Businesses and organizations have a growing need to communicate with their customers and stakeholders effectively and effortlessly through digital channels as part of a comprehensive customer experience. In practice, this must be independent of location or time, ensuring that sent messages reach recipients as effectively as possible while allowing customers to contact the company at their convenience. It doesn’t matter if the customer cannot be answered immediately—automated responses can inform the customer when their inquiry will be addressed.
The communication can be one-way (outbound), for example, informing you of the arrival of a package or the time of its arrival. Increasingly, two-way communication is being added, where the recipient is expected to reply to the message. This could be, for example, an opinion poll or a further question about a subscription.
In addition, messaging services offer a very straightforward and easy way for consumers to communicate with the business (inbound). Send us a text or WhatsApp message! This has long been done by restaurants, for example, which receive reservations via instant messaging. Consumers want the easiest and simplest way to do things.
Send, Receive, and Converse
Text messages have been used for one-way communication for a long time. Yet only in recent years has it become mainstream. The most advanced have also incorporated two-way communication, but this has been less common.
As consumers shifted to using primarily instant messaging apps for personal communication, it opened up the text message channel for businesses and organizations to utilize even more effectively. SMS is the standard messaging application on nearly all mobile phones worldwide, everyone knows how to use it, and messages are virtually always read.
Instant messaging channels, such as WhatsApp, have brought conversations to personal instant messaging, making communication inherently two-way. For this reason, text message communication is also desired to be two-way and conversational.
Multiple Channels, Centralized Management
In addition to text messaging, instant messaging channels are becoming more common in businesses and communities. These include RCS, WhatsApp, FB Messenger and Instagram Direct Messenger. They are not yet “mainstream”, but will become widespread. Communication is highly regulated by both global platforms and service providers to ensure that messages received by customers are relevant and wanted.
Messaging, response management and conversations, both SMS and instant messaging, can be handled by a wide range of commonly available technologies. Some communication can be automated, for example by marketing automation software, but there is a lot of communication that is done manually. This requires a solution that allows centralised management of channels.
How Do I Get Started?
In most cases, there is a need to implement one-way and two-way communication both manually and directly from other backend systems, so the platform used should not only have easy-to-use and advanced web tools, but also rich API interfaces that can be integrated with other backend systems using modern interfaces.
The SmartDialog platform provides you with both. In addition to modern API connections, the platform features an innovative web tool that allows you to centrally manage sending, receiving and conversations from different channels. With versatile user management and integration capabilities, the platform integrates easily with your other software environments. We manage the connection of services and messaging, provide comprehensive user training and support your organisation in using the service 24/7.
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