SMS bot: The Ultimate guide
Everything you need to know about SMS bot - the technology, the use cases, and more.
Customer expectations are evolving and at Freshworks, we conducted a survey that sheds light on what consumers really want from businesses. It’s simple: consumers want businesses to provide message support. Boomers (63%), Millennials (65%), and Gen Xers (65%) say they want to communicate with a brand through messages instead of email or calls.
If brands want to reconceptualize customer service to better engage with customers, adopting a text messaging business feature is a must.
While you can train your team to answer common customer questions through text, business messaging is fast-paced and requires instant one-on-one support. An uptick in ticket volume can easily overwhelm your agents.
The solution: an SMS bot.
An SMS bot can be a game changer in how you meet customer expectations and demands. Besides, shoppers love the interactions. According to Yopto, 80% of shoppers have signed up to receive text messages from at least one brand. Now is certainly a great time to invest in message bots to streamline customer communications.
An SMS bot is an AI-powered chatbot software that your customers, leads, and prospects can engage with when seeking a service from your organization. The bots work like a digital personal assistant that is programmed to your specific needs. For instance, they can use the information in your database to engage with customers through text messaging back and forth.
Here is an example of a message bot at work.
The good thing about bots is that they can work with phones, tablets, computers, and collaboration tools like Slack. An extra plus is that they can integrate with your email marketing and social media tools. So if your customers are reaching out to you via different channels, you don’t have to sweat about failing to address everyone’s concerns.
Generally, when talking about message bots, people only think of them as tools for sorting customer concerns. Even so, bot messaging apps have also shown enormous capabilities for marketing and sharing knowledge. Here are scenarios when your brand may benefit from an online message chatbot.
1. Sending offers and promotions
If you are still reluctant to send promotional emails via text message because of how your customers will react, do not be so reluctant because past studies show that half of your customers don’t mind receiving promotions through text. Text message promotions can range from details with offers, discounts, and coupons. Your brand can use a bot messaging app to send details about price changes or extra incentives, and answer questions about offers. HelloFresh is an example of a food delivery brand that uses a bot with a social selling component built into it to send exclusive discount codes to customers looking for discounts on products and highlight testimonials for social proof.
2. Confirming orders and payments
Local shops, retailers, and restaurants commonly use text bots for orders and reorders. They are among the best industries to invest in bots to streamline customer purchases due to the volume of repetitive workflows and queries.
An example of a restaurant brand that uses a message bot for ordering and payment is Domino’s Pizza. Not only does its bot enable digital ordering, but it also finds customers’ products close to their store and saves and repeats orders. Additionally, it tracks orders and product availability to ensure a personalized shopping experience without a customer signing up or downloading an app to make an order.
3. Sending reminders and invitations to events
Repetitive tasks such as sending invitations to events and answering common questions can easily be done by a bot. An example of a brand that uses a bot for such tasks is KLM, a luxury airliner. Their chatbot provides multilingual real-time support for various travel inquiries. Customers can book tickets, check flight status, receive info about pricing changes and flight changes, and more. Where the bot can’t answer your questions, it will direct you to a live agent for help.
4. Communicate with your internal staff
You can use message bots to communicate with internal staff, not just customers. Companies use message bots to streamline internal operations, encourage meaningful and proactive conversations with team members, and improve productivity.
For example, Delivery Hero’s delivery and support agents use the Freshchat message bot for internal communication and messaging. The message bot allows support agents and delivery persons to communicate on issues like traffic delays, missing items, and more. The ability to do this on one app gives team members a seamless experience, improving teams’ productivity, efficiency, and scalability.
5. Deliver sensitive updates or information
Since the Covid-19 pandemic struck government and healthcare institutions, telemedicine has employed messaging bots to communicate with the public about the virus. Message bots proved effective at educating people and providing time-sensitive information to help the public curb the spread of the virus. For example, the WHO’s Health Alert bot provided accurate and timely information to users on Messenger and WhatsApp.
A good SMS bot guarantees a positive impact on your brand. That is why you don’t want a bot that will only give “yes” or “no” responses, providing no meaningful experience. Depending on your business model, you can go the hard coding way and program your own message bot. But if you are short of time, use no-code tools such as our AI chatbot builder. Freshchat bot builder, for example, allows you to build a message bot in four simple ways using the inbuilt drag-and-drop functionality.
Click on the Bot tab available in the left-hand sidebar and click on the New Bot or select from ready-made chatbot templates
Click on the + button to add a new flow or click on the existing flows to edit them.
Once you are done creating a chatbot flow, preview it by clicking on the Preview button at the top right-hand side.
Click on the deploy tab and select deploy option as Messaging Channel/Web/App based on business requirements and deploy your chatbot on that channel.
SMS text bots come in different varieties and for different activities. The most effective way to pick a bot is to look into your business goals and the results you want from customers. Here’s a list of SMS text bots you can pick to use for your business.
The first on the list is Freshchat. What’s awesome about Freshchat is that it comes with features for all your business needs, such as messaging, routing, campaign development, analytics, reports, and integration with existing workflows and tools like WhatsApp and Instagram. You can always speak to our support team to learn more about Freshchat or just try it for 21 days for free.
If you want your congressional representative to hear your issues and address them in the shortest time possible, Resistbot is the tool to use. The best thing about this free SMS bot is that it can work on WhatsApp, Telegram, and Twitter. Other than voicing concerns, you can use this bot to find information about your voting registration and polling place.
Conversica allows you to connect with leads and customers and uncovers opportunities to improve your business. It has multi-lingual, multi-channel, and multi-integration capabilities, enabling a business to deliver an exceptional experience, build quality pipeline faster, and improve quality of inbound leads.
Customers have already assured businesses they want to talk to brands via text. They love the experience brought by texting and message bots. The next step is to pick a bot messaging tool that will give your customers the experience they crave while also deflating work overload on repetitive tasks that may suddenly overwhelm your call center reps.
Freshchat AI-powered bot messaging tool is built specifically for such tasks, including directing customers to human service reps where necessary.
If you are still debating on the right text message tool that will help keep the existing quality of your service, Freshchat is a great option to consider without worrying about lacking messaging skills and being valuable to your customers and company. Try Freshchat for free.
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