Following my Twitter stream I saw a tweet by @Shopify that said one of their stores have customers texting in questions. This struck me as a bit odd at first, but after reading it’s implementation I find it quite genius.
The company name is Baby Melons. You can see right up top on their customer service page they have a number ready for your text question. Here is the best part about it: you could have this setup for free and implementation is just signing up for a Google Voice number. Post the number on your website. Then receive and reply to text messages in the same way you do emails.
This is something that as a customer I would do just to try. If the experience was good I would be even more likely to purchase from the company. On the business side a customer service rep can only handle one phone call at a time. In theory now the rep could now handle multiple clients at a time with more time to respond.
Benefits: Save labor expenses, give better responses, show off a new side of technology to customers.
Negatives: Some customers may not understand how to text.
I’m always looking for more innovative ways to close sales or communicate with customers. Do you have any? Comment below.
Direct link to the original blog article: http://blog.shopify.com/2010/5/5/let-them-text-us-for-customer-service
