Vacation ownership companies have been capitalizing on text messaging to improve the guest experience before and during their stays. It’s time to add text messaging for other owner communications throughout the year, especially billing and payments.
Advances in technology, including Text-to-Pay and Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), are making text-based communications and payments faster, easier, convenient and more engaging for consumers. They also increase effectiveness and efficiency for companies. From accelerating payments to reducing customer service calls and print/mail expenses, texting can boost cash flow and revenues and lower operating costs.
B2C texting enhances CX
Business to consumer texting has taken off in recent years, and for good reasons. According to EZ Texting’s 2024 Consumer SMS Behavior Survey:
- Customers want it, with 81% having signed up for business texting.
- Text messaging has a 98% open rate.
- 59% respond to text messages within 5 minutes and 77% within 15 minutes.
- 58% say text messaging is the most convenient way for businesses to reach them.
- 47% feel more connected to businesses that send them texts.
The bottom line: 2 out of 3 people say businesses that offer text messaging deliver better customer experience (CX) than those that don’t, according to 2023 research by Simple Texting.
Catering to owner expectations for texting and other digital interactions is critical to delivering better CX. “We know our owners and guests live in a digital world and expect to be able to interact with our brand via digital channels,” John Staten, president and CEO of Holiday Inn Club Vacations, told ARDA+ SkiftX last year. “CX will also become more focused on the entire experience, not just the in-room or resort experience. Companies that refuse to accept this new reality may find themselves out of business or irrelevant in the coming years,” Staten told ARDA this year.
Delivering better financial experiences
Improving the owner financial experience is an important opportunity to increase satisfaction, engagement and on-time payments. It starts with meeting people where they are at, which is on their mobile phone for an average of 4 hours and 39 minutes a day doing non-voice activities including texting, according to Statista.
Adding text messaging for billing and payments also could give timeshare companies a CX advantage. About 70% of consumers want to receive texts for bill pay and payment reminders, but only 30% of people said businesses offer texting for anything related to payments, according to the 2023 State of Business Texting Report.
Leveraging multiple texting options
While the familiar SMS texting format remains popular and useful, vacation ownership companies can tap into newer capabilities that might better suit their goals for different types of financial and governance communications and payments as well as owner preferences. They include:
SMS (Short Message Service) is the most common type of text. Businesses can send brief messages of up to 160 numbers and letters and links to websites. It works well for alerting owners that their billing statements are available and for payments reminders. In both cases, companies can streamline the owner experience by including links in the text messages to online documents and payment portals.
Some texting providers also enable companies to create branded and customized shortened URLs, giving them more characters for conveying a message or shrinking long encrypted links that enable automatic sign-in and thus improve ease of use.
MMS (Multimedia Message Service) allows senders to add video and audio files up to 30 seconds long as well as graphics, emojis, GIFs and messages with as many as 1,600 letters and numbers. These texts travel over the same cellular networks and arrive in the same inboxes as SMS texts.
MMS can enhance the owner experience in several ways. For one, vacation ownership companies can send a billing notification with a PDF snapshot of the actual statement as well as a link for viewing and paying it. Similarly, collections firms can contact owners about overdue bills and send a visual of the Regulation F validation notice.
Text-to-Pay simplifies transactions by integrating the billing and payments with a one-step solution. Owners can enable the feature in a payment portal by storing a payment method in their user profile. Companies can then generate a text to them for payment and owners simply respond “YES” or “PAY” to make their payments, using one of their stored payment methods.
As companies look for ways to strengthen owner relationships, expanding their omnichannel communications and payments programs to include text messaging is a proven strategy. Texting is a key part of delivering the personalized and increasingly digital experiences that owners of all ages want.
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