Avoiding the Spam Folder: Finding A Reliable Means of Customer Communication

Email is a popular way of communicating with customers, but in the age of spam where inboxes are clogged with ever more messages demanding customer attention—and stricter spam technology that often condemns legit messages—emails aren’t always the most reliable way to ensure your communications are received. While email will likely remain a core part of the way you communicate, there are alternatives to email that ensure important and time-sensitive messages to your customer are not getting swallowed up by the bottomless pit of spam.

Voice Broadcasting for Customer Notifications

When it comes to certain use cases, voice broadcasts can be a good complement, and sometimes a preferable option, to email. Appointment confirmations, for example, or delivery notifications and emergency alerts. Essentially any message where it is vital that it not get lost in an inbox or spam filter is an ideal candidate for voice broadcasting.

What makes voice broadcasts so ideal for these kinds of notifications is the fact that they will never end up in a spam folder or lost in an overcluttered inbox with your customer none the wiser. After you record your short message to your customers, you can schedule a call to go out to their phones with a delivery guarantee—and if they don’t answer, it’s eother recorded in their voicemail or put back into the call queue for a later broadcast. The potential for getting missed or buried is nearly eliminated. Besides, receiving a phone call provides a much more personal experience for your customer since they can hear your voice, and allows you to provide more detailed information than you might be able to convince your customers to read in a lengthy email.

IVR for Better Survey Results

Even greater than the challenge of delivering customer notifications is the challenge of getting your audience to respond to your customer satisfaction surveys. You depend upon the data gleaned from surveys to improve and fine-tune your processes, but it can be difficult to get enough people to respond or provide meaningful information. Unless you plan on surveying people manually (potentially very expensive and time consuming), automated phone surveys using IVR (interactive voice response) or email blasts that direct people to take a web survey are your best and most cost-effective options, and while both survey methods can be effective, IVR voice broadcasts via the phone might be your best bet.

Think about it: on average, people receive dozens, maybe hundreds, of emails every day but only a handful of phone calls. It’s very easy for your email request to be lost in an overcrowded inbox. A ringing phone stands out, and you have a greater chance of them completing the survey.

In addition, with phone surveys, users can record responses with their own voice, enabling freer and more detailed responses. You can also hear the inflection and tone of an answer, giving you nuanced data you just can’t get with typed text.

Finally, phone surveys can be easier on your audience than web surveys, since it’s just easier for most people to speak a response instead of typing one out, especially if you are trying to solicit in-depth free-form answers.

This doesn’t mean you should strike email from your marketing and customer service strategy altogether, but some customer communications are too important to risk being lost in a cluttered inbox or spam filter. To get serious about making your customer communications count, download this white paper: New Ways to Integrate Voice Broadcasting into Your Marketing and Sales Strategy.