Чаты с клиентами: как общаться бизнесу в 2025 году

Discover solutions for communication in your small repair shop.

Table of Contents

1. Why Communication Matters More Than Ever
2. When and What to Communicate with Clients
3. The Power of SMS in Repair Businesses
4. Using Automation to Save Time (and Make Money)
5. Choosing the Right Communication Tools
6. Tips for Building Strong Customer Relationships
Communication Solutions for Small Businesses Near You

1. Why Communication Matters More Than Ever

Relationships do not exist in vacuums. They are forged over time through words and actions that communicate meanings to the persons involved, thus affecting the type of relationship formed. If we evaluate relationships based on their positive and negative aspects, we notice how critical communication is in building the reality we experience.

Good business communication shapes our ideas, people, and ourselves. When used correctly, communication in business elevates all parties, gets to the goal of the conversation, and supports change for the better. In an intensely competitive repair market, good communication helps you stand out.

Besides knowing what to say, you should also know when to say it. For example, customer communication for repair shops includes quotes, invoices, repair status, and deliveries. Such communication should respond to the query and help the customer prepare for their next move, without confusion, within your business hours.

External notifications by statuses

In your repair business, open and transparent communication between you and your employees fosters good and trustworthy relationships. Trackable conversations help you hold each other accountable and brainstorm quickly. When you add good listening skills that focus on empathy and solutions rather than shame and blame, the result is an efficient workforce that can focus on serving your customers instead of festering on ongoing conflicts.

When team members trust each other, they can pass it on. Your customers expect prompt and reliable responses on the phone and during the repair process. When they have a pleasant experience from onboarding to invoicing, repair, and collection, they’ll trust your word and consider being loyal. As their loyalty to your repair business increases, so do the recommendations, giving you a good foundation for cash flow in your repair business.

2. When and What to Communicate with Clients

When dealing with hundreds of customers, responding to all messages can become overwhelming. Customer communications software helps you organize and automate messaging throughout the entire customer journey: from discovery and booking to payment and follow-up.

The easiest way to understand your communication needs is to watch the workflow in your repair business. In every step, you’ll notice points of interaction with a customer, where you need more human input, and how to create templates that summarize your message without affecting meaning.

When you first meet a customer, they’ll ask a few questions to establish if you can assist them. They expect prompt responses to their questions in the discovery phase so that they can decide to set an appointment.

After the discovery phase, customers expect quick guidance through the registration process and appointment confirmation. If the appointment is in their home, a confirmation call or message before the day of the appointment is standard practice.

Once the repair is in process, status updates and ETA messages help the customer gauge how long they will wait until their goods are back in use. If you send an invoice, it’s good practice to follow up on payments and confirm receipt of payment.

It’s also common practice to follow up with customers to gauge their satisfaction with your repair business shortly after delivering the item for reuse. Collecting feedback helps you improve your service to your loyal customers.

In each point of interaction, “when” to respond depends on the industry you operate in. If you serve a clientele that operates at midnight, it’s not unusual to respond to messages and phone calls at that time. Establishing consistent operating hours helps you and your customers know when to reach out.

Delayed sending of SMS messages

3. The Power of SMS in Repair Businesses

SMS is trusted as a reliable means of communicating with businesses, which means they have a high open rate. They’re short and succinct, which means customers can quickly draw the information they need and carry on. They’re also easy to deliver on a scale.

SMS notifications for service businesses are good for appointment reminders, confirmations, and feedback. It supplements other forms of communication. For example, if you send a PDF invoice to your customer via email, you can send an SMS to remind them to open their email for a copy of the invoice. The customer will have the reminder and the printable copy of the business document to satisfy their communication needs.

Sending SMS from tickets or work orders

Sending SMS is also easier than crafting other forms of messaging that include detailed graphics. While rich SMS allows you to send more graphics, classic SMS is rooted in simple alphabets, numbers, and punctuation. It’s perfect for urgent communication needs like updates, reminders, and confirmations.

SMS is a reliable communication tool. It’s short, clear, and effective. You can connect services like Twilio or BulkSMS with your customer management software and send appointment reminders, status updates, and payment confirmations in just a few clicks. Pair it with email or messenger communication in one unified system.

4. Using Automation to Save Time (and Make Money)

Learning how to improve customer communication helps you select the right small business communication tools. When you observe your workflow process, you’ll notice interactions when you and the customer send messages in email, SMS and WhatsApp messages, and phone calls. The chosen means of communication helps you know when to automate and when to stick to human support.

For example, if a customer’s first point of contact with your business is your website, browsing for information and engaging the chatbot before contacting you via message or email is standard practice. You can automate the chatbot responses to cover the most common queries for new customers and create a ‘Help’ section to help them further understand your services.

If the customer needs a quote, you can create a general calculator to create estimates. However, you need messaging and email options for detailed quotes. A customized quote means you need to craft a personalized response. However, you can automate part of the process by creating SMS templates for the welcome message, quote alerts, and the actual quote.

Effortless transition from estimates to payments

More detailed repair shop quotes in PDFs are best shared via email. If a phone call is required to explain the quoting process, make your workload easier by creating a follow-up or thank you SMS template before sharing the invoice and receipt after payment. Again, it’s standard practice to send customers SMS notifications for the repair invoice and receipt of payment for their accounts and assurance.

Customer communications software allows you to automate communication processes in your repair shop. Set up chatbots, use message templates, and create triggers that send quotes, invoices, or reminders automatically. It’s the smart way to reduce manual work, avoid errors, and maintain high service quality.

The result? Time-saving, consistent service, and happy customers. Plus, you can always personalize where needed.

The benefits of automated customer communication are visible throughout your workflow.

• Time-saving: Every minute spent crafting a message from scratch and forgetting essential details is one better spent communicating effectively. Templates help you send all critical details in the correct format for accurate and fast interpretation.
• Consistency: When you use SMS, email, and phone call templates in your communication processes, you’ll retain consistency in the quality of communication and data. Templates tick all critical boxes for what you need to tell a customer and what you need to ask them to understand them. When you craft communication templates for your business, you’ll also retain consistency in your personality, which builds trust.
• Better retention: Clear communication with customers helps them pay on time and prepare for repairs. After a customer confirms an appointment, you can add them to your list of tasks and assign them a time based on the job schedules. With a real-time timetable integrated into your repair shop management software, you can confidently send specific timelines to customers. Checking in with your customers before and after the service helps you avoid hiccups and make alterations, if any, to avoid frustrating your clients and your technicians.

5. Choosing the Right Communication Tools

Small repair shops don’t need a massive tech stack to stay connected with customers — they just need the right channels inside one smart platform like RO App.

With built-in communication modules, you can send and track all messages in one place, maintaining a full history for every client.

Breezy communication with AI-powered reply suggestions in chats

Here are the top communication tools worth considering in 2025, all available within RO App:

• SMS: One of the most reliable and effective communication channels, ideal for booking confirmations, job status updates, payment reminders, surveys, and promotions. With like Twilio CRM Integration or BulkSMS Integration, you can automate bulk messages, reminders, and follow-ups. All SMS exchanges can be linked to the customer profile for easy tracking and context.
• Email: A great option for sending quotes, invoices, appointment updates, and documents like PDFs. Email automation helps maintain a professional tone and ensures timely communication.
• WhatsApp: Widely used for its real-time convenience. It allows you to send instant messages, share updates, and provide quick support, all while keeping a full message history for each client.
• Facebook Messenger & Instagram Direct: Many clients prefer reaching out via social media. Syncing chats from these platforms lets your team respond quickly using saved templates, without needing to switch between apps.
• Unified Communication Hub: Bringing all of these tools together in one platform gives your team a centralized workspace to manage messages, assign conversations, and ensure a consistent customer experience — no matter the channel.

With one client card that stores the entire communication history across SMS, email, WhatsApp, and social media, you’ll never lose context. It’s easier to follow up, personalize conversations, and even analyze customer sentiment later.

Repair shop CRM with messaging helps you integrate all your SMS, emails, phone calls, and WhatsApp concerns under one roof. The key is to focus on the most popular digital communication channels for local businesses in your area. You can then focus on creating templates to share across apps as long as the recipient fits into one of the steps in your customer journey. You can also vary the templates per platform to help your customers receive and store the information in their preferred format.

CRM for small business also helps you retain a consistent contact profile for customers who use multiple apps to interact with your repair business. You can keep a chronological log of all interactions with a customer for easy follow-up. The wealth of communication later helps you perform sentiment analysis for your business and research areas for improvement.

6. Tips for Building Strong Customer Relationships

Good communication helps you attract and retain customers to maximize their lifetime value. Here are several customer service tips for repair shops for better customer relationships.

Be proactive, not reactive

A good customer communication strategy is established by taking control and leading an honest conversation instead of waiting for the customer to initiate the process. This means that even if the customer approaches you first, you must communicate effectively through your marketing or website and guide them toward finding a solution.

Proactive communication has four parts: anticipation, preparation, engagement, and transparency. Anticipation is about foreseeing communication needs, while preparation is about creating effective solutions and investing in them. Engagement focuses on improving your response time and updates, while transparency keeps your communication honest. These guiding principles help you improve client satisfaction with better communication.

Some of the ways you can build proactive communication in your repair shop are:

• Provide a live chat feature on your website and other messaging platforms, if possible, to engage customers before you can provide human-to-human interaction.
• Give customers the option to decline or accept automated conversations and guide them towards available communication options.
• Align your interactions with your business needs. For example, if you need a customer's email to launch the customized quote process, include email collection as a compulsory step in the quote request process. Then, create a contact card for the customer based on their email for easy tracking.
• Share real-time updates on technical problems like a slow website, limited support, delayed deliveries, or any changes to ETA. If you notice anything that affects your service delivery to a customer, inform them that you’re working to resolve the issue and/or provide alternative solutions.

Follow up after the service is complete

Checking in with a customer after a repair helps you learn how best to serve your clients. It also informs the customer that you care about quality and improvement and are open to honest feedback.

Feedback collection system to improve service quality

Follow up after a reasonable time to give the customer time to experience the product or service. It’s also prudent to remind the customer about the follow-up message, call, or email when delivering their product or service so as not to seem intrusive and demanding.

During the follow-up, give the customer sufficient time and allowance to express the quality of service in their own words instead of limiting them to scales.

Use positive, friendly language

Passive aggressiveness, rudeness, and a lack of concern show up in your choice of words, emojis, and tone. You need a professional yet friendly tone and voice in your communication to attract and retain customers.

Creating a content creation and moderation process helps you revise any communication, whether messages, calls, or documents, that blames the customer instead of focusing on solutions and facts. Furthermore, being proactive in your communication helps you find different ways to break negative news without causing panic.

Always choose easier words over complex ones to avoid confusing customers with jargon. Unless your customers have technical knowledge about your solutions, focus on providing the simplest explanations.

Establish filters for insulting, derogatory, and bigoted language in your content before publishing. If possible, have an approval process for the messages sent to customers. Create templates to reduce moments of weakness among your sales team and escalate conflict through different levels of customer service as needed. Your goal is to ensure both your workers and customers are satisfied at the end of a frustrating process without harming your business’s reputation.

Communication Solutions for Small Businesses Near You

Great business communication isn’t about having the biggest team or expensive tools. It’s about optimizing what you have. For small businesses, an integrated messaging solution improves interaction tracking, time-saving, and data capture. Coupled with the right communication strategy, you can intelligently automate your repair shop communication needs. Book a demo RO App today and keep your customers happy and coming back.