Written by: Kenneth Reilly, Senior Research & Insights Associate

With critical decisions being made faster than ever, a continuous stream of feedback from your customer is imperative to navigating your business through uncharted waters. Long gone are the days when businesses had the luxury to take their time carefully planning and testing initiatives.

Companies in today’s environment are acting first and making adjustments on the fly, which is driving a parallel need for quality, Real-Time Feedback on these initiatives. While there are numerous methods for Real-Time Feedback available, this article explains how SMS Campaigns can be leveraged to capture this type of information. 

What is ‘Real-Time Feedback’? 

When we talk about Real-Time Feedback, we are referring to a constant stream of data from users of your product or service, leveraged to obtain in-the-moment feedback and ensure a consistently great experience that is in alignment with brand expectations. 

While companies like Netflix have built their own innovative, real-time analytic databases to gather feedback on users of their streaming service, not every company has the resources or the need for such sophisticated systems. There are much cheaper and less labor-intensive alternatives. 

What are SMS Campaigns and how are they used? 

SMS (Simple message service) Campaigns are used by insights teams to quickly and easily reach audiences by directly messaging their cell phone. Essentially, any touchpoint along the consumer journey provides an opportunity to detect patterns and optimize the experience. 

With Fuel Cycle’s SMS Campaign feature, clients are able to share any activity within the platform to easily reach their community with customizable text messages, increasing participation rates while reaching a wider and more diverse audience. 

A few specific use-cases for SMS Campaigns shared by SurveyMonkey include: 

  • Phone support feedback: Immediately after you end a phone conversation with a customer, invite them via SMS to take a survey to rate the service experience. 
  • Purchase feedback: Right after someone makes a purchase, either on a company’s mobile site or in-store, invite them via SMS to take a survey to learn about their purchase experience. 
  • Delivery feedback: Immediately after your customer receives a shipment or delivery, invite them via SMS to take a survey to understand if the experience met their expectations. 

Why Use SMS Campaigns for Real-Time Feedback? 

The key component that makes SMS Campaigns a reliable method for Real-Time Feedback is speed. Studies show that 90% of the time, a text sent to a customer is read within three minutes, which ultimately removes recency bias and ensures higher quality feedback. 

In addition to the quick response time, SMS Campaigns are praised for the strong response rate, which is reported to be 7.5x greater than email. As, the traditional method for survey feedback, email has quickly become a crowded space. What once was a sacred and personal communication channel during the early days of the internet has transformed into an endless stream of advertisements and promotions, where survey invitations, unfortunately, end up lost in the crowd. SMS Campaigns also appeal to a millennial audience – among the 18-34 year old age bracket, text is the preferred channel for notifications from businesses. 

Improve Response Rates and Drive Real-Time Feedback with Fuel Cycle 

Fuel Cycle users can create SMS Campaigns to reach community members wherever they are, even across the world. SMS Campaigns can be used by themselves or as a complement to email and push notification campaigns, so you can tailor your outreach to your unique audience.

To learn more about how Fuel Cycle can help your brand leverage SMS Campaigns, schedule a demo today.