September 22, 2020 5 Highly-Effective Industry Use Cases for SMS

SMS messaging is a highly powerful tool and can be used for your business.

Did you know up to 98% of SMS messages get read within 3 minutes of their delivery? Yes, for starters, virtually every consumer has a mobile phone. We keep our phones near us, 24/7. Plus, most SMS messages are brief hence, convenient for a fast-paced lifestyle. Now, compare this with the 20% that emails enjoy. SMS messaging can be a powerful tool to push a brand to customers. Then, here are five ways you can use the SMS service for your business.

1. Alert Customers of Any On-Going Service Maintenance

Planned system maintenance or unexpected downtime can inconvenience customers and lead to losses. Yet, a one-line SMS message can make a difference in how your customers embrace such disruptions. Send an alert to customers in due time about the critical system downtime. It will give them a chance to make plans for alternative solutions as they wait.

2. Scheduling Customer Appointments and Important Reminders

Doctors, lawyers, accountants, and other professionals make regular appointments with their clients as part of their service provision. Most of these clients may not be on email or phone at all times. Yet, a doctor may want to send a quick reminder to a patient to go for their regular checkup. Likewise, a lawyer may like to remind the client of an upcoming court hearing, failure to which the client may pay hefty fines. Here, SMS service is the most appropriate means of communication. An expert from Edgility can help you set up a simple, direct, and effective SMS functionality to get you connected.

3. Billing Alerts and Reminders

Keeping a healthy debtor’s aging balance is critical for any company’s cash flow. You do not want to pile customer invoices, holding up the cash needed for the business operations. To keep tabs on customer billing and collections, follow up your customer bills with SMS alerts and reminders. They will help customers plan on paying their bills on time. You can even anticipate a bad debt from the kind of response you get from such alerts and plan for alternative cash sources.

4. Tracking Customer Shipments

If your company does door to door deliveries, use the SMS feature to your advantage as follows:

• Use an online SMS service to confirm or verify the order number, delivery address, or expected dispatch and arrival dates. The customer can correct any inaccurate details before the goods leave the warehouse.
• Update clients about their shipments’ status, especially if it takes days or weeks to get the consignment to the client.
• Offer a self-service customer support feature via SMS (auto-responders). Here, the customers get quick answers to their queries by replying to short questions with a number.

5. SMS For Company Logistics

Apart from B2C interactions, companies can use the SMS service to streamline their operations. Think of high-stress service delivery at the airport, shopping mall, emergency room, or noisy areas. The messages allow your staff to maintain good communication while coordinating their work despite any disturbances. Other areas include:

• Alerting staff any last-minute changes to a customer order
• Sending traffic updates to drivers
• Communicating any inventory shortages
• Planning staff shifts

Conclusion

SMS service is an excellent functional and marketing tool that can enrich the customer’s buying experience. Come up with innovative ways to inform, entertain, and educate the customers via SMS. It will complement your efforts in building a reliable brand.

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