Crafting a better work experience

People like texting, that's a fact.

Being able to offer customer service via SMS (short message service) or texts opens up a fresh and dynamic way to reach customers but also for them to reach you better.

According to Gigaom, SMS are opened around 98% of the time! This number is astonishing, especially when we know emails are at best opened 22% of the time.

Why should I use SMS as a communication channel?

Let me give you three reasons why you should add SMS to your omnichannel customer support arsenal:

1. They are affordable

Unlike phone calls, where one agent can only take one call at a time, with SMS a single agent can be working multiple cases at any given time. The actual cost of SMS is also lower than a traditional phone call.

2. They're not frowned upon

People are tired of intrusive marketing calls or having to wait for ages before they are transferred to the "right" area of the company.

With SMS, customers respond when and if they want. Also, if they contact your company, their expectations will be lower in terms of replying speed. This gives companies a little room to breathe and handle cases with more care and diligence.

Additionally, people seem to see SMS as a more relaxed and approachable way to contact and get contacted by companies.

3. They're very popular

Literally, billions of people use SMS every day. There's no special tool, software to download or process to master. You just need a mobile phone and some credit in it. I don't believe there's another communication channel with entry-barriers as low as SMS.

Ok, but how do multiple agents reply from a single number?

This is where we come in to help. We offer a great integration with Twilio SMS that lets you send and receive text messages from your future collaborative email client, Missive. You read that right. Your team can collaborate and respond to SMS and emails from a single app, without stepping into each other's toes. Not only that, but you can also add WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and more!

Missive is a team inbox and chat app that helps businesses stay on top of all their communication channels in a single app. All while enabling collaboration between coworkers.

One of the best features is the ability to collaborate inside SMS. For example, if a customer sends a message, and you don't know how to respond, you can @mention another team and instantly give them access and ask for help.

You can also create team inboxes and assign certain SMS to specialized teams. Maybe a customer has a sales question. Then you can assign it to the Sales Team manually or through automated rules.

And you know how there's are always some questions that come through every day, multiple times per day...? With Missive's canned responses, you can quickly respond to popular SMS questions in seconds!

Pro tipUse the shortcut: Shift + Command + O to quickly open the responses popup

Nice! How do I set up Twilio SMS?

Step 1

Create a free Twilio account and buy a Twilio phone number.

Twilio's Console site allows users to quickly search for and provision phone numbers for your company. You can filter phone numbers based on location, phone number type, capabilities, and more from their Console.

Here's an in-depth guide of the phone number purchasing process. Or, if you prefer, you can also do a third-party phone number porting to Twilio.

You will be able to consult your number(s) in the Phone Numbers option under the Super Network category, which can be accessed by clicking on the sidebar's 3-dotted button.

Step 2

In the Twilio console, go to your dashboard and copy these two critical numbers: the Account SID and the Auth Token.

Step 3

Open Missive and go to Accounts > Add Account > SMS

Select whether this SMS account will be shared with a team, like the support team or if it will be a personal one.

Enter the Account SID, the Auth Token, and your Twilio Phone Number.

Step 4

Start collaborating around SMS with Missive! See how your customer satisfaction ratings go through the charts!

In today's fast-paced world, customers expect fast, reliable service. With so much competition out there, failing to do so can result in decreased brand loyalty.

In the online world, live chat is often the most effective channel of communication. According to eConsultancy:

Live chat has the highest satisfaction levels for any customer service channel, with 73%, compared with 61% for email and 44% for phone.

In this article, we will explain how you can add live chat to a WordPress site.

Choosing a live chat service to add to WordPress

There are many options out there. Choosing the right one depends on your individual use case.

If you are part of a small/medium team that is looking to collaborate around live chat, email, and other communication channels, then Missive is the way to go.

Missive Live Chat is powered by Twilio. Right off the bat, it is free, and you can have up to 200 active chats per month. After that, you will pay a low fee, starting at $0.03 for each additional one.

There appears to be no reliable live chat options for WordPress that are free. So using Missive Live Chat is a high-quality, affordable investment.

Setting up Missive Live Chat

Once you have created your Missive account. Go to your Settings and click Accounts then Add account.

Select the Missive Live Chat option.

As we stated before, Missive Live Chat uses Twilio's Conversations API, so you must first sign up to Twilio. Monthly fees (after the 200 active chats per month) will be charged to your Twilio account.

Once you've signed up, you will have access to the dashboard, where you will be able to see two important pieces of information: your Account SID and Auth Token.

Back in Missive you can continue the process.

Missive is, above all, a tool to collaborate around different channels. You will be asked to choose whether you want the chats shared with teammates or not.

We suggest you choose the first option and share it in a Team Inbox. This will lead all incoming chats into a shared inbox where many teammates can assign cases to each other and work more efficiently.

After that, you will need to enter the Account SID and Auth Token from your Twilio account as well as a Chat service name.

Your chat is almost ready to be plugged into WordPress.

Setting up Missive Live Chat in WordPress

It's quite easy to install Missive Live Chat in WordPress. We have developed a simple plugin for this purpose.Go to your WordPress Admin, click Plugins, search for Missive Live Chat, install it and activate it.

Upon installation, click on Missive in your WordPress dashboard sidebar, and follow these steps:

1. Enable Missive live chat by selecting the Yes option
2. Copy the account id from the code snippet in Missive. It looks like this number:
   2846475-c2324-232344-235-dsfds34ffdf233

1. Paste the id in the Chat Account id field back in WordPress.

1. Save changes

Congratulations! You now have a live chat on your website. But it's not in sync with the site's branding. Yet.

NoteYou can also add the code snippet directly to the WordPress theme's header.php file, although it will get deleted each time you update or change the theme. That's why we recommend using the Missive Live Chat for WordPress plugin.

Customizing the live chat window

Inside the Missive Live Chat for WordPress plugin settings you can:

• Change the main color
• Customize various messages such as welcome, help, error, title, etc.

For other settings, open your Missive app and go to the Setup tab in the Chat account and click Configure. Among other things, you can:

• Change the position of the bubble
• Show online status
• Show avatars
• Show names
• Ask for name and/or email
• Require name and/or email
• Change the bubble messages
• Change the User Interface messages
• Identify and verify users
• And more

The widget is highly customizable. For all options, see the documentation.

Here's the final version of our chat bubble. It looks great, right?

Managing the live chat

Missive Live Chat is the perfect way to interact with visitors and users from your website without creating additional silos of communication.

Whenever someone sends a message through the live chat on your website, it will instantly appear in your Missive app, and like all other channels (email, SMS, social media messages), you decide where these messages land. You may choose for them to arrive in a Team Inbox or everyone's Inbox.

Missive Live Chat offers you fantastic features:

• Identify visitors & authenticate users
• One-to-many interactions
• Customizable widget
• Schedules
• File exchange
• Automation
• Read status
• Attach and display meta data
• Emojis

Go here to learn more about each feature.

We hope this article helped you add a live chat to your WordPress site!

The customer's journey starts when they visit your website or brick-and-mortar store for the first time, and it doesn't end when they make a purchase or hire your services. It goes well beyond that point.

You've worked hard to acquire that customer. You've invested time and money. So it makes sense to retain them as long as possible. As it's the case for many industries, the cost of keeping a customer is lower than acquiring a new one. This Harvard Business Review article says that the acquiring cost can be 5 to 25 times more expensive than the retaining one.

So, how can you measure customer satisfaction to maintain low churn rates and long-lasting customers? Easy, just ask your customer for feedback. Ask for feedback on the product, the support experience, etc.

In this blog post, we're going to center around customer satisfaction in the support experience. Because unless you're Google, customer support is an integral part of your daily operations.

There are many buzzwords these days, companies boasting they are "customer-obsessed" or "customer-centric." For the most part, it's true. Companies focus more than ever in providing excellent customer support. It is mainly due to the level of competition. You can quickly lose customers to your marginally-inferior competitor if they offer superior customer support.

How to implement a customer satisfaction survey?

Probably the most known and effective way to do this is by embedding a link with the survey in the support employee's signature.

We've all seen these surveys—some people like them, others don't. Either way, they are great tools to provide feedback to the company about the employee's performance and helpfulness. Since support agents are the company's face, you only want to work with the best talent you can find.

It's also important to note that they are indispensable assets to businesses, and their work is not easy. These types of surveys can also help agents themselves. Some companies reward employees with the best ratings by giving out bonuses.

Tools to measure customer satisfaction

It's a crowded space where solutions abound. So we took the task of researching the top 3 options for customer satisfaction surveys. They all support shareable links, and some offer embeddable code.

Nicereply

With powerful analytics and an easy setup, Nicereply lets you create surveys for each employee rapidly and see a leaderboard.

Simplesat

Simplesat's customizable rating scale and quirky icons are an engaging new take on user experience.

Delighted

Their 5-star survey product lets you collect customer feedback easily with a link. Delighted's dashboard lets you see your customers' feedback in real-time.

Bonus: Typeform

Typeform offers a design-centric solution for surveys. They also offer a wide arrange of visually stunning templates.

How to add a survey to my email signature?

With Missive's managed signatures feature, you can easily add customer satisfaction surveys to each of your teammates' signatures in just minutes.

The dynamic data comes from your team's editable member profiles.

You can also add custom fields.

Also, in some survey tools (namely Nicereply) other variables can be fed to enrich reporting. For instance, you could pass the {{ conversation.id }} and {{ message.id }} variables to know in which email exchange the customer completed the survey.

Depending on the customer satisfaction tool you select, there are three ways to add the survey to managed signatures in Missive.

1. Single link with employee selector

In this case, you have a single link pointing to a general survey. When the customer clicks on the link, they're sent to a page where they can select the employee's name that helped them and then they can proceed to rate them. This system usually works for small teams.

In Missive's managed signature rich text editor, simply add the survey's link.

To make this more appealing, you could create an image link with HTML. Like this:

You can achieve that with this code:

<div>
  <strong>
    <span style="font-size: 15px;">{{ user.name }}</span>
  </strong>
</div>
<div>
  <em>
    <span style="color: #005CD4;">Company Inc</span>
  </em>
</div>
<div>
  <span style="color: #737373;">
    <span style="font-size: 11px;">@company.inc</span>
  </span>
</div>
<br>
<div>
  <span style="font-size: 12px;">Was my response helpful?</span>
</div>
<div>
  <a href="http://www.mysurvey.com/companyinc">
    <img style="width: 100px; margin-top: 5px;" src="https://i.imgur.com/s2q0a6T.png" alt="Survey">
  </a>
</div>

2. Dynamic survey link

If the satisfaction survey system gives you a unique link per employee, you can add the unique part or the URL as a custom field in the member's profile. For example, if the complete link is:

http://www.mysurvey.com/companyinc/employee/sales/671gjbsw2

Then in each employee's custom field, enter the variable part of the URL:

In the editor, type in the static part of the URL and add the newly created variable custom field, like this:

3. Embeddable code

Some survey collection companies let you generate embeddable HTML code. In this case, copy the code and paste it in the managed signature editor.

You can also add custom field variables like in the example above.

We're confident these customer satisfaction surveys will help your company offer the best experience and ultimately retain more customers.

Research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company shows that in certain industries, increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.

Start gathering feedback!