's not always a great move for some companies, but there is a fairly sizable potential upside here. If even only a handful of customers suddenly get questions or concerns answered much faster than normal, then that might prove beneficial to companies through improved customer retention rates, positive word-of-mouth promotion, or even increased business as well as repeat. There's a potential for increased frivolous messaging to deal with, yes, as well as accidental messaging, but so too is there a greater possibility of customers getting what's desired more rapidly, a point that's always worth pursuing on some level.
Only time will tell if text and SMS messaging becomes a bigger part of the customer service picture, but there are certainly advantages to doing so. There are downsides, of course, as is commonly the case with any new technology, but here might be a case in which the positives beat the negatives.
Edited by Alisen Downey