Text Messaging Featured Article

The days of long, lengthy phone calls to make plans for the weekend have long-since passed as we can now send quick, short notes through text messaging that help us accomplish the same goal. While the practice may take away the more personal connection, it also allows time for other activities, like getting in touch with your favorite contact center.

OK, that might be a stretch as few consumers get excited about calling the contact center, but customer service agents do want to hear from customers. It ensures they can still have a job. If agents and other employees could resolve issues just as easily as you made those weekend plans, everyone would be happier.

TSG Global is focused on bringing such simplicity to text messaging by supporting the right infrastructure, while also providing voice service to carriers and the enterprise. To get the full story, TSG Global’s Noah Rafalko sat down with TMC’s Rich Tehrani (News - Alert) in the TMC newsroom at the Editor’s Day 2014 event in Boston.

The latest the company has to offer is known as Green Bot, a solution designed to reside in the cloud and allow any user to put texting on their number. The solution extends to 800 services, allowing companies using such numbers to capture messages without having to download an app. Using Green Bot, the user can opt to be text enabled and then start a conversation. The solution ensures no messages are missed.

For the first quarter of 2014, companies throughout the marketplace enabled 250,000 toll free numbers. To do so, they simply signed a piece of paper, allowing TSG Global or Green Bot to text enable the number. Instantly activated, users can then add anything else they need, including browser-based access points. By pushing this process to the cloud, it’s easy and accessible for any user.

Contact centers putting this service in place can easily customize the solution, automating certain processes, putting live agent transfer capabilities in place and even specify that certain interactions only go to live agents. It can also connect directly with a company’s customer relationship management (CRM) solution so that all text messaging is captured in the customer record. Plus, social media interactivity is enabled to ensure no messages are ever missed.

The key to text messaging success, regardless of the tools used, is centered on overall management of the channel. Companies should never activate the service and then fail to support it as they would live calls, web chats or any other customer service channel. According to Rafalko, this is happening too often. For 800 text messaging, there are 18,000 texts in one month and most companies do nothing with the texts.

If you hope to engage all generations and drive quality experiences, it’s time to implement text messaging and support it across the organization.