Raise your hand if you hate phone-trees.

Yep, my hand is up too.

But what if you didn’t have to interrupt your day to glue your phone to your ear, listening to the same monotonous options play while you put your day on hold.

What I’m about to tell you next may seem shocking, but it’s true.

You can text phone trees now.

Crazy, right? Actually, not so much.

Technologically speaking, there’s no reason that companies can’t offer you this convenience. Any landline can be text-enabled; companies just haven’t started acting on it until now.

Now you might be wondering, “What does it takes to enable such a wonderful experience for your customers?”

It’s really not complicated or expensive, and you can get it up and running pretty quick. (With OneReach, you can have everything ready to go in less than 24 hours). Text-enabled phone-trees or IVRs are a win-win, for the customer and the business. Customers can get answers when they want and how they want—they can even walk away from the phone if they need to. They can also shorten their service experience to a quick series of texts instead of sitting through a lengthy phone conversation.

Businesses offering interactive text response (ITR) can increase efficiency for their customer service/support group. For example, if a customer is more satisfied with the automation they are offered, they’re less likely to need a real person to help them. If they do need a real person, the cost of servicing them will be reduced because A) an agent (responding via web-chat to texts) can service more than one customer at a time B) agents can be provided with more context before being connected to solve the customer’s problem faster.

If you’re wondering whether or not would actually want to text your company, recent research by Harris Interactive and commissioned by OneReach says yes, they would: 64% of Americans would prefer text messaging over calling when getting customer support. (You can download the FREE report in full here).

Would it actually be more convenient? Sure it would.

You don’t have to be the parent of screaming children to appreciate that it would simply be more convenient to not have to be glued to the phone, incapable of doing anything else, just because of you have a question about your bill/a product/your account/change of address, etc.

Convenience, preferred method of communication, easy to use…what are you waiting for?

To learn more about text-enabling your landline, visit onereach.com.