Phone calls are great for a personal touch, but not every question warrants a potentially time-wasting game of phone tag. How much time have you spent leaving detailed voicemails just to have the same conversation with the customer because they didn’t listen to it? How much is that wasted time costing you? From the customer’s perspective, when was the last time they answered a call from a number they didn’t recognize?
Consider another situation: Have you ever had to deal with a ‘he said, she said’ between you and a customer? You know what your employee told you they said over the phone, but six months later the customer has a different recollection. Texting eliminates this entirely by having a paper trail of the conversation.
Images are another way of clearly communicating an issue to a customer. No more misunderstandings or confusion. Did your tech find an issue that wasn’t on the original estimate? An image can help the customer understand why it needs to be corrected while recording the fact that you made them aware of it in a permanent log.
When text messaging is embedded into your Dealer Management System (DMS), it means that all your information is stored on one platform. The alternative is a 3rd party application that doesn’t keep your customer records and contact history in one place which requires regular synching of your customer list between two applications. Who needs the complexity caused by trying to link two non-embedded applications? Embedded text messaging means that you have one customer list and when a customer texts you, you can see their linked purchase and service history.
You are probably aware of the huge advantages that text messages have over other more traditional means of communication. Many sources cite text message open rates as high as 98%. This leads to response rates that are many times higher than phone calls or emails.
But why should text messaging be embedded into your Dealer Management System (DMS)? While some other Dealer Management Systems offer some kind of text messaging implementation, usually they aren’t a truly fully embedded platform like BiT. Third party applications don’t have the ability to store conversations or images in a customer record all in one platform that also records your sales, service and email history. Third party applications force you to hop back and forth between your DMS and another application and require regular maintenance to synch your customer lists.
BiT’s Embedded text messaging also offers the ability to separate conversations between departments. This allows you to keep your salespeople focused on texts related to sales prospects and lets your service manager focus on texts related to service.
Having an embedded texting solution in your DMS is a modern solution to communicating with your customers that ultimately leads to you getting paid faster. Some businesses see a 30% increase in revenue over six months – just because they can reach the customer quicker!