5 Reasons to Consider Utility Text Messaging

As a utility company, you may be looking for the best way to communicate with your customers. Utility companies provide incredibly vital services to the residents of specific geographic areas. Power, water, gas, and more are absolutely vital to people’s everyday lives. As such, it’s paramount for these important providers to have the ability to quickly and effectively communicate with all parties that use their services. One of the best ways to do this in the modern era is to implement SMS text messaging. Below are five reasons to consider utility text messaging.

Texting Transmits Important Information Quickly

Utility companies don’t only have to transmit messages to their customers regarding things like bills. They also, from time to time, have to transmit messages that could impact their clients’ safety and well being. This is the case, for example, for a power company that has to announce an outage for a specific market for a specific period of time. This kind of message being received quickly is important.

One statistic you should know is that 90 percent of texts are read within three minutes of being sent. This is quicker than almost any other medium. If you need an important message to be digested by individuals quickly, texting is your best choice for sending that message.

Texting Is the Best Choice for Mass Communication

Utility companies also tend to have very large customer bases. This could conceivably include millions of people that live in multiple major urban areas and all surrounding suburbs. In many cases, a utility company will need to communicate the same message to all those people simultaneously in real-time.

Text messaging for electric companies to alert major metro areas of service announcements, for example, is very unlikely to fail due to technical reasons. With other options for mass communication, this may not be the case. Even if the message does manage to reach all customers, it may not reach all of them at the same time. Texting really is the most efficient option available.

Texting Is an Inexpensive Solution

Another one of the best reasons to go with texting for customer communication is the amount of value you receive for the dollar spent. Of all the different ways to communicate with customers, texting is one of the most cost-effective. Texting slashes the overhead inherent in other modes of customer communication. For example, sending mail requires paper, envelopes, postage, toner, and lots of labor. An SMS text message, on the other hand, involves no such overhead. In fact, a mass text message could be initiated by a single person in a few minutes.

Texting Is Filtered Far Less Than E-Mail

One of the biggest alternatives to texting for communicating with customers is e-mail. However, texting has certain strong advantages over e-mail that make it a superior choice. This is mostly due to how consumers perceive e-mail and how e-mail is treated by different e-mail clients. Consumers hate e-mail “spam” and tend to ignore non-work related e-mail as a result.

This attitude has been integrated into most e-mail clients that now have strong filtering systems that automatically send certain e-mails to the junk or trash folder. Unfortunately for utility companies, this can often include legitimate e-mails from businesses. This is much less the case with text messaging.

Texting Provides Convenience for Customers

Texting can also provide a good deal of convenience to your customers. This would include, for example, reminders to pay upcoming bills or notifications that they are delinquent on payments. It can save them from the consequences of not paying their bills on time due to absent-mindedness.

For you, it helps to ensure your revenue streams are less impeded. It’s also excellent for customer service. Sending SMS text messages directly to consumers can allow you to more quickly and efficiently follow up on a customer service issue in real-time. Customers will be more satisfied as a result

Overall, SMS texting messaging is an excellent solution for reaching out to consumers regarding the different messages you want to impart to them. It’s quick, efficient, and cost-effective. There are a wide array of different services that can be streamlined for your utility company by integrating text messaging into the process. The possibilities mentioned above are only a starting point.