OpenMarket – August 9, 2016
This is exactly what one group of crafty individuals did. In the business of providing cable/satellite TV and internet services, the cost of onboarding new customers can be huge!
As a consumer, there’s a ton of communication and coordination that goes on to make sure I get my service installed, configured and working properly. The sooner this happens, the happier I am, and the quicker I’m contributing to a company’s bottom line. Let me share a story about one of OpenMarket’s enterprise clients who is using our SMS service to provide a better customer experience while significantly lowering their operating costs.
The onboarding team of this company reviewed their business and identified some key opportunities to make improvements. Two areas of focus were the high cost of install engineers and the high rate of missed appointments. By working with OpenMarket, the team designed a “welcome journey” for new customers. The team chose to leverage SMS as part of the communication plan because, well, everyone knows how to text message and 98% of SMS messages are read within about three minutes.
The journey started with an order confirmation and welcome message. These are nice-to-have customer experience elements, but they also began to train the new customers on SMS engagement. Next came the appointment confirmation, reminder and rescheduling if needed… all via SMS. These relatively simple, short text messages which help people manage their appointments had a dramatic impact on the success rate of installs. As a result, the company’s missed appointments went from 35% down to 5%. Extending this program to all service calls meant eliminating over 45,000 missed appointments each month – which generated a savings of over $6M per month!
Needless to say, the success of this onboarding team has earned the appreciation of their company.
We see many examples like this where SMS is being used by companies in ways that are lowering costs, driving revenue and improving the customer experience. Feel free to contact us if you’d like to learn more.