Connect to your customers with SMS customer service

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Make customer experiences easy with text messaging

Overcome low response rates

Drive customer engagement with short messaging service (SMS) communications. Proven to have higher response rates, you can quickly connect in convenient ways to drive business results.

Say goodbye to busy tones

High phone call volumes can negatively affect your customer experiences. Divert some of those calls to text, including capabilities to give customers the option to shift from an IVR to SMS.

Personalise every interaction

Communicate with customers in a memorable, personal way. By using friendly emojis, you can enhance routine interactions and improve customer experiences — every time.

Take advantage of leading SMS customer messaging software

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Inbound SMS

Make it easy for customers to have rich conversations with your brand. Equip your agents to receive .jpg, .gif and .png files from inbound customer interactions.

Outbound SMS

Drive the effectiveness of your customer communications with SMS. Keep customers updated on everything from sales promotions to school closures and emergency notifications.

SMS routing

Allow Genesys to support your SMS natively, or bring your own provider with BYO options. Route based on agent schedules, skill sets and more, or use data from the customer message.

Consistent agent experience

Enable your agents to manage all channels in one interface, with SMS texts threaded into a single interaction for easier management. Give agents the tools they need to perform their best, from transcript history across channels, to canned responses or artificial intelligence assistance for replies.

24/7 availability and global reach

Your customers are diverse — and your SMS communications should feel familiar. Use SMS phone numbers that feel familiar to your audience to improve their experiences. Give your customers the ability to reach out and respond whenever it’s best for them. And let your agents pick up the conversation in a timely, convenient manner.

More use cases with rich media

Bolster time to resolution while adding additional use cases through support for multimedia messaging service (MMS). Have customers both receive and send media ranging from images to videos. This includes support for sending proactive rich image notifications to customers, giving them more engaging updates.

Quality monitoring

Record every SMS interaction for effective quality monitoring. Use the data to coach agents so they can provide better customer support for future forecasting and scheduling decisions.

Reporting and analytics

SMS channel data is routed directly into analytics and reporting dashboards. Access it at a moment’s notice, giving your admins the tools they need to make adjustments and achieve results.

Voice of the Customer

Understand customers’ concerns and expectations. Leverage text analytics and digital conversations to identify contact purpose, trends and agent best practices.

Create consistent agent and customer interactions with SMS

Customers expect high-quality experiences every time they interact with your business. With Genesys, you can meet customers on the devices they use most often — their cell phones. Provide reliable, personalised experiences, even when contacted via text message. And, with all channels in one place, you can consolidate analytics and reporting — driving better business results over time.

Get in touch — easily

Texting is a natural part of customers’ lives. When you offer SMS customer service, you elevate your brand’s intimacy and reduce the effort to get support. You can solve issues without adding to your voice call volume. And you can improve agent productivity by allowing agents to handle more than one SMS interaction at a time, or even manage handling interactions across different digital channels simultaneously from the same interface.

Create consistent customer experiences

Using a unified interface, your agents can manage customers’ text messages — along with all other digital interactions such as social media, chat and email. Your agents will have context to continue previous SMS conversations and offer more personalised customer experiences.

Support customers all day, every day

With text messaging, customers can reach out and respond when they want, and still get the same great service. Your agents can pick up the conversation at a moment’s notice. No matter the time of day or day of the year, they can provide accessible text-based support.

Ensure every interaction is exceptional

No matter which agent customers connect with, they should receive consistent support. Recording every SMS interaction means you can assign them in quality evaluations. Use this data for future forecasting and scheduling — ensuring support is always in place.

Get the SMS analytics and insights you need

See historical and real-time performance for SMS and all your other communication channels. Give admins visibility into channel performance at any time. Easily configure and manage alerts for SMS interactions when a particular metric is outside of defined thresholds.

See what else you can do with Genesys

Explore more ways to enhance your customer experience

Genesys makes text messaging easy

Tap the power of messaging for customer care, marketing and payment processing. See how our customer messaging system makes it easy to incorporate SMS into your customer journey. You’ll be reaching customers in real time, in no time — all while increasing customer satisfaction and boosting revenue. Request your demo today.

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Frequently asked questions

How do you use SMS for customer service?

Short messaging service (SMS) for customer service involves using text messages to communicate with customers. This can involve sending alerts or notifications, confirming appointments, answering queries or resolving issues. To use it effectively, ensure messages are clear and concise, respect customers’ preferences and privacy, and aim for timely responses.

What are the benefits of SMS customer service?

SMS customer service offers several benefits. It provides a convenient and familiar channel for customers; messages can be delivered and read quickly; and it allows for easy automation of alerts and notifications. It also leaves a written record of communication, and unlike email, doesn’t risk being lost in a spam filter.

Can I send SMS over the internet?

Yes, you can use the internet to send and receive text messages. This is often done using an online platform or service provider that can send SMS to mobile numbers worldwide. Many of these messaging platforms also provide additional features such as bulk messaging, automated responses and integration with other software.

Is it possible to use MMS for customer service?

Multimedia messaging service (MMS) allows you to include things like photos, videos and audio in addition to text. In contrast, SMS just supports plain text, although SMS and MMS can both appear in the same conversation thread. The use of MMS can and should be supported as part of the customer service strategy. It opens additional use cases through rich media, such as a customer having to send a photo for validation on a problem or product, and enables better support.

Can you bring your own SMS account to Genesys Cloud?

If you already have a Twilio account for SMS services, you can take advantage of the Bring Your Own (BYO) SMS feature to integrate your Twilio account with the Genesys Cloud™ platform. Additional BYO providers will be coming soon. BYO allows you to frictionlessly send and receive SMS messages with your customers, leveraging all the SMS capabilities of Genesys Cloud. For more information on integrating your Twilio account, consult this article.

Support for additional BYO options is coming soon.

How does SMS customer service contribute to overall customer satisfaction and retention rates?

Customers use all manner of different channels to communicate with your business, and the more options you provide, the more likely it is that you will be able to use the channels your customers want. Through SMS, you can provide timely alerts on everything from service outages to limited-time discounts direct to your customers’ phones, allowing them to react quickly to new information.

Is it possible to automate responses and interactions in SMS customer service?

Yes, it’s possible to automate responses and interactions in SMS customer service. This leverages AI through virtual agents for managing interactions with customers, granting the ability to scale quickly and efficiently without having to lean harder on human agents, and personalisation for each and every customer. Automated interactions provide a number of benefits, including notifications (such as when an item is out for delivery) and rapid responses at all hours (including both peak hours and outside normal office hours).

Are there any limitations to providing customer service via SMS?

There are some limitations to SMS messaging. The most important is privacy. Customers in most regions will need to opt in to receive SMS messages from you, and they should also be provided with a simple way to opt back out. With the volume of spam messages on SMS, it’s important to make sure that your messages are clearly legitimate and from your business, especially if you’re providing links that you want customers to click through. Finally, there are some character count limitations — again, especially if you’re providing links.