Best Practices for Templatizing Customer Service Text Message Responses

Nov 12
|
~
3
min Read
|
Business Texting

If you’re working in customer service, you’ve probably heard a thing or two. You’ve probably heard these same things over and over (and over). This is because when it comes to frequently asked questions, they’re ‘frequent’ for a reason. Depending on your industry or service, your customers are often looking for the same things. This means that a majority of your inbound calls, emails, or text messages are probably asking the same questions.

Now, think of how your associates spend their days. If customer service reps are spending unnecessary time manually answering the same questions over and over (and over), this can mean hours of wasted time daily.

Business texting can help alleviate much of this time waste in two ways. First, text messaging itself eliminates the waiting period many customer service teams experience when trying to connect with customers. Instead of playing phone tag or hoping an email clears spam filters, direct-to-consumer texts are almost guaranteed to be read immediately and prompt a response. Second, text responses are easy to templatize, making it the perfect channel for customer service teams that are experiencing a ton of FAQs.

Here are some best practices for templatizing text responses to customers:

Make sure your answer doesn’t feel like a template. We’ve all been on the receiving end of bucket responses as consumers. When you’re creating your templated text responses, add a human element to the voice and message so it doesn’t sound too robotic. Make sure you answer the question quickly or that you provide the link to any external information without too much extra content. Be quick, precise, and to-the-point.

Add in personalization and dynamic values. Just because your team is templatizing responses does not mean that personalization needs to be left behind. Modern customer service teams thrive on delivering targeted information to consumers, and text messaging has become such an excellent channel for these interactions because it is a highly personable, configurable model. Service teams can add personalization to templated text messages with dynamic content.

Instead of saying, “Hi, thanks for your message!” you can say, “Hi Kevin, thanks for your message!” simply by adding a <first name> tag into your template.

Track your templated (and custom) responses. Data is king, even when it comes to templated text responses. As a rule, make sure you’re tracking every single text message sent to consumers. This means tracking things like:

  • The number of inbound consumer questions.
  • The percentage of these questions that require a custom or templated response.
  • The number of customer responses to templated responses vs. custom responses.
  • The number of customers that are ‘satisfied’ by the answers they receive.

While templated text messages are great for fielding initial questions, customer success teams shouldn’t rely on templates to have full-blown conversations with customers. Instead, templates can answer FAQs or field inbound questions. Then, a live service agent can pick up the conversation and take it from there. Using a bit of both means that when customer service reps get involved, they’re already halfway done answering a question, which means increased efficiency and less wasted time.  

Want to learn more? Kenect is helping B2C customer service teams across all industries engage with more customers and streamline operations with business text messages. You can learn more by texting us today!

Get texting for your business