mobile messaging or sms chatbots

Since messaging apps overtook social networking apps in popularity last year, there’s been a lot of bandwagon-jumping pressure for businesses to quickly deploy customer-facing chatbots into Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and other messaging networks. One of the biggest challenges  companies are facing today are how effecting are  messaging  chatbots ? and are they  really the best place to provide customer service? And are chatbots—even sophisticated ones—the right way to respond to the growing demand for text-based customer support?

Before your business hops on the messaging train, take a step back and survey the landscape. Instead of trying to utilize all the messaging apps you think your customers might be using in the future, or trying to “go where the millennial's are,” why not consider a reliable, stable technology that also has the virtue of being a medium your users already use and love, and where there’s a proven response rate and demand?

The future of chatbots for businesses is not in messaging apps, but in SMS.

SMS is preferred by many for text-based support.

It’s true that messaging apps have overtaken social media, but that doesn’t mean that’s the best place for customer service from your business. These metrics prove only the apps’ popularity, not their utility or their ability to serve your customers’ needs best.

Imagine for a second: Where would you go first when you have a problem with a business? Let’s say you need to make a change to your airline flight itinerary, or return a faulty product that you ordered online. Are you going to open Facebook Messenger? How would you even initiate that conversation?

Unless the business already initiated the conversation via your preferred messaging app, there’s no obvious place to start. How would the business know which is your preferred messaging app, anyways? There are so many choices now, just like social media, and none of them is right for everyone. What if the business went all-in on WhatsApp, and you only use Messenger? Before you’ve ever contacted the company for customer support, you’re annoyed.

As a business, you can remove the question of which messaging app to support by building your text-based support channels via SMS instead. Everyone who has a smartphone with one of the messaging apps also has a phone number and a built-in texting app. Even people who don’t have smartphones (though they may be increasingly fewer in certain Western countries) can get a great customer support experience through a text message thread. Instead of worrying about where your customers might be, rely on SMS to find them where they already are.

Allmost all statistics show that SMS response rates beat out other forms of text-based communication by miles ahead.

Most people have email too, you might argue, so why not use email? Isn’t that a proven channel of customer communication? While that’s true, according to the Pew Research Center, short-term response rates for text messages are consistently higher than email. Text messages for marketing have a 98% open rate, while email open rates only average about 20%. On average, text messages are read within 5 seconds. Additionally, 97% of smartphone users use text messaging regularly, making it the most widely-used smartphone feature.

As a result, 79% of companies believe their customers want SMS support. If you want high response rates from happy customers, these statistics prove that text-messaging is the way to go.

Best practices for SMS chatbots for customer communication

SMS isn’t going anywhere, despite what the CEOs of messaging companies might prefer you believe. When it comes to customer service, consider deploying an SMS chatbot over a messaging app one, to better serve your customer’s needs. If you’ve decided the time is right for your company to deploy an SMS chatbot, consider these best practices first, to ensure you’re providing maximum value for your users:

• Find ways to make it clear what the boundaries of the bot’s capabilities are, and to communicate to the user what it can and (implicitly, at least) can’t do.
• Fail gracefully by always implementing friendly, useful denials and error messages, like “I’m sorry, I’m not understanding the question—I’ll connect you to my human colleague.” Those outs will help you avoid creating the text communication equivalent of road rage.
• If a human is expected, don’t make it impossible to get to a human on the line (like many voice-based customer service lines currently do).
• In fact, if you’re a smaller business, or already have a customer service staff, consider slipping the bot altogether, and making SMS a channel to reach real people.
• Conversely, if a bot can answer a question and dealing with a person is unnecessary, don’t make the customer talk to a person to get an answer.
• Don’t be gimmicky—or people won’t engage with you for very long.

What makes a bot really great? According to Robert Hoffer, who worked on one of the first successful chatbots on the internet, “most designers agree bots need to have something resembling a human personality.” Even though his creation, AOL Instant Messenger’s SmarterChild, wasn’t all that sophisticated, it had a stickiness that we don’t often see in modern bots. At its peak, SmarterChild chatted with 250,000 people a day.

If you’re looking for inspiration, here are some modern bots that provide real value:

• Reply Yes provides an ecommerce service over mobile messaging. The customer enters their phone number, and then the service texts them product images and descriptions. The customer can respond LIKE, DISLIKE, or OWN to personalize future picks. Or, as the name implies, reply YES to purchase the product.
• Digit helps people save money with small bank transfers and intelligent analysis of their bank account balances and transactions. While it has apps for iOS and Android, its SMS interface is comprehensive and users do not need to download the app to get the most out of it.
• Capital One has its own bot for banking customers called Eno. Customers can use it to easily find out more about their money.
• StaffJoy notifies your team about scheduling updates, ensuring that changes to a complex schedule never get missed. This can be used to make support teams, warehouses, delivery companies, or restaurants more effective.
• If your company is interested in leveraging an existing Natural Language Processing or AI platform to build a bot, Agent.ai and DeepPIXEL both provide artificial intelligence, including natural language processing (NLP), to enhance and empower customer service and sales teams. A third option, Conversable, “powers the intersection of AI with messaging and voice.”
• Finally, for a fun example, Botline Bling lets anyone simulate a texting relationship with the artist Drake.

More good news: SMS continues to evolve. Take the emergence of the RCS (“Rich Communications Service”) standard, an initiative supported by an increasing number of carriers around the world. While large carriers are still converging around how the marketplace will work, RCS (sometimes called “Advanced Messaging”) enables rich user interactions, dynamic elements, and analytics, right in the messaging inbox. This means that bots built on SMS will soon have a rich interface as the standard, which will empower better, more consistent communication across devices—without requiring users to download an app or friend anyone. Keep an eye on news about RCS, as it’s something you’ll likely be hearing about in the coming quarters.

When it comes to chatbots, what not to touch with a ten-foot stick

Finally, there’s a long list of “Don’ts” for chatbots. Here’s a short list of things you should absolutely not do with SMS chatbots:

• Don’t send soulless spam or overuse SMS messages (for instance, to convey information the user already saw on the web or in your app)
• Don’t ignore customers with legitimate problems or use a “we’ll get right back to you” autoresponder, afterwhich no one ever follows up
• Don’t deploy chatbots who say the same thing over and over again, or have no personality
• Don’t auto-message customers with pushy or invasive sales pitches
• Don’t use bots as a substitute for real people when a personal touch is needed
• Don’t create a chatbot simply because you think its personality is entertaining. Customers don’t want entertainment—they want help!
• (It goes without saying that you should practice good hygiene with basics like user opt-in and compliance with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and other applicable regulations)

Sadly, many first-generation chatbots are simply identical copies of existing Interactive Voice Response (IVR)—phone customer service—experiences. As Chris Messina, product guy and bot expert, pointed out in a recent Q&A, “To stop there ignores the potential for these platforms, as well as what advances in AI and machine learning may offer in the way that they adapt, respond, synthesize, and respond to inbound user queries.” Instead, imagine a scenario where those dense and annoying call trees are removed altogether. Those kind of chatbots, in the words of Messina, “allow a user to express herself in her words (to specify an intent) to have the system respond with a relevant and contextual response, avoiding the multi-layer decision tree workflow altogether.” Imagine how much happier your customers will be when this becomes not just a reality, but the norm.

The bottom line is: don’t use a chatbot because it’s new and shiny. Only add one into your communication workflow if it genuinely improves the customer experience. And don’t be distracted by the popularity of new messaging apps. Instead, meet your customers where they already are with text-based communication through SMS—and, when appropriate, with chatbots in that high-touch channel. Your customers will thank you.

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