Chatbots have been making waves in the customer service industry, providing a range of advantages that can enhance the customer experience by reducing customer friction, increasing revenue, and alleviating pressure on human agents.

From providing 24/7 availability to offering personalized recommendations, chatbots have the potential to revolutionize the way businesses interact with their customers.

What is a Chatbot?

Put simply, a chatbot is a computer program designed to quickly respond to and assist customers with their questions. Whenever a customer initiates contact through a communication channel, a chatbot will attempt to identify and resolve the customer’s issue by offering solutions to common problems.

Modern chatbots like Contacto’s can even be configured to trigger customized workflows dynamically based on customer responses, enhancing your business’ ability to gather relevant information from your customers before they connect with an agent.

Benefits of Chatbots

We’ve compiled 10 benefits of chatbots, and tips for how you can use automation to enhance the customer service experience, while also alleviating pressure on customer service agents, increasing revenue, and creating repeat business:

1. 24/7 Availability: Chatbots can provide 24/7 availability to customers, which is not always possible with human agents. This means customers can receive immediate assistance, regardless of the time of day or night. This can increase customer satisfaction and reduce the likelihood of negative reviews or customer churn due to unaddressed concerns.
   
2. Quick Response Times: Chatbots are capable of responding to customer inquiries in seconds, providing instant answers and minimizing the waiting time for customers. This can reduce frustration and increase overall customer satisfaction, while also freeing up customer service agents to handle more complex issues.
   
3. Cost-Effective: Chatbots can help companies save on labor costs, as they can handle a large volume of customer inquiries simultaneously. This can allow companies to allocate their resources more efficiently and effectively, while also reducing the need to hire additional staff to handle customer service inquiries.
   
4. Reduced Pressure on Human Agents: Chatbots can handle routine inquiries, allowing human agents to focus on more complex issues. This can reduce burnout and turnover among customer service agents, while also increasing the likelihood of positive customer interactions.
   
5. Improved Context for Issue Resolution: Chatbots can gather information from customers and provide context to customer service agents before the customer is transferred to a human agent. This can help agents provide more efficient and effective solutions, as they will have a better understanding of the customer’s issue before the interaction begins.
   
6. Increased Revenue: Chatbots can increase customer engagement by providing answers to questions that prospective customers may have while evaluating your product. This can increase revenue and customer loyalty, while also improving the overall customer experience.
   
7. Multilingual Support: Chatbots can provide support in multiple languages, making it easier for companies to expand into international markets. This can increase customer satisfaction and reduce language barriers for customers.
   
8. Consistent and Accurate Responses: Chatbots can provide consistent and accurate responses to customer inquiries, reducing the likelihood of miscommunications or misunderstandings. This can increase customer confidence in the company and its products or services.
   
9. Improved Data Collection: Chatbots can gather customer data and provide insights into customer behavior, preferences, and pain points. This can help companies improve their products or services, as well as their overall customer service strategy.
   
10. Creating Repeat Business: A positive customer service experience, facilitated in part by chatbots, can create repeat business and increase customer loyalty. Customers who have had a positive interaction with a chatbot are more likely to return to a company for future purchases or services.

So we ask the question again: what is a chatbot? A chatbot is a useful self-service tool that is evolving the modern customer service experience by providing 24/7 availability, reducing the pressure on your human agents, and decreasing the time to ticket resolution for your customers.

The Importance of Self-Service in Customer Support

In our recent Leadership Talk on the Modern State of Customer Support, Plivo’s head of support Renu Yadav highlighted the importance of self-service tools:

“Self-service options are a great way to reduce the number of queries coming to support agents and allow them to focus on more complex problems. I also think that it is important to build an extensive FAQ section so that customers can easily find answers to common questions.

I also think that chatbots and AI can be valuable tools for customer support. They can provide instant, 24/7 support for simple inquiries or issues, and they can also gather initial information before escalating more complex issues to human agents.”

How PlivoCX’s Chatbot can automate your customer service

PlivoCX’s modern chatbot leverages advanced automation technology to enhance the customer service experience for businesses of all sizes. With features like 24/7 availability, quick response times, and multilingual support, Contacto’s chatbot is an excellent example of the potential that this technology can bring to your business.

By embracing chatbot technology in your contact center, companies can provide better customer service, reduce costs, and increase revenue, all while freeing up their human agents to focus on more complex tasks.

With the rapid advancements in AI technology, chatbots are only going to become more sophisticated and capable of handling even more tasks, making them an essential tool for any modern business looking to stay ahead of the competition.

So why wait? Start exploring the benefits of chatbots today and see how they can revolutionize your customer service experience.

At Plivo, we’re steadfast in our dedication to stringent security measures, to ensure we offer our clients a trustworthy and robust Cloud Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS). We’re pleased to share that we’ve renewed our SOC 2 Type 2 certification, which includes HIPAA controls.

Maintaining a strong security culture

The focus on security is at the heart of our operations, woven into the fabric of our services. Our security team continually improves our security controls, threat-mitigation processes, and monitoring systems. Everyone at Plivo knows that keeping your data safe is our highest priority; we’ve built our culture around that value.

Our SOC 2 Type 2 commitment

In 2022 we obtained our initial SOC 2 Type 2 report, which provided reassurance to our customers about us as a service organization handling, storing, and processing user data. The report not only confirmed the adequacy of our security systems and procedures, it also examined our operational effectiveness in adhering to these controls over time. The SOC 2 Type 2 certification underscored our commitment to data security.

Our SOC 2 Type 2 certification this year reaffirms our dedication to managing the critical data our clients entrust us with, and reaffirms our stringent controls across critical areas:

• Regular communication of changes to customers
• Robust internal access control to production environments
• Thorough system monitoring and ongoing risk assessments
• Reliable disaster recovery, data backup measures, and system availability
• Responsive system and security monitoring and incident response processes
• Effective employee onboarding and termination processes

These controls continue to evolve as we maintain the privacy and security of customer data and perfect our security systems.

Our security commitment: beyond a checkbox

We see our certification renewal as a testament to our ongoing commitment to you, our valued customers. It signifies our dedication to ensuring your data’s security and our unwavering efforts to keep improving. It isn’t just about ticking a box for us, but rather about living up to the trust you place in us.

We’re proud of our team’s hard work over the past year, and we’ll continue striving toward more robust security measures and accreditations in the future.

You can read more about our renewed SOC 2 Type 2 compliance, our security measures, and how we’re continually protecting your data on our security page.

Your security is always our top priority. We appreciate your trust in us.

If you can get customers and prospects to subscribe to informational updates from your business, you can build a brand loyalty bond that’ll be hard to break. The trick is to give people information they can use.

Text subscription is a service that businesses provide to send information via SMS to people who opt in to receive it — pretty simple. It’s the same concept as a newspaper or magazine subscription. Those businesses monetize subscribers by selling ads to people who want to reach them. Businesses that offer text subscriptions monetize their efforts by gathering contact information from people who might be current or potential customers, which they can use in campaigns or sales outreach.

Text subscriptions work so well because SMS is an ideal channel for marketing communication. Nearly everyone has a cell phone — 97% of Americans and almost 7 billion people worldwide — and everyone with a cell phone has SMS. Of course smartphone users also have access to apps, but you have to convince people to download them, and apps often include unwelcome trackers.

People look at 99% of text messages, usually within 15 minutes of receiving them. Email lacks the same immediacy, and open rates for email marketing messages are much lower than for SMS. SMS messages also have high engagement rates.

From a budget perspective, text messaging is incredibly affordable. Messages sent through Plivo cost half a cent in the US, and similarly low amounts elsewhere in the world, and you pay only for what you send — there’s no additional subscription cost to use the service.

What is a text message subscription?

Text subscription is a service that businesses provide to send information via SMS to people who opt-in to receive it — pretty simple. It’s the same concept as a newspaper or magazine subscription. Businesses use text message subscriptions for a variety of purposes, such as:

• Sending out coupons and discounts
• Announcing new products or services
• Sending appointment reminders
• Sharing breaking news or updates

Text message subscriptions are a great way for businesses to stay connected with their customers and keep them informed. They're also a convenient way for customers to receive information from their favorite businesses.

How to use text message subscriptions

Starting up a text subscription service is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. You need to create valuable content to gain subscribers, but there’s no point in creating content unless you have subscribers.

You will likely need to put time and effort into developing your text message subscription service for several months before you see a payoff. Don’t offer a subscription service unless you can offer something that recipients will value.

What kind of content provides value for subscribers? A subscription with a regular cadence can be anything you know a lot about and that they need to know about, too. You might be able to alert subscribers to something new about your product or industry.

Ideally, each text message should offer some actionable advice they can use to overcome some challenge or problem. You can also offer early access to new products or services, or first access to new content.

But your text subscriptions don’t have to be on a daily or weekly cadence. You can send text messages to opted-in subscribers with notifications about things like

• Flash sales
• Subscriber discounts or other special deals
• Surveys (make them short — ideally, a single question per outreach!)
• Shipping notifications
• Suspicious account activity
• Feature updates

Opt-in is critical.

Before you send a single message, you must get recipients’ permission to send them messages, even if you already have their phone number. That’s not just good advice — it’s probably the law. Different countries have different rules. In the US, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) covers opt-ins, while in Europe it’s the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

You can obtain permission in several ways:

• Though a number provide via an online form
• Via text message that includes the opt-in keyword
• In-store, point-of-sale signup
• Opt-in button on a mobile web page
• Interactive voice response (IVR) opt-in via phone call

Give people a way to sign up at points they’re most receptive to interactions with your business, such as overall service signup and as part of the purchase process.

When people opt in, send a confirmation message that lets them know what to expect from the subscription. They should already know what kind of content to expect — that’s probably why they signed up. Let them know how often they can expect your messages and tell them how they can opt out, should they choose to. You should store recipient opt-in records electronically so you can show compliance if you’re ever audited.

And so is opt-out.

Make it just as easy for customers to opt out of a subscription as it is to opt in. Give recipients a keyword (such as STOP) they can send in reply to your messages to tell you to stop sending them texts. If they opt out, then the opt-out confirmation message you send in reply should be the last message they receive (until and unless they opt back in).

While getting permission is critical, opt-ins aren’t the only restrictions you should be aware of —  additional regulations where you are might include things such as prohibited sending times.

Once your concept and your content are set you can let people know about what you offer. Post about it in your other channels: newsletters, social media, your website. Include samples of the kinds of messages you’ll offer so people can see the value of the service.

Best ways to use text subscriptions

The best way to use a text message subscription will vary depending on your business type and customer behavior. However, there are a few common ways that marketers have implemented text message subscriptions with success.

1. Promotions and discounts:

To increase sales and boost customer loyalty, send subscribers exclusive discounts or special offers. Use customer data to send personalized messages and offers, making the communication more relevant and effective.

2. Event reminders:

Notify your audience about upcoming events, sales, or new product launches to boost attendance and participation. You can also send appointment reminders to reduce no-shows or late arrivals.

3. Customer engagement:

Share valuable content like tips, tutorials, or product usage ideas, or collect feedback through surveys to improve products and services.

4. Loyalty program:

Keep subscribers informed about their loyalty points, rewards, and how they can redeem them.

5. Order updates:

Finally, build excitement for product delivery with real-time order status, shipping information, and delivery notifications to enhance the customer experience.

These are a few marketing-focused ideas, but there are dozens of other ways to use text subscriptions. Local governments use text subscriptions to send road closure notices, emergency alerts, and weather updates. Consider your business needs when you craft a strategy for your text subscription program.

How to send text messages using Plivo’s SMS API

Once you’re ready to talk to your subscribers, all that’s left is to integrate the sending process into your existing applications. Integrating SMS into your applications makes more sense than pasting together a messaging pipeline that relies on pumping your subscribers through a service like Zapier to an expensive texting service. We’ve created quickstart guides that show you how to send text messages using Python, Java, or any of five other web development languages. If you’re interested in the technical details, they’re a great place to start. You should also read up on best practices for text messaging.

With Plivo, you can automate reaching all your subscribers in bulk, or you can pick a subset of subscribers to reach out to, such as people in a single country or region or those who spend the most.

Plivo offers global reach, with the ability to text people in virtually every country on Earth. Plivo messages enjoy high delivery rates thanks to the Premium Communications Network we’ve put together over more than a decade. And we offer white glove support to make sure our customers are satisfied.

Conclusion

Ready to launch your own text message subscription? Get started with Plivo’s user-friendly SMS API. In five minutes or less you can start sending messages to your first subscribers. Learn more by requesting a trial of Plivo’s platform.

SMS marketing typically involves promotional SMS — text messages that businesses send for marketing or advertising purposes to promote the company’s products or services. Promotional SMS can raise brand awareness, foster engagement, and promote ecommerce.

But in business, SMS is good for more than marketing. The flip side of promotional SMS is transactional SMS, and it’s the right communication channel for many use cases.

What is transactional SMS?

Transactional SMS involves sending automated messages to customers in response to an event or when triggered by a customer request or action. Transactional messaging examples include sending order confirmations, account balance notifications, real-time alerts, and one-time passwords (OTP) for two-factor authentication (2FA).

Customers prefer to receive such notifications via text message. SMS has the highest reach among communications channels: 91% of the global population has a mobile device. SMS boasts a 98% open rate, and 95% of people read their text messages within three minutes of receiving them. The low cost to send messages makes SMS a cost-effective communications channel.

Benefits of transactional SMS

But transactional SMS service isn’t good just for customers. It offers a host of benefits for businesses too.

• Improved customer engagement: Send important and timely information to customers keeps people informed and engaged with the brand. It fosters increased customer satisfaction and loyalty and can improve customer retention.
• Increased security: When used for OTPs and to send security alerts, transactional SMS helps protect accounts from unauthorized access and avoid fraudulent transactions.
• Real-time communication: Transactional SMS enables real-time communication, allowing businesses to send urgent or time-sensitive messages, such as booking confirmations, delivery updates, or appointment reminders.

A transactional SMS use case

One example of transactional messaging comes from Plivo customer LAZ Parking, which manages parking properties on behalf of lot and garage owners in the US. At the height of the COVID-19 epidemic, LAZ rolled out a touchless pay-to-park solution. But rather than forcing drivers to download an app, LAZ relied on SMS.

Each LAZ Parking lot posts a sign with a unique alphanumeric code. The sign tells drivers to text the code to a short code phone number. When the company receives a new text, it replies by sending a link that drivers can use to pay for parking using their mobile devices.

<img src=”/assets/dist/new-design/customers/laz/laz-text-to-speech.png” style=”display: flex; width: 50%; margin: 0 auto;” />

LAZ Vice President of Innovation Patrick Ryan found Plivo’s transactional SMS API to be an excellent fit for his company. He says, “This is a simple way to give customers access to mission-critical systems and get them to interact with them via their phone. Giving customers a link via text is far less technically complex than having to build your own app — an Android version, an Apple version — and distribute them in the app store. We can build our system how we want it, put a sign in a location, and get it up and running. It’s much more direct and simple.”

LAZ’s use case is an innovative example of how to take advantage of transactional SMS. Other common use cases include

• Booking confirmations — travel and hospitality business can send text to confirm a hotel room or a restaurant table.
• Order receipts — retails can offer SMS as a way for customers to get their purchase confirmations.
• Delivery status messages — stores and food service businesses can text customers to tell them to come and get it.
• Billing reminders — sometimes it pays to tell people that it’s time for them to pay.
• Appointment reminders — healthcare providers and service businesses can let people know they have plans to visit, to help avoid missed sessions.
• Service alerts, such as utility outages and flight delays — in unusual circumstances, an informative text can be reassuring.

Making it personal

When you use an SMS API like the one provided by Plivo’s cloud communications platform, you can tailor transactional messages to individual customers or segmented groups based on the data you have about them, enabling businesses to deliver more relevant and personalized content.

Whenever you need to provide valuable, timely information, consider text messaging. When you’re ready to get started, read our SMS Best Practices Guide for detailed texting considerations.

New businesses today have abandoned the public switched telephone network (PSTN) in favor of voice over IP (VoIP). With VoIP, software converts analog speech into digital packets that are sent as data over the internet.

VoIP telephony has several advantages over the older generation of voice over copper wires.

• Cost-efficiency: VoIP services are less expensive than traditional phone lines. They’re just network connections, which means long-distance and international calls are no more expensive than calls across the street. While you can use desktop phones for VoIP calls, you don’t have to — that’s another savings. And VoIP services include features like caller ID, call waiting, and voicemail that traditional providers may charge for separately. Some VoIP providers offer features that old-school providers can’t, such as speech transcription.
• Scalability: It’s easy to add or remove VoIP lines — all it takes is a few clicks on a configuration console. That’s a big benefit for seasonal businesses, whose usage varies over the course of a year, while growing businesses can start small and expand as they grow.
• Resilience: In the event of a power outage or natural disaster at your primary place of business, you can easily redirect numbers to other locations or mobile devices.
• Flexibility: People with VoIP lines aren’t tied to a single location or a particular phone. They can take calls wherever they are, and on just about any networked device — laptop, smartphone, or dedicated IP phone. That’s a benefit for everyone in the organization who makes or receives calls. It’s especially useful for businesses with remote workers or multiple locations.
• Integration: In many cases, businesses can integrate VoIP lines with other business applications to improve workflow and enhance customer experience.
• Voice quality: Twenty years ago, VoIP calls often had lower voice quality than phone connections. Today’s VoIP services provide voice quality that’s as good as or better than traditional phone lines, provided there’s a good internet connection.

That last bullet raises an important point. While VoIP has many advantages, it relies on a company’s internet connection. Businesses looking to implement VoIP need to make sure they have a robust, stable, and speedy connection to get the best performance from their VoIP system.

For robust VoIP, choose SIP trunking

One of the most popular ways to get VoIP services is via SIP trunking. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) an international standard for voice communication over data networks. Trunks used to be physical links — copper wire installed by phone companies from their central offices to customer premises. Nowadays the term also refers to virtual lines of communication.

With SIP trunking, organizations can make calls over the internet to anyone with a phone number. Thanks to all of the advantages of VoIP communication enumerated above, SIP trunks are replacing physical phone lines virtually everywhere.

Zentrunk tops other SIP trunking services

Zentrunk, Plivo’s SIP trunking service, provides global coverage for outbound and inbound voice calls, working with your current cloud or on-premises communications infrastructure. Whether you’re looking to increase the capacity of your current telecom stack, increase coverage and phone number inventory, or extend your on-premises infrastructure to the cloud, Zentrunk can get you started.

Plivo’s SIP trunking service provides:

• Interoperability: Zentrunk is designed to work seamlessly with any IP-based communications system, including PBX systems, cloud communication platforms, and session border controllers (SBC).
• Elastic SIP trunking: Zentrunk can scale automatically based on demand. This elastic scaling means you don’t have to worry about exceeding any maximum number of concurrent calls, as the system adjusts in real time to your needs.
• Reliability: Plivo has seven internet points of presence (PoP) around the world to ensure minimal network latency in call handling and maximum voice quality.
• Easy setup and management: You set up and manage Zentrunk through the user-friendly Plivo console or via Zentrunk APIs.
• Comprehensive documentation: Our documentation includes a quickstart guide and interconnection guides to assist with the setup and configuration of your trunks.
• Transparent pricing: Plivo offers straightforward, pay-as-you-go pricing with no long-term commitments or hidden charges.
• Security: All communication is encrypted using Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP) to ensure the safety and privacy of your calls.
• Global reach: Zentrunk provides call connectivity to users in 190+ countries.
• 24/7 support: Plivo offers available around-the-clock technical support to ensure any issues are addressed promptly and your communication system remains up and running.
• Customer service: Plivo support team helps customers resolve carrier-related issues by working directly with the more than 1,600 carriers in our Premium Communications Network.

When you need to market to a large audience, what’s your best tool? It’s the one that can reach just about anyone through a device they already carry with them.

Advantages of SMS

Communicating with a host of potential or existing customers at once is called bulk marketing — and the most effective channel to use for it is SMS text messaging, for several reasons.

It’s personalized. With a cloud communications platform like Plivo, you can use SMS APIs to send targeted, personalized text messages from your own applications directly to customers’ mobile devices. Once you’ve coded your application, you can generate marketing campaigns with a few mouse clicks.

It’s cost-effective: Each outgoing message costs ₹0.14 in India; businesses that have registered on a DLT platform are eligible for a lower domestic rate. Messages cost a fraction of a cent in North America and similarly low amounts in other countries; for Plivo’s rates in every country, check our pricing page. Low cost and the high open rate of 98% give SMS the highest ROI of any communications channel.

It’s measurable: If you’re not sure whether bulk SMS is effective, you can take advantage of another of its features — tracking. You can run analytics to see key metrics such as click-through rate, delivery rate, and unsubscribe rate.

With Plivo, you can monitor SMS marketing campaigns in real time through the messaging logs on the Plivo console. The logs show you how many messages you’re sending and what the status is — delivered, failed — and, if a message failed, what reason was for the failure. And you can filter the logs in a number of ways — by location, by from or to number, status — and drill down on any entry in the list of results.

SMS use cases

Bulk SMS marketing campaigns tend to be oriented toward promotional messages and customer engagement. Promotional messages cover things like

• Product launches
• Sales and discounts
• Special offers and promotions
• Event invitations
• Loyalty programs and rewards

Customer engagement messages are designed to maintain a positive ongoing relationship between you and your customers, with things like

• Timely updates
• Tips and helpful information
• Surveys and feedback requests

And while we’re focusing on SMS marketing, once you’ve set up a communications platform to send marketing messages, you can make use of it in other ways as well. For instance, you can use it to send transactional messages such as

• Order confirmations
• Shipping notifications
• Payment reminders and balance notifications
• Appointment reminders
• Service updates

If you’re a manufacturer, a service provider, or a governmental agency, you can send timely notifications about

• Product recalls
• Service outages
• Appointment cancellations
• Security breaches
• Traffic and weather alerts

And any organization can set up message distribution lists for their own staff and contractors and send things like

• Company announcements
• Policy updates
• Training and development opportunities
• Shift reminders

Special considerations for bulk SMS marketing in India

Following a set of best practices will help you get your message out wherever you are in the world, but if you’re trying to reach recipients in India with your SMS messages, you have a few extra factors to consider.

• Regulatory compliance: The Indian government has strict regulations in place to protect consumers from unsolicited marketing messages, such as the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations (TCCCPR) and the National Do Not Call (NDNC) registry. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) requires all message senders to register on a DLT (distributed ledger technology) portal. Different regulations apply to transactional and promotional messaging. Ensure that your bulk marketing campaign adheres to all relevant requirements.
• Language diversity: India has numerous languages and dialects. Using recipients’ preferred languages enhances engagement and response rates. Tailor your messages to the linguistic preferences of your target audience.
• Cultural sensitivity: Indian consumers have diverse cultural backgrounds, and you have to be sensitive to them when designing bulk marketing campaigns. Make sure your content is respectful and relevant to the specific needs and preferences of your target audience.

Keeping these considerations in mind as you craft your marketing messages should help you create campaigns to send promotional messages, advertise products or services, increase brand awareness, and drive sales in the Indian market.