Customers often ask us what use our innovative txtUs system could have for their business. Essentially think of the product as ’email’ but that the replies go back to the customer’s phone as a text message and they can reply by text message.
Here’s a couple of great examples which illustrate how the system works.
Example 1 – Conduct customer research using txtUs
In this example we ‘start the conversation’ by texting out to everyone who has bought from Widgets.com in the last week, using the Text Marketer online bulk sms software.
We simply ask customers to reply back, rating their experience and any other comments.
Below, Mr Smith replied to us rating Widgets.com only a 6 but saying it was because of a web problem. We replied saying it had been fixed and he has thanked us for that. On the final communication we can just say thanks.
You’ll see that from your point of view, you’re just replying by email and the full thread of each conversation with each customer is included on each email.
Example 2 – a ‘cold’ enquiry from a customer
In this example, we have promoted our txtUs number in our summer catalogue so that customers can enquire by text.
First, we see that the enquiry has come in to our email and we can now respond by email which will be converted to a text message and sent back to the customer’s phone. We can add in order details for them to phone us or go to the website.
From the next reply we can now see Mrs Gareth-Jones has got the information on her phone (saved to her inbox) and she can now complete the order at her leisure having been reassured her dress is in stock in her size.
She’s obviously impressed with the service! We see this is a lot when companies start using txtUs for the first time. Customers are really impressed they can deal with a company by text messaging because it’s most people’s favoured way of communicating nowadays and has the benefit of being usable by customers any time, any place.
We’ll just reply a simple thank you and look forward to your order on this one. As you’ve got this in your email program, you could always flag it to chase in a couple of days too, if the order hasn’t come through by simply replying again to the last email on this thread.
A ‘revolution’?
Communicating by text message isn’t a revolution – most of us do it every day!
But for industry, txtUs is. It brings together 2 fundamental communication technologies, text & email. From a company’s point of view txtUs is simply providing customers’ text messages into emails in the normal way into your standard email program so there’s no new technology to install or learn. But, from the customer’s point of view, they are communicating with you by text message.
With txtUs you get your own unique mobile number to promote for your business. Most other systems used a shared number so for example this means you can’t even received cold enquiries to it, you would have had to send out a message first! Not great for new business!
And as you can see, txtUs provides the full thread of the conversation in the emails you receive so you can what’s been said and when.
We would urge all companies to trial txtUs in their companies. The feedback from people already using it is that their customers are, “more likely to communicate”, “more loyal” and “recommend us to more people because of it”.