SMS Proves Key to Improving Customer Service
A BulkSMS.com Case Study

SMS proves key to improving customer service

In an ambitious marketplace where businesses compete for customers, customer satisfaction is seen as a key differentiator. Businesses who succeed are often the ones that make customer satisfaction a core element of their business strategy. This is the aim of Knight Sound and Light whose slogan, “Big enough to cope. Small enough to care. We are different” speaks directly to the quality of their customer service. Based in the heart of London, Knight Sound and Light remains at the forefront of supplying and maintaining high quality DJ, studio and pro audio and sound equipment.

In putting their business promise into practice, Shannon Ryan, head of Technical Sales at Knight Sound and Light, identified an underlying flaw in their customer service strategy lay in difficulties faced when communications between staff and customers failed.

“When orders arrived or repairs were ready for our customers to collect, we would give them a call to inform them of the pickup time and date. The only problem with this was that we found that the majority of the customers would not answer phone calls and we would have to leave voice messages which were missed or misinterpreted. In which case, many customers would end up dissatisfied at the speed of the order simply because of the missed communication,” said Ryan.

In an attempt to solve this problem, the Knight Sound and Light team moved to email to notify their customers of collections. However, email quickly proved to reflect similar service problems as phone calls as many customers did not regularly check their emails, the emails addresses were incorrect, or their emails ended up in the junk or spam folder. Faced, once again, with the problem of how best to communicate with their customers, Ryan decided to try SMS messaging.

Ryan started using the BulkSMS Web to SMS platform in 2013, an online SMS messaging service that provided the solution for their customer communications. The Knight Sound and Light staff were able to send SMS text messages notifying customers of an order or equipment repair that was ready for collection. According to Ryan, “with the sending of SMS messages, both our staff and our customers are much happier with the speed of equipment delivery and orders are now being collected in hours or days as opposed to weeks and months when SMS was not yet in place.”

“It is great to see how SMS is being used to improve customer service and communication in a small business such as Knight Sound and Light. Their use of SMS messaging specifically shows how they achieve their company goals of improving customer service by providing a trusted and reliable communication solution,” says Dr Pieter Streicher, managing director of BulkSMS.com