Use Cases For Text Messaging Beyond Payment
Of course, there are more ways you can interact with your customers beyond asking for payments. Finding software that can perform multiple tasks is the best way to take full advantage of the tools you are paying for. Beyond payments, text messaging can:
- Allow companies to send terms of service and onboarding paperwork through text directly to a consumer’s phone.
- Reduce business costs by eliminating contracts being sent through the mail by attaching an esignature request to a text message, so consumers can sign and return agreements in a matter of minutes.
- Deliver meeting notes or other client files directly to a mobile phone number while still protecting secure information through dual authentication.
- Allow auto repair shops to send repair details and ask for go-ahead to start service via SMS.
Short Codes and Longcodes: What’s the Difference?
SMS texting works through either a short code or a long code. Long codes look like a regular 10 digit phone number, but are a dedicated number for texting.
PDCflow, for example, has a registered, dedicated number for texting, so our customers don’t need to go through the hassle of registering a number or spending extra money on their own numbers.
Short codes are the five-digit phone numbers many companies use to send promotional texts about sales, etc. These can be costly to register, take a long time to set up and may get flagged as spam, making it harder to deliver important messages to the customers they are intended for.
How Can Offering Pay By Text Options Help Your Business?
In order to make texting work for your organization, you need to make goals your payment software can help you achieve. Here are three of the main ways texting can make daily tasks easier and simplify communication with customers while streamlining the digital customer journey.
Faster Payments
Of course, the quicker customers can access your online payment portal, the better. Offering a pay by text option gives them a direct line to payment methods that help capture revenue faster and reach customers the ways they prefer.
With its high open rates and increasing popularity, texting is an effective way to ensure more customers are reading your communications. A recent study found that “30 percent of small business customers would frequently or always pay with a text from their phone if they could.”
This statistic alone is a good reason to adopt a text channel for your business but it becomes even more convincing to hear that for customers under 35, the number of people who want to pay by text nearly doubles.
Customer Support
Customers will need support or have questions about their bills. That’s just a fact of business. If you combine customer service calls with the ability to send a statement or invoice by text while on the phone with your customer, they can access statements and discuss their account live on the phone, streamlining interactions.
Sending payment requests through text can also comply with Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards by allowing customers to enter payment card information on their own, so employees never see or hear sensitive data.
Awareness
If you have other steps to your workflow besides billing and payments, consider using text messaging for those as well. Current payment communication software like PDCflow’s Flow Technology should offer you additional workflow functionality so you can get more out of your business tools.
How PDCflow Does Text
PDCflow’s unique Flow Technology is a payment communication system that lets you engage with customers by text, email, or both at the same time. Flow offers several workflow actions to choose from, so you can get more done in a single transaction.
In one workflow, you can send your customers:
- pay by text requests
- documents
- digital signature requests
- photo upload requests
SMS Flow Delivery and Benefit
Text messaging through Flow helps you stay compliant with the TCPA, offers you flexibility and streamlines tasks. Here are a few other benefits of using Flow Technology for SMS payment communications with customers.
- Can send one communication to consumers via text and email simultaneously, so it’s fast for staff and convenient for consumers to access important documents or complete workflows any way they prefer.
- SMS through Flow allows for more versatile workflows, as you can combine all Flow capabilities in one interaction (send and receipt of documents or photos; esignature and pay by text requests, etc.)
- Notification tracking makes it easy for teams or individuals to see if an SMS communication has been sent, received, completed, or if it failed. Set up automated email notifications to go to an individual staff member or group email address so you know exactly what stage customers are in at any given time.
- Increased security with an optional dual authentication PIN ensures sensitive messages are only viewed by the intended recipient. If you need to send meeting notes, contracts or other private documents to customers, you can use a shared secret (known by both you and the recipient) as a PIN. This ensures information remains confidential.
PDCflow’s payment communication software offers flexibility, streamlined workflows and faster payment resolutions. Enhance the customer experience and boost company revenue with Flow Technology today. Request a call from a PDCflow Account Executive.
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- ABOUT THE AUTHOR -
Hannah Huerta, Marketing Specialist
Hannah Huerta is a Marketing Specialist at PDCflow. She creates content for the accounts receivable and payment industry.
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