Text messaging is a proven effective communication strategy for businesses. It can be used to reach out to customers, send them promotional messages, run marketing campaigns, and engage with them to enhance business. Text messaging is done using SMS or short message service. It is easy to implement and is very effective. There is another powerful benefit of text messaging, which makes it preferred by companies. This is the option of a text message survey.
What is a text message survey?
A survey is a device used to find out the opinion of a person. It is commonly used by marketers to understand customer perceptions. For example, once a customer buys a product, a text survey can be administered to find out if the customer is happy with the product. These surveys can be sent every time an order is placed or periodically (once in six months or a year). Surveys used to be done by sending forms to fill in. Most customers are busy and don’t have time to fill in lengthy surveys. This is why text message surveys have become popular. Customers would find it easy to send a response by text message.
Why carry out text message surveys?
The following explains why marketers should start using text message surveys as a part of their customer engagement strategy:
A text message survey is easy to implement. It needs just an SMS to be sent.
The survey can ask one question or a couple of questions. This would fit within the character limit allowed by SMS.
Customers would find it convenient to reply to a message by selecting one option or typing one word. They can do it at any time when they are free. They would prefer these types of surveys rather than filling forms that take a lot of time.
A survey is very important to understand the voice of the customer. It helps to know what is in the customer’s mind, which is very important for a business. It can help to understand if the customer is happy or unhappy.
Many times, a customer does not complain but is unhappy. Such customers can go away. Surveys help to identify this. It can help businesses take corrective measures to make customers happy again.
Implementing text message surveys
It is easy to implement text message surveys. You just need two resources. One is a database of customers to whom you need to send the survey message. The second is text messaging software to help you send these messages easily and effectively. Once you have these resources, you can send the surveys at the click of a mouse or just by tapping your screen.
The following explains how you can implement text message surveys in your organization:
Ideally, the text message survey should have a single question. You need to spend time planning the question and the answers or responses.
Offer choices or options for the customers. For instance, good/bad/average. Alternatively, a rating can be taken on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is the least and 10 the highest. For example, a question can be “Are you happy with the product you got. Rate your satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10.”
Customers can reply to text message surveys by sending their answers in the form of a number. For example, sending the number 8 to the above example indicates their rating is 8/10. Even keywords can be used to encourage responses to questions.
Sometimes, the product or service offered would be complex. In such a case, it may call for more than one question. Instead of sending all the questions together, they can be sent one at a time. As a question is answered, one more can be sent. Too many questions must be avoided as they may not yield a proper response.
Customers can be encouraged to respond by offering a gift or incentive. Your message can indicate that all customers who participate in the survey would get a discount/free gift, etc. You can even offer a lucky draw for all survey participants where a few winners get free products. This will motivate customers to participate.
You can create the message and send it to all customers at one time. Personalize the message by including customer name/company name, etc. This will make the message seem personal and not look like a mass text message. The customer is more likely to respond with this tactic.
As you would have understood, running surveys is an important way to understand the voice of the customer. You can now run surveys whenever you want thanks to SMS. It is very cost-effective to run surveys using text messaging. Start using surveys today to help you get inputs for improvements from your customers.
