Webex Notify Makes Messaging a Powerful Customer Service Tool

Companies spend around $350 billion each year on customer services initiatives but most are achieving only mixed results. According to a survey from Method Research, 91 percent of consumers report having a poor customer service experience within the last six months and 33 percent say customer service overall is worse than ever. In fact, analysts suggest U.S. companies are losing up to $75 billion a year due to poor customer experiences.

Part of the problem is that customer expectations have changed. Accustomed to the always-on nature of digital transactions, today’s consumers expect fast resolution of their issues. They don’t want to spend time on hold waiting to be guided through a byzantine telephone menu of numbered options. At the same time, contact center managers are struggling to meet expectations due to a combination of record high call volumes and ongoing staffing shortages.

Webex Notify addresses these challenges by enabling organizations to use their messaging platforms to engage and serve their customers in near real time. The communications application helps organizations reduce call volumes and improve the customer experience by automatically sending timely and relevant notifications to customers.

Messaging’s Benefits

Consumers increasingly prefer to interact with brands by dashing off a quick and easy text message. Over the past two years, there’s been a 110 percent increase in consumers who prefer to use messaging to address customer service issues, according to an Enterprise Strategy Group report.

That’s actually very good news for most customer service organizations — increased use of messaging reduces overall call volume, eliminates hold times and enables timely and accurate customer interactions. Cisco researchers expect 80 percent of customer service organizations will make messaging their primary customer support channel by 2025.

Messaging offers a range of benefits. It is particularly useful for securely delivering important communications such as order and shipping notifications, appointment reminders, service downtime alerts, secure login verifications, personalized promotions and more. These reminders and alerts provide a level of personalization that drives customer satisfaction.

Messaging also creates operational benefits for the organization. Messaging-based service platforms facilitate auto-replies and automated routing, which frees up staff for other tasks. It’s easy to scale as demand increases. And support costs are far less than for voice and video channels. According to a Forrester study, the average cost of a customer service phone call is about $16, compared to about $1 for the average text thread.

Creating Compatibility

One barrier to the increased use of messaging in the contact center has been the fragmented state of the market — there’s SMS, iMessage, WhatsApp, Messenger by Meta, Snapchat, WeChat and Business Chat, to name a few. Many of these apps are incompatible, so you have to know which app each customer is using.

An all-in-one solution such as Webex Notify simplifies things, using APIs and low-code programming to organize messaging solutions in one place. This ensures that you can engage with customers on their communication channel of choice. In addition to supporting communication across various messaging apps, Webex Notify features integrated templates for email and voice communications. It also supports large contact lists, de-duping and bulk transmissions across channels.

Traditional telephone-based interactions remain important to customer service operations, but customers increasingly want the option to communicate by other means. Messaging has become the preferred option for many because it is quick, convenient, discreet and easy to use. Call us to learn more about using Webex Notify to integrate, automate and simplify your messaging environment.