Phone calls require you to stop what you’re doing and concentrate on the call. The phone call is highly interruptive, as well as being public, since everyone can hear us talking. Remember when the person ordering in front of you at a restaurant counter gets a call and starts talking? It’s as if this person absolutely wants you to listen in on their conversation. Sometimes you wonder if they’re doing it on purpose to attract attention. From now on, taking a call in public, especially in a quiet place, is very impolite. Sometimes, a call may be urgent and necessary to take. On the other hand, people are replacing phone calls with text messages for a number of reasons.
- Conversation remains private
- The conversation does not disturb anyone around.
- Conversation takes place when I am available.
- I can talk to several people at the same time.
Text messaging is an “asynchronous” method of communication, while telephone calls are “synchronous”. This means that to talk on the phone, both parties must be 100% available and focused on the conversation. What’s more, you’ll quickly notice when you’re talking to someone who’s doing something else during the call. Text messaging is then “asynchronous”, which means that everyone can respond at their own convenience. This is an advantage when chatting in a public place without disturbing everyone around. What’s more, I can interrupt the conversation without upsetting the other person. With text messaging, I can postpone my communication and go about my day as normal, while continuing my conversation when I’m available.
What’s more, text chat means I can talk to several people at the same time without anyone getting angry or feeling that I’m not 100% focused on the conversation.
So text messaging is a highly effective way of reaching and keeping in touch with a wide range of people. Text messaging is becoming an essential means of communication for businesses. Unfortunately, very few organizations are able to reach and be reached by their customers via text message. Why not? Today’s telephone systems are often outdated, or do not offer text messaging capability. Companies don’t believe they can integrate text messaging with their customers, and the same goes for their customers, who don’t believe they can communicate with their supplier via text. And yet, the time and efficiency savings that SMS offers companies are immense.
Remember the time you take to manage your voicemail messages. A simple text message saves your customer from having to leave a message on your answering machine, and saves you from having to stop everything, call your voicemail and struggle to listen carefully to each message and dial manually afterwards. What’s more, you have to manually record the number and name of the customer who left a message. Access, sound quality and the speed at which some messages are left make this a difficult task.
Take the time to observe the year of manufacture of your telephone system. You’ll probably be surprised at how old it is. Yet your customers have a $2,500 state-of-the-art smartphone in their pocket. They’re texting, chatting, taking videos, going on social networks and occasionally making a call. Note that I didn’t mention that they manage e-mail, because they rarely do.
Stop trying to increase your advertising budgets or trying to find out why you’re getting fewer customer inquiries. It’s simple: people call you, but unfortunately you can’t always get back to them, and they don’t leave messages. What’s more, they’ll probably never call back. That’s one lost customer and one lost business opportunity. Less than one in five people leave a message these days. And the younger generation doesn’t call or e-mail. How will they reach you? I have to tell you, they’re only going to go where the supplier is able to serve them on the communication channel of their choice and at the time of their choice.
Equip yourself with an intelligent telephone system to integrate your company’s ability to text your customers. Synchronize your phone system with your customer database to know which customer is communicating, and sometimes prioritize certain customers with more urgent needs than others. What’s more, you’ll quickly be able to distinguish between communications from new prospects versus existing customers, because your intelligent phone system knows and recognizes your current customers, displaying their first and last names. However, this isn’t the case with your prospects, as the system doesn’t know their first and last names linked to the phone number they’re calling or texting with. Hurry up, because your prospects are already going to your competitors, and soon your current customers will be doing the same if you don’t serve them in the way they expect.
