With the advent of business text messaging as an effective customer communication channel, numerous texting platforms have come into the limelight over the past decade. There are over 400 listings in the category ‘SMS Marketing Platform’ alone on the software aggregator platform Capterra. With no shortage of options, the choice of selecting the best enterprise messaging tool becomes a tough one, especially if this is a new channel for the telecom company.
Business text messaging is a very broad category with too many options
The term business text messaging or SMS marketing can mean different things to different businesses. From just the ability to do mass messaging to the ability to run specific campaigns and get in-depth analytics, features of business texting platforms vary immensely. It’s essential to have an understanding of the purpose behind using the text channel before looking at options. Doing so will significantly help in filtering through the huge list and narrowing it down to the few that make sense for the particular business use case.
What to look for in a business messaging platform
Flexibility
The ability to customize the messaging should be a major consideration when selecting the text outreach platform. The ideal solution should integrate with the existing tech stack of the business and surface relevant information about the customer to the sales rep doing the outreach. This is a critical requirement for an industry like telco where most organizations use legacy infrastructure and technology. Sending contextual messages will help Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) stand out from the competition. Personalization is critical while communicating with customers, the flexibility of the messaging tool plays an important role in determining the course of the conversation.
Control
The term control can be interpreted in two ways in the context of this conversation. Firstly, control over the content of messages, and secondly, control over the text-based outreach process. The first part pertains to the ability of the platform to set brand compliance rules around the conversation so that anything inappropriate or offensive is not sent as well as received. It should also have automatic Do-Not-Contact management and opt-out management to ensure the sales reps are only sending messages to those customers who have given the consent to contact them via SMS. Coming to the second piece of control around text messaging, the ideal solution should provide sales leaders with the ability to assign conversations to their staff as well as give them a detailed insight into the conversation. Frontline sales teams often struggle with calculating the ROI of their customer outreach campaigns. The platform should make it easy for the staff to report on the outreach activity and hold their teams accountable to customer outreach.
Ease of use
Telecom and wireless retailers are always on the hunt for a solution that makes it easy for them to get in touch with their customers. So obviously, the text messaging platform must be easy to use and should have a clean, functional interface. Going beyond this essential prerequisite, any tool that has preexisting but modifiable templates of messages would have a huge advantage over one that needs the sales reps to start the conversation from scratch. Better yet, if that tool allowed reps to send personalized messages at scale with a bulk Messaging functionality, telcos could reduce their time spent on initial outreach efforts and improve their follow up and close rates.
Most of the frontline sales staff members consider customer outreach as an additional responsibility. A business texting platform that eliminates any unnecessary steps and makes it easy for them to send messages will have more buy-in from the team.
“On day one when we started using Statflo, I had someone reach out to me within a few hours and say how much easier Statflo was as compared to the previous outreach platforms our team had been using. The Chat Starters especially stood out to the team. Not having to think about how to start the conversation and just clicking on the Chat Starters to start sending out messages is just awesome. The buy-in for Statflo was instant from our team.” - Terry Crump, President, New England Wireless
Learn more about how Terry and his team use Statflo to improve frontline accountability and drive results with one-to-one messaging
Variety of content
The ultimate goals of any telecom provider are to shorten the upgrade cycles and upsell/cross-sell to drive ancillary revenue. MNOs consider driving more traffic to the store as a necessary stepping stone to reach those goals, owing to the ability of their sales teams to sell more when the customer is already in the store. Any texting solution selected by the telco teams has to help fulfill these objectives quickly and efficiently. One of the ways it can be done is by looking for a platform that allows salespeople to send a broader variety of content over text messages. For instance, a tool that can create and send something like appointment links to visit the store, payment links to purchase accessories over the phone, or even document collection and verification options through the message, will help telcos reach their goals even faster.
Statflo: The one-stop text messaging solution to drive more revenue
Using a technology like Statflo helps telecom companies build meaningful exchanges with their customers and ensures the customer satisfaction that drives revenue. Given the range of services that can be availed virtually by a tool as flexible as Statflo, using the platform ensures that telcos have the features to adapt to changing customer needs. Incorporating one-to-one messaging into a customer engagement plan will not just boost engagement but will have far-reaching downstream effects in terms of customer retention, increasing the overall lifetime value of the customer, as well as increasing the average revenue per customer.
To learn more about how Statflo helps telecom retailers engage, retain, and grow their customer base, schedule a call with the sales team here.
