Text Request Talks
4 Franchise Customer Experience Tips with Trey Powell of Mosquito Joe
Business texting can boost your franchise’s customer satisfaction ratings, but only if you successfully implement it into your existing communication gaps.
Here’s how to add text messaging to your processes, so you can create seamless customer experiences.
This article takes insights from our Text Request Talks podcast with Trey Powell and further distills it into advice specific to texting. Powell is a franchise owner of Mosquito Joe and Wonderly Lights.
The following tips expand on how to meet the same goals Powell does with text messaging.
Watch the full interview on YouTube.
1. Create 5-star experiences that customers want to share.
40% of Powell’s business is referrals from happy customers who are singing his praises. Powell’s success comes from taking care of his customers—and the way he does that is by reaching out to them and learning the specifics of what he can improve.
Text messaging is Powell’s preferred channel to get customer feedback, because:
Customers actually see his messages
Customers feel more comfortable sharing their thoughts via text rather a phone call
The key thing is that once you get feedback, you act on it by either a) filling any gaps the customer points out, or b) following up with a review link if the customer was satisfied.
Business texting tools, like Reviews, make it easy to monitor online feedback. Reviews connects your franchise locations’ Google Business pages to Text Request, so you can easily request, track, and respond to online reviews all from one place.
Acknowledging customer feedback, whether it’s a public review or a private message, is key to showing you care about their experience. That kind of commitment ultimately leads to more happy customers, more referrals, and more revenue.
2. Provide the smoothest bill pay possible with text-to-pay.
Frictionless buying experiences drive revenue. That’s why Powell recommends having as much of your payments process automated as possible.
Customers want to pay by text, because the process is so fast. Our Payments features gives your franchise one, secure place to:
Create payment requests
Track and process transactions
View and download payment request histories
Send payment reminders
Customers reply to your first SMS payment request with a confirmation code to pay. Then they just put their debit or credit card on file, and bang! Their next payment is even smoother than the first because their card is on file.
This method beats out paper invoices and mailing every time, plus it provides an easy way to follow up with recurring customers whenever they have card declines or require updated info.
More and more customers are asking for payment reminders and bill pay options through SMS for these reasons. It eliminates any extra hassles for both of you, while keeping revenue flowing.
3. Mass text prepayment discounts.
In one week of January, Powell closed $450,000 in business by sending a single SMS promotion to existing customers. What did this SMS promotion offer?
A major discount in exchange for pre-paying for the entire year of services.
Customers were more than happy to take advantage of this discount, because it cut down on the number of times they’d have to pay—which goes back to creating those frictionless buyer experiences we talked about earlier.
Send these annual prepayment opportunities to your entire customer base at once with mass texts. Mass texts work like BCC email, so any responses become one-on-one conversations that customers can use to say “yes” or ask additional questions.
From there, you can say, “Want me to charge it to the card we have on file?” and the prepayment process is done! That’s painless for you and the customer.
4. Delegate communication tasks.
Powell says the hardest part of successfully passing on tasks to new reps is finding the balance between trust and guidance. So how do you approach this with business texting?
Set clear processes and roles, plus have pre-written templates to keep communications consistent across employees and locations. You also want to be able to see who says what to whom, so you can maintain oversight and accountability—and course correct where needed.
Text Request’s dashboard makes it easy to jump in and see how your teammates are communicating with customers, so you can give them pointers on how to improve ongoing. We even offer a templates feature, so your most frequent communications stay consistent and quick.
This way your entire team is able to text—but with your ongoing supervision and support—so communications don’t get bogged down because only one person is doing everything. Efficiency like this ensures the customer experience you provide stays as seamless as possible.
How Else Can Text Messaging Improve Your Franchise's Customer Experience?
The above are just a few quick tips—but we have an entire in-depth franchise text messaging playbook for those who want to learn even more ways to implement SMS into your processes.
Our business texting software has helped hundreds of franchise brands streamline communication, and we’re ready to help yours next!
