How You Can Use SMS to Increase Answering Rates For Your Call Centre

So you’ve reached out to your lead via call and they’ve not answered. What do you do next? Leave a voicemail message? Hope they call back? Call them again the next day?

Why not think outside the box and utilise MaxContact’s SMS service that is inbuilt into the contact centre system? This means it’s native to MaxContact and all part of the same easy interface that your team are used to.

Imagine you've just received a hot lead from your website and you call them from the dialler but present a CLI (Caller Line Identification) that they don’t recognise. There is a fair chance that they might not answer as they don’t know who it is. With MaxContact, you can set business rules to automatically send an SMS to the unanswered lead along the lines of “Hey, it’s James for Company XYZ. Sorry that you couldn’t take our call, I’ll call you back shortly from the same number.” This feeds confidence into the consumer that the call is coming from a business that they have engaged. The dialler is then configured to automatically dial the lead back in a pre-determined amount of time, 10 minutes for example. We’ve seen clients have a contact rate of 85% after implementing automatic SMS follow-ups.

And if you’re thinking, “what about those leads who text back?” well why not have a conversational SMS exchange with them? If they want to interact with your business over SMS then let them. With MaxContact’s conversational SMS, replies will come back into the contact centre team, again on the same platform, whereby you can then reply back and forth with the customer on their terms. Of course, this interaction can seamlessly be migrated to a voice call once the conversation reaches its advanced stages. All of this is recorded against the lead in MaxContact ensuring you have a holistic view of the customer journey and their history engaging with your business.

These are just a couple of ways of utilising SMS to improve your brand visibility, customer experience and engagement. Contact your account manager or reseller partner to find out more about SMS within MaxContact.