With all the cell phone Black Friday sales recently a lot of the other carrier were offering better deals to the point where I was thinking of switching. However, usually in these types of businesses they have a loyalty department that will give you unadvertised offers in hopes that you would stay. So I decided to reach out to the company to see if they would offer anything better first.
Now usually you would expect to phone in to a customer service line where they will constantly transfer you to the appropriate departments. However, for this carrier Freedom Mobile they actually had an option to use WhatsApp which is entirely text based and so I thought I would try it. At first It was virtually like talking to one of those live chat box features on websites. But in this case it was interesting in the sense where I felt like you could initiate the chat and then go about with your business as you wait for reply.
Unlike when you phone in, you often have to stay put and being ready for once they answer while potentially listening to those on hold music. If you are not there then the person will probably hang up or the call could get disconnected. With this chat it took a long time for someone to arrive but I never really felt like I would potentially miss the message and then have to start over again as an example. The chat conversations would always be there.
In the end I got an awesome deal where I got so much more than expected and I am paying almost $10 a month less than before. It got me to think business wise if just using text chats like these for customer support can actually be good. For example, I can imagine this being useful if you are commuting in public transit and not having to yell to make sure you can be heard or worrying that the call will get dropped as you go through a tunnel. Even I was surprised that this way could work very well for a business.