Email is slow. Phone calls are expensive. SMS hits the sweet spot: fast, personal, and already in your customer's pocket. Here's why forward-thinking support teams are adding text messaging to their channel mix, and how AI makes it practical at scale.
Every customer has a phone in their pocket. They use it to text friends, confirm appointments, and get delivery updates. But when they need help from your support team? They're expected to open a laptop, find an email address, and write a formal message. Or worse, sit on hold waiting for a phone agent.
Something doesn't add up.
The Problem With Traditional Support Channels
Email has been the backbone of customer support for two decades, and for good reason. It's asynchronous, creates a paper trail, and lets agents handle multiple conversations at once. But email comes with serious drawbacks:
- Response expectations are slow. Customers sending an email mentally prepare to wait hours or days. That's not great for urgent issues.
- Emails get buried. Support requests compete with newsletters, promotions, and internal threads for attention in crowded inboxes.
- Formal tone creates friction. People write longer, more detailed emails than necessary because the medium feels formal. More text means more time for agents to parse.
Phone support solves the urgency problem but introduces its own challenges. Hold times frustrate customers. Each call ties up an agent for the full duration. And phone conversations don't naturally produce structured data, so someone has to manually log everything.
Why SMS Changes the Game
Text messaging sits in a sweet spot that neither email nor phone can match.
It's fast but not demanding. An SMS conversation moves at the pace of a text thread with a friend. Customers fire off a quick message and go about their day. Agents respond when ready. There's no hold music, no formal greeting, no sign-off.
It's where your customers already are. SMS has a 98% open rate compared to 20% for email. Messages get read within minutes, not hours. Your support channel is competing for attention, and texts win that competition decisively.
It works for field teams. If your customers are technicians, drivers, or anyone who works away from a desk, email is impractical. These people live on their phones. A quick text about a broken part or a schedule change is natural and effortless.
It produces structured data. This might sound counterintuitive. How is a short text message more structured than a detailed email? The answer is AI. Short, conversational messages are actually easier for AI to parse and categorize than long-form emails. Each text tends to contain one specific piece of information, making it straightforward to extract device types, error codes, locations, and urgency levels.
Making SMS Support Practical With AI
The biggest objection to SMS support has always been scale. If customers start texting you, won't your team be overwhelmed with short, fragmented messages that are hard to track?
This is where AI changes the equation entirely.
When a customer texts your support number, AI can immediately:
- Create a structured ticket by extracting key details from the message: what the issue is, what device or product is involved, how urgent it seems.
- Ask follow-up questions to gather missing information, just like a human agent would, but instantly.
- Route the ticket to the right team or priority queue based on the content.
- Maintain context across the entire conversation thread, so the customer never has to repeat themselves.
The result is that your agents receive fully structured, prioritized tickets instead of a pile of fragmented text messages. They jump straight to solving the problem instead of spending the first five minutes figuring out what the problem actually is.
Real-World Impact
Support teams that add SMS as a channel consistently see these results:
- Faster first response times. Texting feels quick, so teams respond accordingly. Average first response drops from hours to minutes.
- Higher customer satisfaction. Customers rate SMS support interactions higher because the experience matches how they already communicate.
- Lower cost per ticket. Agents handle more concurrent SMS conversations than phone calls. AI handles the intake work that used to take manual effort.
- Better data quality. AI-structured tickets from SMS conversations often contain more accurate, more complete information than manually created tickets from phone calls.
Getting Started
Adding SMS to your support stack doesn't mean replacing what already works. The best approach is to offer it alongside your existing channels and let customers choose what works for them.
The key is having a platform that unifies SMS and email into a single inbox, so your team doesn't end up switching between tools. When both channels flow into the same ticket system with the same AI-powered intake process, adding SMS feels like a natural extension rather than another tool to manage.
The future of customer support isn't about choosing between channels. It's about meeting customers wherever they are. And increasingly, that's a text message away.
