In the past two years, we have seen businesses find solutions and create opportunities to keep revenue flowing, and now, new data is showing how its working in service departments.

We know that nearly 90% of all customers would prefer to interact with a business through text, rather than a phone call, so it’s important to make sure your business is offering these services to keep up with demand.

What is the revenue issue?

First, you need to identify the problem you are having with payment collection in your service department. Are your customers just not paying, or are they having a tough time reaching you? Or is your current system out-of-date?

Right now, dealers without texting systems in place could be losing out on potential customers because many are simply turning away from phone calls. Customers want to ask questions, about bills or equipment, and have it answered quickly. If you have a texting system in place, customers can ask a question anytime through the platform, which is attached to your existing business phone line, and get an answer from someone on your team within minutes.

It also allows you to keep a paper trail of transactions. You can pull up invoices, show customers what they have paid and when, and keep track of invoices for the future.

Create payment solutions in your service department

Now that you have figured out the problem, it’s time to set up the solution. Text-to-pay is something that may have seemed unlikely, even just a few years ago, but in the wake of the pandemic customers are now expecting businesses to have this product.

New data we collected from dealers who use connect shows 85% faster payment collection in sales and service with text-to-pay. Why? Because people are familiar with it. Businesses adopted these systems over the pandemic to reduce in-person interaction, and customers like it.

We are also showing that businesses are saving 45 minutes per customer interaction in sales and service by using texting and text-to-pay. With service workers able to send updates to customers in seconds via text, and customers filling out their own text-to-pay forms, businesses are saving lots of time.

One dealer on the east coast who uses Kenect said adding this platform has transformed their service department.

“We are saving approximately 50 hours of labor weekly that would have been spent talking on the phone with customers, just by not having to pick up the phone, play phone tag, leave a voicemail, or have a lengthy conversation with a customer.”

Save time for your customers and your employees

Another interesting piece of data shows that 91% of customers prefer text-to-pay, once they start using it. That means most customers, as soon as they started using text-to-pay, actually like it better than any other form of payment. Also, if customers complete transactions themselves, then there is less confusion about where credit card information is coming from, and how they will pay.

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