smart messaging; automating your workflows
Reaching customers is becoming increasingly difficult these days due to everyone utilizing the same technologies to sell a product or offering to the end recipient, as such you need the most direct way possible to cut through the digital noise. One way to achieve this is through a smart messaging platform that can get your message to the customer directly through their phone. This is a device closer to the user than any others and has no automated blocking for SMS. An SMS is around 184% more likely to be actually read than an email that may end up in a spam folder or deleted at a glance; worse yet is the user unsubscribing the email address.
These days many companies use smart messaging to achieve a deeper level of interaction and automation for repetitive workflows. For example if you need to qualify a potential sales lead then you can use smart messaging to achieve this through artificial intelligence (AI) that is integrated into a chatbot. Now this has some benefits due to the means of communication. For example there are people thinking that the message was sent by a real person and others that know otherwise, and in either case this is useful. For example, the user that thinks it is a message from a real person will likely respond to a short and concise message due to the obligation and the small size of an SMS, making the user think that there is nothing further after the first reply. For the user that thinks it is a chatbot, they may still respond to it for the exact opposite in terms of obligation, they may not see it as a starting point for a marketing funnel. Again, in both cases the first call to action (CTA) is achieved.
Once the first message has been answered it is likely that a user will wish to complete consecutive messages from the basic idea that once they have started something they need to finish it, and so long as the smart messaging replies are not too long in number of responses it is likely that all information will be gathered successfully. Here it is important to know how fast smart messaging should operate, if too fast in replying it will feel to the user as an irritation while if left too long the original incentive to complete the task is lost and the process stopped by the user. To optimize the smart messaging platform some form of testing is required on a smaller portion of the call list demographic.
A smart messaging platform can be integrated into existing enterprise solutions such as the client requirement management CRM system through convenient APIs. These can be set up in a few minutes and allows an existing CRM system which contains all customer contacts to be filtered for SMS contact lists for a marketing campaign much more easily than trying to do it manually and enables the smart messaging platform to use the list to quickly make contact with the details provided in the CRM but also to return information back to the CRM later. Interestingly a smart messaging platform can be used to take users through the process and assess if they qualify for a follow-up by a member of the sales team, reducing many hours of wasted staff time chasing contacts through the equivalent of cold calling. If you are not using the system for sales you may be using it to schedule and confirm appointments with SMS using the same type of process making smart messaging platforms a highly effective customer management tool for many sectors from healthcare to logistics.
