In 2020, contact centers were forced to revisit how they’ve traditionally approached the customer experience.

Call volumes have surged and remain high. And that means longer average handle times (AHT). Outbound calls are just as taxing; it now takes an average of 18 calls to connect with a buyer. For many, this means lower customer satisfaction scores and potential lost revenue — all of which hurts already shrinking budgets.

Modern contact centers are discovering that texting is a powerful channel for meeting and exceeding key metrics while delivering an exceptional customer experience. Here are four ways texting can improve your contact center metrics.

1. Increased Accessibility and Reduced AHT

Texting is ubiquitous. A customer might not have your app or belong to certain social media channels, but the odds are that nearly all of your customers have access to text — and text daily. And, because text interactions are four times faster than a phone call, using them in the contact center can significantly improve average handle times. No one wastes time exchanging information — texting keeps everyone focused on communicating their main points.

2. Greater Agent Capacity

Texting increases an agent’s capacity to handle more interactions. Technology like Textel Genesys Cloud integration for SMS let users handle multiple text interactions simultaneously. That means fewer customers need to stay on hold and, consequentially, abandon rates drop.

Texting is asynchronous, allowing an agent to respond to one customer while waiting for another customer to reply. Like chat and other channels, canned text responses are available to offer quick replies. Agents also can see the entire text history for better context and faster responses.

3. Faster Connections

Whether your agents are sending one-to-one messages or one-to-many messages, you’ll see a much better response rate with texting than traditional channels like voice and email. People open 98% of texts they receive, compared to opening just 22% of email messages. Compared to other channels and nothing competes with texting.

  • Texting averages a 40% response rate.
  • Phone calls typically only create a 5% response rate.
  • Email response rate is only 3%.

Texting can be a complete game changer for contact centers that rely on incessantly dialing a customer to get a response. For example, a Textel customer in education went from doing over 3 million dial attempts a month to sending over 1 million texts a month. But the contact rate jumped 225% with the shift to texts.

4. Decreased Resolution Times
Texting removes barriers to communication, making it easier for agents to resolve issues. Features like MMS texting let customers and agents send and receive images, emojis and documents that can often offer more information than a six-minute phone call.

Textel and Genesys Cloud
The Textel texting platform for the Genesys Cloud solution lets contact centers connect to their customers — wherever they are. Textel provides significant benefits to Genesys customers, including:

  1. Ability to use both SMS and MMS text messaging
  2. Available for Genesys Cloud Tier 2 and 3 customers
  3. Embedded within Genesys Cloud chat window
  4. One invoice for Genesys and Textel simplifies vendor management

Learn how Textel can revolutionize your customer experience here by visiting Textel in the Genesys AppFoundry Marketplace.

This blog post was co-authored by Paul Jones. Paul is a Senior Director of Account Management at Textel. Paul has over 20 years of experience in the customer experience industry with over 12 years at Genesys/Interactive Intelligence. Paul spends his time driving his two boys to multiple different sports activities inclusive of hockey, baseball, football, and wrestling.

You can find him on LinkedIn.