Text-enabled numbers: Another tool in your communications belt

If your company’s toll-free number isn’t enabled for text messaging, you could be missing out on an important channel for customer communications — especially millennial communications.

As of 2015, a whopping 189 trillion text messages were being sent worldwide each year, with 97 percent of smartphone users in the U.S. using texts regularly — making it the most widely used basic phone feature or app nationwide. Another recent report shows the average American sends and receives 32 texts daily, while U.S. smartphone owners aged 18 to 24 send an average 67.

Adding texting to your company’s communications toolbox doesn’t mean, however, that you should phase out your voice communications and live call center personnel. Savvy marketers are developing omnichannel strategies so customers can choose how they’d like to communicate, and one recent survey found 52 percent of U.S. consumers prefer to text with a live support agent for their customer service needs. As of 2015, 48 percent of contact centers worldwide were offering SMS communications, while another 22 percent planned to add it within a year.

Known in the industry as TETFNs, text-enabled toll-free numbers enable a number of marketing and customer support functions, drawing the aforementioned customers who would rather send or receive a quick text than deal with voice communications. And they’re especially efficient and cost-effective to implement when added to your existing 800 number. After that, they can be automated to answer simple customer questions without need for human intervention, while more complex questions can be auto-routed to live personnel.

Benefits you may not have considered? Analysts say businesses offering text messaging better meet the needs of time-starved customers, since so many answers are automated and agents can typically handle multiple text conversations concurrently. And adding texting capacity brings you into line with customer expectations, since many are probably already trying to text you without success.

As for outgoing messages, mobile text marketing is an art and science unto itself. As soon as they get permission from their customers, businesses can devise and send a variety of strategic texts — including short ads, coupons, reminders, confirmations and surveys. After all, as Mark Cohen once said in the New York Times, “The same 160-character dispatches first popularized by nimble-fingered teenagers may be the closest thing in the information-overloaded digital marketing world to a guaranteed read.”

In broad terms, texting is very much a part of the self-service future predicted by Gartner, which forecasts that by 2020 consumers will manage 85 percent of their relationships with businesses and organizations without human interaction.

“At this point, if you aren’t providing the SMS text channel in your contact center, or at least have it as part of your strategic plans, you’re behind the proverbial eight ball,” advises John Larson on Genesys.