5 Advantages to Integrating SMS on Customer Service SaaS

Even as SMS reaches maturity (almost 30 years young!), this channel never ceases to continue reinventing itself. From person-to-person communications to marketing machine, SMS has become the new darling of customer engagement SaaS platforms. It’s no wonder: SMS boasts a 98% open rate and 95% of people read text messages right away. With 64% of consumers preferring customer service via texting vs a voice call, it’s only natural that contact center, CRM and other customer engagement solutions are expanding their communications channels with SMS.

A few years ago, integrating SMS was a shy attempt at providing one more channel for mobile savvy consumers. If an enterprise wanted SMS to be integrated into a customer engagement SaaS, most likely it would have had to rely on integration hubs to have access to SMS, requiring additional costs and/or engineering resources. Now, SMS has become one of the most relevant communication channels to inform, converse and engage with consumers. But a new wave of SMS services is needed to fulfill this demand. Customer engagement SaaS has taken note and started integrating natively into their CRM and contact center platforms.

What advantages does an SMS native integration bring to customer engagement SaaS? Here are the top five benefits:

1. SMS is ready to be used out of the box

Spare your enterprise customers the need for custom engineering. By integrating text messaging natively, you allow your enterprise customers to use SMS messages right away, without any complexities involved in integration. Having SMS integrated into your system enables your enterprise customers to use easy features like turning texts into support tickets for rapid issue resolution. In addition, it’s possible to get ahead of support issues by sending proactive messages and automated notifications to enhance customer communications. One- and two-way SMS communications are easily available and accessible for your enterprise customers, without hassle.

2. SMS is under your control

Because SMS is an inherent communication channel, you as the customer engagement SaaS have control over the quality, features and pricing offered to your enterprise customers. This also enables you to expand services according to your customers’ needs in terms of quality requirements or new network coverage. Regular maintenance on your part makes sure that your customers will always have access to updated services, avoiding technical issues in the long run. At the same time, you have a better chance of controlling pricing – and therefore profits – for SMS if this is natively integrated into your platform. The more strategic SMS becomes to your enterprise customers, the more you should invest in SMS as a core service integrated onto your platform.

3. SMS is a core part of omnichannel communications

Omnichannel communications is about delivering a continuous conversation stream regardless of which channel is used for each interaction. It’s about adapting the communications according to the situation and use case across channels. SMS is extremely valuable in omnichannel scenarios, because it fills the gap that traditional channels cannot fulfill, like email and voice calls.

Emails and voice calls are still useful for certain use cases, but certainly not for all. However, emails and voice calls are still heavily used for most situations, leading to long waiting times, delayed issue resolution and poor customer experiences. Most consumers today are used to texting and naturally want to text businesses as well. Due to its real-time, mobile-first nature, text messages are easily noticed by users and acted upon. Therefore, time-critical notifications or simple inquiries can be solved with a text message.

With the seamless help of SMS and its ability to interact with other core channels, SMS allows you to provide your enterprise customers with seamless, omnichannel communications.

4. Messaging is the future

Most customer engagement SaaS are seeing the value of SMS – and beyond. The use of chat apps is nearly universal and naturally your enterprise customers are looking into experimenting with the likes of Facebook Messenger for real-time customer communications. At this point, most implementations are offered on integration hubs; once they become a standard communications channel, it is likely that messaging apps will be an inherent part of customer engagement SaaS, just SMS as is becoming these days.

To take advantage of future developments in messaging, starting with SMS today is essential. SMS will enable you to better understand which use cases it can be applied for, how consumers react to it and how it helps your customer service agents to solve issues with messaging.

The contact center, CRM and other customer engagement SaaS markets have a wide range of providers, large and small, global and local. In an increasingly saturated market, tech companies need to understand new trends and requirements from their enterprise customers and act accordingly. SMS and messaging in general are growing trends in customer engagement that can no longer be ignored.

Integrate SMS into your SaaS platform and differentiate now to reap the benefits of the latest strategic customer engagement channel. After all, your customers are already texting – and demand that you do, too.

5. Differentiate in a saturated market

The contact center, CRM and other customer engagement SaaS markets have a wide range of providers, large and small, global and local. In an increasingly saturated market, tech companies need to understand new trends and requirements from their enterprise customers and act accordingly. SMS and messaging in general are growing trends in customer engagement that can no longer be ignored.

Integrate SMS into your SaaS platform and differentiate now to reap the benefits of the latest strategic customer engagement channel. After all, your customers are already texting – and demand that you do, too.