How To Increase Customer Engagement By 2 Way Messaging

An important aspect for businesses dealing in products and services is customer feedback and engagement. It helps to plan targeted marketing campaigns and also to receive suggestions that can be used to enhance products / services. Traditionally, feedback calls often led to an incomplete and unauthentic response. Calls were an added expense to businesses / enterprises involving infrastructure and resource management. SMS wasn’t considered an appropriate feedback mechanism then.

Enterprise messaging or application-to-person messaging (A2P) slowly gained momentum, as SMS messages were effective mobile marketing tools. Branching from the enterprise messaging portfolio is the two-way messaging service. This interaction based messaging creates a lasting impact on your target audience. Two-way SMS messaging uses predetermined keywords and short codes to deliver text messages to mobile users. It requires end users to send a keyword to a short code, like 23232, to receive an automatic reply.

Interestingly, two-way messaging lets you deliver conversational style messages to your audience instead to just trying to chase them for feedback. The most effective benefit to a company is to receive the quality of information and measurable feedback. Imagine your dipstick study states that around 60% of your customers are happy with your service, but there are 40% of those untouched and may be unhappy. Now you need to improve your communication to attract and retain those 40% customers. Messaging could prove to be that elusive connecting medium to your unhappy customers.

Two-way messaging minimises the need for the user to call customer care or to login to web portals. Customer interaction is simplified by sending an SMS containing a single keyword to a number (short code). By applying this service, you can integrate CRM, build an opt-in customer database, and promotion tactics.

For more insights, we will take you through a use case scenario:

• A business in the Healthcare and Agriculture industry was looking for a way to receive customer feedback. They wanted to ensure their products are of requisite quality and in line with customer needs. Their target audience base varied as they served both urban and rural animal owners. Utilising, traditional approaches to receive feedbacks was time consuming and ineffective. Hence, they approached Route Mobile searching for an effortless solution allowing their customers to respond back to them immediately. They also wanted to decrease the hours lost due to chasing appointments.

• Understanding their concerns, we offered them our two-way SMS service . This was a perfect approach for our client allowing direct customer interaction and data retrieval. The client published different short code messages on their products with instructions to leave the feedback. The feedback rating would range from 1 to 5, with 5 being the most positive feedback along with the name of the customer. The SMS campaign threw analytics that helped our clients tweak product offerings after gauging their market perceptions.

• Benefits of a two-way messaging solution are manifold. It helps numerous organisations, from large-scale multinationals, businesses, and enterprises to sole traders, all driven by the same goal — engagement. Not only you can generate feedback, but also look at employing surveys, subscription services, tracking, and even secondary sales services. Route Mobile’s high customisable two-way messaging API easily integrates with voice messages and email to give our clients a completely packaged solution. Two-way messaging finds use in various business functions such as sales, operational communication, customer retention, etc. The solution also doesn’t require any additional apps or software.

An important aspect for businesses dealing in products and services is customer feedback and engagement. It helps to plan targeted marketing campaigns and also to receive suggestions that can be used to enhance products / services.