The holidays are a busy time for your business, but it’s also a busy time for your customers. When I’m shopping for the holidays, I barely have time to stop to get lunch let alone wait on hold for a store representative to answer my call. Most of the time, I have a short, simple question that I wish I could text the business and get a quick response. Here are some of the questions customers wish they could text businesses around the holidays.
- What are your store hours?
Usually finding store hours is pretty straight forward. A simple Google search should be sufficient to determine when a store is open or closed. During the holidays, however, store hours often stray from their posted times. If you’re like me and you save your shopping until the last minute, you’ve inevitably showed up at a store only to find out it’s closed, or you’ve walked around the shopping center looking for the stores that are open beyond their typical hours. This all could be solved with a simple text. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could text ‘HOURS’ to a business and immediately get the hours of operation for that day?
2. Do you have XXXX in stock?
Jingle all the Way would have been a much shorter movie if Sinbad or Arnold could have simply texted a couple toy stores and asked if they had Turbo-Man in stock. If you’re looking for a popular gift or something very specific, texting a store beforehand could save hours of driving around town from store to store.
3. How much does XXXX cost?
Everybody enjoys a good deal. Sure, you can go on a company’s website and see if they have the prices listed but that doesn’t always work. A lot of company websites don’t have the prices listed. If they’re having a sale for the holidays, there is a good chance that the prices are out of date. Being able to text a business and ask for the price of a particular item would help you bargain hunt in a few taps of the phone.
4. This broke, can you fix it?
There’s nothing worse than unboxing a new gift and realizing that something’s missing or broken. If you are in that position then you want to resolve the issue as quickly and painlessly as possible. Figuring out the next course of action can be difficult. Can you just take it back to the store? Do you need to send it into the manufacturer? These are all questions that could be answered rather quickly by a quick text.
5. What’s the difference between these 2 models?
Again, this is a time when you could probably find the answer online, but it would be quicker to talk to an expert. They’ll be able to understand what you’re looking for and make an educated recommendation on which particular model you should go with. Getting your questions answered ahead of time will allow you to jet in and out of the store and help you avoid spending time in a jam packed retail location.
As you can see, offering your customers the ability to text your business can make their experience once they get to your store much more enjoyable. However, we wouldn’t advise that you go and put your personal cell phone number on your business’s website.
Avochato allows you to easily manage all of your customer communications from a single easy to use inbox. Avochato’s keyword feature allows you to set up automatic responses to particular inbound messages. For example, if someone messaged you with the keyword ‘HOURS’ you could have Avochato automatically respond with your business’s hours of operations. The single inbox allows you to easily assign messages to particular employees and seamlessly transfer conversations from one employee to another without the end customer even knowing they’re being transferred.
If this sounds like something that might help your business you can sign up for our free trial today (no credit card required). What other types of messages do you think people would prefer to have answered via text message?
