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Customer service is changing. Currying the favor of consumers is always going to be a top priority for businesses; we all know that one negative review can tank new menu rollout just as quickly as positive word of mouth can lead to lines days if not weeks before a product launch. People mean everything to a company's success, so when 64 percent of consumers say they'd prefer text over voice communication for customer service and 77 of adults aged 18-34 have a positive impression of companies with text capabilities, it's time to not just listen but to take text message alerts and the systems to the run them very seriously.

Texting: A Consumer-Friendly Way to Communicate

If you want to make you customer base happy, make their lives easier. That's the philosophy behind developing a product or service and it should be the yardstick to which you measure up each action your business takes from here on out – starting, by the way, with how you choose to communicate with those customers. An impressive 79 percent of consumers say they text on a regular basis, which means text message alerts already convenient for them, and even flip phones come text-ready, so there's no software to download or new technology to learn.

What Consumers Text

So we know that texting is practically synonymous with convenience, but how are customers wielding this hand-held power?

• Checking Order Status – Waiting on a delivery? Businesses can send and order confirmation by text that includes a unique short code or embedded link that's easy to use later when consumers are checking on a missing package or just curious where it's currently at. On report found that 38 percent of consumers prefer to check their order status via text message, so once again SMS alerts and text updates are just giving the people what they want.
  
  
• Confirming Reservations – Never again shall a hungry diner miss out on that coveted dinner reservation or miss the opportunity to snag a first-class upgrade on their flight simply because they weren't near a landline, desktop computer, or WiFi. With text, all they need is their phone's network (practically universal these days_ and a company using a fantastic text alert system.
  
  
• Asking Questions – The only thing more frustrating than being unable to find an answer to a question is having to fill out one of those annoying little online forms that disappear somewhere deep into the internet abyss shortly after you press send. Texting the customer service or tech department of a company to clarify your new DVR setup or asking about refund is a lot less irritating, and the less irritated a customer is the more likely they are to continue being your customer.
  
  
• Store Locations and Hours – Your front desk staff can answer the phone and parrot the same address, fax number, and hours of operation information a few hundred times a day, or you can use your text alert system to offer consumers a number they can text keywords like "address" or "hours" to and actually get a quick, concise, and up-to-date response in return.
  
  
• Checking Balances or Due Dates – With SMS two-factor authentication and other safety measures in play, consumers can now text their banks using a unique verification code and check on their account balance or find out when their next credit card payment is due.
  
  
• Resetting Passwords – From email accounts to blogs to social media platforms, every website seems to require a username and password these days, and all their parameters for creating those passwords are different. The result is dozens of passwords no consumer can remember, and text gives them a way to confirm their identity and update their codes to they can get where they want to go with less muss and minimal fuss.
  
  

It's clear that consumers are benefiting from SMS and text alerts in some pretty major ways; is your business doing the same? Trumpia takes everything your customers love about business-based texts and rolls it into one reliable, user-friendly package that's as intuitive as it is innovative. By integrating Trumpia's complete SMS platform for business messaging into your communications and marketing strategies, you're giving your customers what they want while also satisfying the concerns of your own company.

Sign up with Trumpia now and start reinventing the way your business texts or request a 5-minute demo to see the future of business communication in action.