Providing powerful alerts for customers and staff to increase on-site appointments while creating better customer experiences
Text notifications are one of the best ways to engage with people. Not just consumers, or staff… People! With everyone inundated with email marketing and other notifications, it’s easy for your opt-in notices to go…well unnoticed!
According to a recent study from Gartner, the average open rate for text messages is a staggering 98% while email marketing open rates lag far behind with a dismal 20%. This means, appointment reminders, instructions and other details you need to share with customers have a high chance of being ignored if you’re just using email notifications to drive awareness of your appointments.
Text message notifications are a great way to keep your customers and even your employees up to date with critical information about their upcoming appointments and when action is needed to help facilitate those appointments.
Text Notifications for Consumers:
Right off the bat, Engageware clients are seeing that combining text notifications with email notifications increases customer show-rates to over 90%. This builds powerful predictability into the number of customers visiting your locations, furthering cost savings by enabling you to better plan your required staffing levels.
Additionally, your customers are able to reply back to confirm or cancel appointments right from their text notification further increasing customer show-rates, while enabling customers a frictionless way to cancel appointments instead of just not showing up. Customers can either cancel the appointment via text, or reschedule the appointment through their email notifications, while freeing the timeslot they previously held making it available to a new customer.
Next, when customers arrive on-site with pre-scheduled appointments or as unscheduled walk-ins, the last thing they want to do is wait in a line until their appointment starts. And although Engageware’s queue management solution provides customers with a next-in-line digital display and estimated wait times to keep them informed, your customers are going to want to shop around or run errands while they wait based on their schedule. Your employees can easily send “next in-line” texts to customers as they advance in the queue right from the Concierge Mobile app. Customers then know it’s time to come back to the waiting area for their appointment.
Text Notifications for Employees:
With wait time alerts, managers and floor employees are always just a text message away when visitors enter your locations. Wait time alerts are perfect to keep district managers, floor managers, and employees up to date on location visitor traffic and employee utilization. Let’s say you set your wait time threshold to 15 minutes. As soon as a customer who has checked in for an appointment has been waiting for 15 minutes, notices can be sent out to take action and serve more customers when the need arises.
District managers can subscribe to wait time notices to understand when any of the locations they manage see increased wait times.
Location managers can be notified as wait times increase to take action such as redirecting staff members to the floor, assisting with appointments, or calling in more staff members.
Floor employees can be notified as wait times increase to redirect staff from back room tasks such as stocking shelves, unloading products, or inventory and drive them to the sales floor to assist more customers.
Text notifications are a powerful addition to your customer notification strategy that will easily offset its own costs when compared to the increases in show-rates, appointment scheduling productivity, and employee utilization.