How SMS Automation Reduces Contact Center Labor Costs

Increasingly, contact centers are using SMS text messaging to communicate with customers. The trend is fueled by consumer demand, evident in the quick responses and high open rates for text messages compared to other communication channels.

Most contact centers have been using SMS text messaging with their agents communicating with people in a one-to-one fashion. While this can help, it does not address scalable automation needs. And since the higher-skilled agents trained in text communications with customers come at a higher cost, introducing automation allows them to spend more time with customers. Below are several advantages of text automation in contact centers.

Scalability

Most contact center leaders know when and how they would like to communicate with customers throughout their customer journey. Large contact centers serving thousands or even millions of customers are often challenged with the text channel’s resource requirements. Many are now architecting systems and processes for a scheduled delivery of text communications throughout their lifecycle.

Let’s examine a nationwide pharmacy we work with today. For people needing medication involving prescription refills throughout the year, they send SMS text messages to:

• Remind customers it is almost time for their prescription refill
• Asking if they would like to pick it up or have it delivered
• Notifying them when it is ready for pickup or out for delivery

Sounds simple enough, until you consider millions of customers using this service with different intervals for each of their refills. By integrating with this nationwide pharmacy’s customer database, we can use text messaging to communicate with each of these customers at precisely the right time.

Consistency

People are not perfect. This blog post has likely gone through a couple of edits before being published. Thus, the reason we use templates for text messaging, email, and voice messaging. One of the advantages of text automation is the ability to standardize on consistent delivery, without typos, and deliver the message your team prefers.

While we appreciate text messages from people and tend to pardon typos from people, we expect messages from organizations to be of higher quality. Text automation helps make sure the message is delivered consistently every time.

Cost Control:

Leaders of contact centers are mindful of the cost of labor for a contact center agent. They also understand their highest value – working directly with a customer. Contact centers are beginning to use more text-based automation to handle communication with customers where agents aren’t necessarily needed.

One large consumer finance company uses automated text to send new customers a link to their mobile app as soon as they become a customer. This tactic is much more effective, assuring it reaches their mobile phone instead of desktop email (which is often unread). A tactic that’s unrealistic for text-enabled agents to handle at scale.

We Can Help

Many contact center leaders indicate that an agent’s cost of customer engagement is 8-10 times higher than the cost of automation. For help crafting your text automation solution, Contact Us today.