SMS to the rescue

SHORT MESSAGE service, or SMS, is playing an increasingly useful and cost-saving role for companies using call centres to interact with customers.

MARK PAYNE

Not only is SMS technology particularly useful for improving the call centre experience for customers, it is also ideally suited to the rapidly expanding multimedia environment.

A typical call centre query will be routed through an interactive voice response (IVR) system, and SMS is a rapid and inexpensive way of providing the caller with confirmation of the outcome.

If the call centre's response is a short answer to a specific question such as "what is my bank balance?' the SMS is the quickest, most efficient and most secure means of providing the answer.

The beauty of SMS is that such answers and confirmations can be spawned immediately and confidentially from the call centre operators' desktop computers. It is absolutely ideal for quick responses of up to 10 words.

Another effective implementation of SMS for improving call centre service levels stems from the ability of IVR systems to track incoming calls and detect those that have dropped out of the system, either because the caller has hung up or there has been a network glitch.

Call centre systems can be configured to immediately respond by SMS to the dropped call number with a message asking the caller to resume the contact. "This is a very efficient way of indicating to customers that their input is important and that the company is determined to provide top class service and resolve any problem."

Other SMS applications include medical or healthcare centres where automatically triggered messages from a desktop Microsoft environment will remind patients of appointments. This ensures that the medical service provider's time is not wasted and that the patient is not billed for an appointment not kept.

SMS is a technology that ideally suits mobile and technologically savvy consumers. For simple queries such as bank balances, repayments, account balances, contract expiry dates and the like, SMS is the ideal option, particularly in the current high interest rate environment where organisations are looking to achieve significant cost reductions without prejudicing service levels.

About the author: Mark Payne is Director African Operations for Genesys.