5 Great Reasons Text Message Chatbot Is a Game-Changer

Excellent client interaction and support are the foundation of any successful brand. They have the ability to increase consumer loyalty as well as sales. And every successful firm understands this and uses it as a strategy to expand its operations continuously.

Human professionals have always handled customer involvement. However, when the volume of consumer inquiries increases, the procedure becomes rather overwhelming and may place a strain on the company. On the other hand, human resources is not a fully automated system that can efficiently answer all of those inquiries.

This issue is fortunately addressed by chatbots, which are a contemporary and reliable answer. Chatbots are computer programs that simulate human discussions by using a database that already exists. Customers’ involvement with chatbots, especially text message chatbots, is becoming more popular among business owners, looking for ways to give subscribers a positive customer experience.

A text message chatbot, or chatbot that communicates with customers through text messages, is one of the most widely used forms of business automation. It assists businesses by answering the vast majority of their customers’ inquiries and providing them with replies. It is a fantastic technique in improving client interaction that does not need the use of any third-party applications at all.

Even if a text message chatbot has automated the process of consumer interaction, this does not imply that a person is no longer required in the process. Human assistance is still required in many situations. In spite of this, a text message chatbot is quite useful when dealing with recurring many consumer contacts simultaneously.

In this article, we will walk you through the following concepts:

• What is a Text Message Chatbot 
• How Brand’s Can Use Text Message Chatbot
• What are the Benefits of Using a Text Message Chatbot 
• Tips on Using a Text Message Chatbot

What is a Text Message Chatbot

A text message chatbot, typically referred to as an SMS chatbot, is a software program that automatically responds to and sends text messages to those who engage with it. It is most often used for text messaging. With the help of a text message chatbot, you can create an interactive marketing channel that improves customer communication, delivers bulk text messages, raises consumer conversion rate, and does a variety of other tasks.

Because text messages are immediate and accessible, a text messaging chatbot is a scalable tool that can be used by a wide range of organizations of all sizes and sorts. With the help of this solution, it is able to send bulk messages to a group of people. A text messaging chatbot’s personalization and customization are also rather basic, allowing you to start an engaged discussion with your consumers without having to refer them to a website or another application. Most significantly, text messaging chatbots are very engaging, making them ideal for distributing promotional material and sales updates through text messages.

Additionally, a text messaging chatbot enables you to increase consumer engagement by sending text messages to them. As a result, clients may get an update on their order or make a transaction. Additionally, you may automate your text messaging chatbot by programming it with artificial intelligence-powered replies, which will allow users to ask queries and obtain quick information without having to go through any other communication channels.

How Brand’s Can Use Text Message Chatbot

One of the best advantages of having a text message chatbot is its flexibility. There are plenty of ways brands and organizations can use a text message chatbot. Here are some of them. 

1. Raise Funds and Donations

Organizations can use a text message chatbot to raise funds and ask for donations from individuals. Across many nations, this method of raising funds for health-related organizations, such as foundations that fund scientific research into cancer and other comparable areas, is quite popular for raising funds.

Among the charity organizations that often utilize text messages and text message chatbots to generate finances through donations are the following organizations:

• No Kid Hungry is an organization that works to ensure that children have access to nutritious meals in sufficient quantities.
• In response to the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, the Jewish Federation of America
• The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) (ASPCA)

Another prominent text message chatbot application for fund-raising is the Humane Society of the United States campaign. It was discovered that after sending a simple reminder through a text message, respondents were 77 percent more likely to donate. The Red Cross is another organization that has sought donations using SMS text messages.

2. Send Automated Welcome Message

In the minds of your audience, automatic welcome messages for business leave a lasting impression. This allows people to remember and appreciate your warm and fuzzy greetings while also furthering the perception of your company’s image.

Automating your “welcome committee,” which consists of the various messaging applications, might make your life simpler in the same way that other monotonous activities are being eliminated from our lives. In place of personally greeting every new subscriber, everyone who registers up for an event, and everyone who opts into your newsletter, you can set up your greeting message to be sent automatically. This will save you time and effort!

Automatic greeting messages also ensure that the message reaches its intended recipient when the required action is done since the message is sent in real-time. You also have the ability to choose the content of the message, customize it, and put together the optimal combination of factors to win over your consumers.

Here are some suggestions for creating an automatic welcome message:

• Don’t forget to include a short description of your company after your message, or weave a self-promotional plug into the message early in the message if you’re feeling particularly confident about it.

• Don’t be monotonous! No one appreciates a nasty greeting or a generic rip-off of your old greeting card collection.

• Personalize it by adding some aesthetic components. Add some personality and spice to your presentation that your audience will like.

Send Out Event Notifications and Invitations

Since text messages have a 98 percent open rate, they are a great way to send out event notifications and invitations to consumers. However, sending bulky messages can be tiring and costly. This is why text message chatbots are valuable when it comes to notifying and inviting subscribers to participate in an event. 

A text message chatbot can automatically send out bulk messages notifying your subscriber list about your brand’s upcoming event. This will help you save money from sending individualized text messages per subscriber. It will also help you save a considerable amount of time since the process is automated. 

Manage Appointments and Deliveries

Customers can easily manage their appointments, deliveries, and purchases using an automated text messaging service. Clients may be reminded about their meetings through automatic booking reminders, and you can give self-service alternatives so that they can confirm, cancel, or reschedule their appointments without the need for an agent. 

Additionally, you may alert consumers of their delivery time frame and offer them the choice to adjust their delivery time window. If the consumer wants further assistance, you can even provide the opportunity for them to continue the SMS chat with a live representative.

Collect Payments

Reminding clients to make payments by text messages is an excellent method to communicate with them and urge them to complete a transaction. By using automated text message reminders, you can increase the percentage of your brand’s ‘promissory notes’ conversions while using 60 percent less agent resource than was previously possible. 

Customers may make mobile payments fast and easily using a text message chatbot without leaving the text message they have been receiving. Message payments may be made over secure channels using the service provider of your choice. Customers are also automatically identified and verified by our ID & Verification system, which employs cutting-edge technology to minimize the danger of fraudulent behavior. This enhanced customer experience provides the consumer with the assurance that their information is secure.

Send Satisfaction Surveys

Conducting customer satisfaction surveys is a great approach to get useful input that can be used to enhance the overall customer service experience. Sending surveys through text messaging may result in much greater response rates than sending surveys via other means. 

Sending automatic, customized surveys to your consumers is made possible by a text message chatbot. Customers may reopen SMS messages at any time, as opposed to online chatbots, allowing them to simply re-engage and complete surveys whenever and wherever it is most convenient for them to do so.

Whatever the purpose of a text message chatbot is, it is crucial to understand that the personality of the message is critical in virtually all of these situations, as we’ve shown above. And sending emails might be risky for security reasons, such as when a code is required to validate access to our bank account, which is common.

The last point of observation leads us to a decision. Despite the rapid advancement of text messaging technology, it is difficult to imagine a scenario where an SMS would be a viable alternative.

At least in Europe, the current trend is in the other direction. For sensitive services such as banks, confirmations through a temporary code are required, and SMS is the only means to contact the user without running the risk of causing a security breach to occur.

To sum up, the key to their success can be traced to several variables, including the fact that users nowadays are hooked to written communication, the personality of this kind of media, the poor quality of internet connections in certain locations, and worries about security.

Finally, despite the development of new cutting-edge technology, text message chatbots are still a long way from being depleted of their fuel. This underappreciated marketing technique will very probably surprise us again in the future, and it should be a permanent fixture in the marketing toolbox of any customer-focused organization’s arsenal.

What are the Benefits of Using a Text Message Chatbot

Besides automating your text message customer engagement processes, a text message chatbot can offer more value and functionality to your brand. Perhaps, the vast range of benefits it can offer to businesses can be rooted in the persistence of SMS as a channel of communication. Unlike leads through the website and social media, your leads don’t have to be online so that you can engage with them. 

Here are a few of the other benefits a text message chatbot can offer your business. 

Make your Customer Service Available 24/7

As we all know, providing excellent customer service is the most critical aspect in achieving success. Having customer service available 24/7 with immediate responses, regardless of whether your company operates globally or locally, significantly influences your clients’ happiness and desire to purchase. In contrast to the majority of consumers who are constantly placed on wait as operators attempt to connect you with a customer service center, chatbots never tire of responding to their directions.

They may be available to work and interact with audiences at all hours of the day, every day of the year. This feature enables enterprises to perform more tasks while saving time by responding to frequently asked questions about their products and services without waiting for customers. While a chatbot cannot completely replace real-time customer service in certain situations, it may be used to enhance it so that real-time staff can give full service without putting clients in a poor mood by making them wait for extended periods.

Thousands of prospects may be reached for free at once using this method, and they never have to visit your mobile website! It is possible to move prospects from the top to the bottom of the funnel with a chatbot if you do it correctly. With all of the integrations into Messenger Chatbot, you can essentially replace the website experience entirely. 

Help your Brand  Save Costs

The traditional way to offer 24/7 customer service is by hiring more human agents. This, of course, puts a burden on your company as it is laborious and costly. It also requires you to train them to provide exceptional customer service. But, with a chatbot, your brand can offer an always-available customer service without hiring additional staff and spending a large amount on labor and training. Yes, you have to invest in creating and implementing your text message chatbot, but it is more practical compared to the cost of hiring additional human agents. It can give your company a higher return on investment (ROI).

You can create and implement a text message chatbot for a fraction of the cost and time it takes to develop a cross-platform application or hire workers for each activity. Managing more than one or two individuals at the same time is a difficult problem for a single person, and it is far more difficult for an employee. Hiring agents to work 365 days a year and increasing resources to assist clients with simple questions might be prohibitively costly for a company’s budget. Not only will you save money on personnel expenditures, but you will also prevent the complications that might arise as a result of human mistakes.

According to Chatbots Magazine, employing virtual agents may help firms save up to 30 percent on administrative costs and increase productivity.

Chatbots enable businesses to save money while also being readily customized to satisfy a variety of requirements, depending on the user application. Keeping them up to date was minimal when they were constructed. According to an industry study, chatbots would handle 90 percent of all customer inquiries over the next five years. This implies that they would have saved $8 billion in corporate expenses by 2022.

Solves Bucket Leaks

For a long time, bucket leaks have been a major source of worry for many organizations. It is a simile for the experience of losing a client. However, although finding a solution to this problem is difficult (if not impossible), a text message chatbot and other chatbots ensure that the bucket remains filled despite the leak. Chatbots do this by guaranteeing that new customers and leads are accumulated over time.

A text message chatbot functions as a knowledgeable virtual customer representative who is constantly accessible to talk with your prospective customers on the phone or over the internet. Because the answer is automated, customers are more inclined to continue a discussion knowing that they would not have to wait for a certain length of time to respond to their concerns. Because of this, they are more likely to make a purchase and become a loyal client in the long run.

Optimizes your Customer Service

With text message chatbots, you can give a more engaging and one-of-a-kind consumer experience. A text message chatbot may gather information from your customers instead of having them fill out an online form. Evidently, clients despise filling out forms, which may result in their everlasting loss of company loyalty. Text message chatbots, as opposed to forms, make the process of collecting information more engaging, which is something that customers clearly enjoy. Text message chatbots do not have a facility for submitting information requests. It is instead dependent on the way in which the customer behaves during the dialogue that they bring them up.

Using a text message chatbot to collect information from your clients is more efficient and less invasive than using forms. You may thus replace your forms with a text message chatbot in order to create more leads and increase your revenue. Furthermore, you will not need to transfer your visitors to a website or a different application in order to gather information. Consequently, customers find it more comfortable to slip their information into a discussion than filling out a form on the website.

Most importantly, if your consumers have any problems with their purchase, they can just text your text message chatbot, and they will get a response as soon as the message is received.

Higher engagement and sales

The importance of keeping consumers connected with your brand cannot be overstated, which is why more and more businesses are turning to chatbots for SMS marketing. Engaging consumers with text messaging has been shown to enhance sales by as much as 40% in certain cases.

Because text message chatbots have such a flexible framework, it is very easy to optimize them for various channels and increase your brand’s engagement. As a simple example, you might recommend that your text message subscribers follow you on social media and sign up for your email newsletters. You may also use your text messaging chatbot to deliver links to your consumers and make product offers.

They may be trained to make a natural-sounding tone, making them seem more human-like to the user. Customers will feel more at ease as a result, and their overall experience with your company will be more positive.

Since you are receiving all relevant information about the consumer via a text messaging chatbot, there should be no use of fictitious e-mail addresses, false identities, or false last names while conversing. Chatbots are used by businesses to acquire insight into their customers and to communicate with them in a proactive manner. Email marketing has an open rate of just 3 percent, but chatbots have an open rate of up to 98 percent! They also keep current clients engaged with fascinating brands and items by sending push alerts or introducing them to fresh promotions.

Tips on Using a Text Message Chatbot

Here are some of the best practices in utilizing a text message chatbot.

Determine the questions frequently asked by your customers

To develop an effective chatbot, first identify the common problems users encounter and the common misunderstandings they have while interacting with your product or service. You may use a brief survey or feedback from your customer care staff to gather information for analysis inside any marketing platform you currently use.

If your clients or prospects have a question that a human cannot answer, a FAQ chatbot can assist them. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) bots deliver well-structured replies regarding your company’s brand, goods, or services and may assist in directing clients to the right website pages at any time of day. In most cases, they are accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

User-friendly Q&A chatbots serve the same purpose as FAQ bots by responding to user questions. Apart from providing rapid responses, these bots significantly improve the user experience by studying user queries and retrieving information that is related to past searches. Personalized talks tailored to each user’s specific requirements take place.

Re-engage customers

You may be acquainted with Facebook’s 24+1 rule, which states that you may send a personal one extra message after the first 24 hours of communicating with them. A push notice should be sent to the user when this is utilized to re-engage them and refresh that window, which is often the case.

With SMS, the restrictions are more flexible since there is no 24+1 constraint (but we should still avoid spamming individuals). In order to get a user to finish the experience, re-engagements should be planned ahead of time. It is recommended that you follow a one-hour, 23-hour, and three-day cadence for this; however, you may also follow up with your consumers in the future if you have anything fresh to share with them. 

Is it possible that you’ve added a new vendor and are now able to handle consumers who were previously ineligible for your services? Don’t be afraid to reach out. Is there a limited-time offer going on in a certain state? Those who utilize the service should be targeted. The advantage of having a discussion over SMS rather than on Facebook or your website is that you have the opportunity to re-engage these individuals indefinitely after the conversation has ended. As a result, consider innovative approaches to accomplishing this goal.

Make sure the chatbot isn’t too chatty.

Overwhelmingly, businesses are focused on making their chatbots more pleasant or conversational, in the same way, human customer service representatives would be. Customer responses to increasingly realistic chatbots, it turns out, aren’t always overwhelmingly positive. For starters, it blurs the line between people and machines, and, as previously said, it might lead to unrealistic expectations of chatbots in certain cases. 

Furthermore, consumers like it when their chatbots sound like talking to other people. Being forced to acknowledge that you’re speaking to a computer when it sounds so much like a real person might be unsettling. So just focus on developing a quick and effective bot while maintaining a neutral yet welcoming tone.

Allow the Chatbot to handle the most frequently asked questions.

Chatbots are particularly effective at freeing up human customer care workers by handling simple concerns. When designing a chatbot for your company’s customer service requirements, take into consideration the concerns and inquiries that your customers are most likely to phone in with. If your chatbot is capable of recognizing and responding effectively to the most commonly asked queries, it will be significantly more useful than anything else you can put in place.

Have a fail-safe plan in place.

Adapt a range of polite rejections and error messages to your needs. A better option than having the chatbot and the user go around in circles is for the chatbot to be upfront and explain that it doesn’t understand or can’t assist with a certain problem.

Along with fail-safe features, make it as easy as possible for customers to communicate with a real person when a chatbot is unable to help them. Even if it is unable to comprehend the nature of the customer’s problem, a well-programmed chatbot can typically direct the customer to the most appropriate customer service agent. Avoid making the customer listen to a long list of options, which wastes critical time, as is the case with many automated phone answering systems.

Send segmented campaigns.

The term “segmented campaigns” refers to the process of breaking down large client lists into smaller groups based on common characteristics such as age, geographic area, interests, purchase history, and so on. Having identified and segmented your target audiences, you can program your text bot to send specific, targeted messages to individual groups that are intended to capture their attention and pique their interest, resulting in increased customer engagement and consumers who are more motivated to respond to your messages. In contrast to email, you do not want to send out a single message to all of your subscribers at the same time.

Use emojis cautiously.

When creating your text bot, it’s recommended to avoid using too many emoticons in the responses. While emojis may assist you in communicating your message in a pleasant and conversational manner, overusing emojis can reduce the impact and clarity of your message – not to mention the fact that using too many emoticons might come off as unprofessional at times. To avoid the overuse of emojis, it is recommended to configure the bot to use just a few strategically positioned emojis regularly.

Send more interesting SMS by including MMS and rich media.

Text bots don’t simply deliver text messages; they may also transmit multimedia communications, such as movies, GIFs, and music. Text bots are becoming more popular. Multimedia messaging service (MMS) may enhance the texting experience for consumers and is typically faster and more convenient than sending text messages since MMS just needs a single media file. Make a schedule for your bot to send MMS messages whenever you believe it’s most convenient, but keep in mind that they need more bandwidth to transmit, receive, and open than plain text messages. Feel free to check out this home theatre power managers guide.

Frequently Asked Questions

Because not everyone is acquainted with text bots, we’ve compiled a list of some of the most often asked questions, along with their associated answers, to help clear things up.

Quick Round-Up

Text bots are a terrific tool when set up properly. They may increase your communication with clients and develop great ties with them. Automating your client interaction process provides rapid communication and frees up your human resources to undertake other useful duties.

Suppose you want to use a text message chatbot in your marketing tools, no need to go farther than the chatbot marketing solutions supplied by nerDigital. They provide different marketing automation, including SMS and WhatsApp automation. Contact us now to learn more.