Who’s having a great year? This company. We just learned that we won not one but three 2023 APPEALIE SaaS + Software Awards.

• Overall SaaS Award winner in the Development + DevOps category for Small Business + Mid-Market
• Overall SaaS Award winner in the Development + DevOps category for Enterprise
• SaaS Customer Success Award winner

If you think this sounds like old news, that might be because we won the Overall SaaS Award in the Development + DevOps category for Small Business + Mid-Market last year — and the year before that. It’s a threepeat!

The Customer Success Award is new. Winners are “recognized for their demonstrated excellence and customer outcomes,” according to the APPEALIES. The pride we take in supporting our users translates into happy customers.

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Or it might be because we just announced that we won a 2023 Stevie Award.

New and noteworthy

Why did the APPEALIES choose Plivo? Cited features include:

• Number masking lets ride-hailing and delivery customers and providers communicate without revealing their real phone numbers to each other.
• Improved data filtering on the console gives customers instant access to their most important messaging and numbers data.
• Customers in India can receive invoices, make payments, and receive payment receipts in rupees (INR).
• US customers can get information about the level of STIR attestation for each call via the API responses and callbacks or via Call Detail Records downloaded from the console.
• Our new iOS and Android mobile SDKs are built over a WebRTC framework, which offers better call quality and improved developer integration experience.
• We reduced call transcription prices by 37%. Call transcription now starts at $0.0095 per minute. Transcription accuracy parallels industry leaders but at far better prices.
• By default, Plivo expires messages that remain in the messaging queues after three hours. Customers now have the ability to set a custom message expiry interval for their SMS and MMS messages. Why do senders set an expiry interval? Some text messages have a limited useful lifetime — if they’re not delivered within a certain period, they become useless. Expired messages are not charged to customers.

We appreciate the recognition, which confirms Plivo’s quality. This award pairs nicely with the notice that we were named the top overall CPaaS by G2 users in the most recent Grid® Report for Communication Platform as a Service for Spring 2023.

Plivo has won a Bronze Stevie Award in the Platform as a Service category.

For those not familiar with them, the Stevie Awards were created in 2002 “to honor and generate public recognition of the achievements and positive contributions of organizations and working professionals worldwide.” The American Business Awards, the type of Stevie that Plivo won, are open to US organizations and feature a variety of categories, including startup of the year, executive of the year, and best new product or service of the year. This year the Stevies received more than 3,700 nominations for the awards.

What made Plivo stand out from the pack? Stevie judges cited improvements over the last year in Plivo’s 10DLC features. 10DLC numbers, as you know if you send text messages in the US, are standard US local phone numbers that carriers approve for application-to-person (A2P) text messaging. To use them, organizations must register their brands, declare their use cases, and link phone numbers. This registration process lets carriers know who’s sending what kinds of messages and ultimately protects message recipients from unwanted spam texts.

Continuous improvement for the win

A year ago, to register for 10DLC, Plivo customers had to provide our support team with relevant information and wait for results. Since then, Plivo has added 10DLC registration features to the console, allowing customers to register their companies (brands) and use cases (campaigns) themselves and link their long code numbers to campaigns. Through the console they can also get transparency into the 10DLC process; they can

• View 10DLC registration status of a number
• Check what campaign is associated with a number
• See what throughput is allocated for a number by carrier

In addition, Plivo created a 10DLC API that lets reseller customers automate registration for multiple 10DLC brands and campaigns.

What the judges said

Stevie judges were impressed with the simplicity of the console interface — “impressed with the enhancements to automate workflows and the details on 10DLC,” were one judge’s exact words. “Customer experience is indeed the key.”

Another judge commented, “Easy to use and cost-effective service with great customer support and comprehensive documentation.”

And a third said simply, “This is a great connectivity product for enterprises.”

We appreciate the kind words. We think we’ve earned them. If you’re a Plivo customer and you agree, please share that with the Stevie Award team and help us earn their People’s Choice Award for Favorite New Product. At the top of the form enter the short code I706L or click on Platform as a Service and then tap us.

What is Call Quality? How to Monitor it in Your Contact Center

These days, contact center managers can find answers to questions about call strategy with a much more analytically rigorous approach than a reflection on their personal experience.  

Thanks to the proliferation of cloud contact center solutions, collecting and analyzing conversational data from calls between customers and agents has never been easier.

With call recordings and call metrics, contact center managers can routinely identify low-quality calls, listen to them, spot weaknesses, and help the agent and team address these shortcomings through personalized training plans and alterations to call processes and scripts.  

In this article, we’ll explain what call quality is, why monitoring it is so essential for contact centers, and how busy managers can do it efficiently and intelligently with the help of technology.

What is Call Quality?

Call quality is a measure of the effectiveness of phone call conversations between a business’s contact center agents and its customers.

Each contact center has its own set of standards that determine call quality. But, in general, high-quality conversations are those in which the contact center agent is polite and helpful and leaves the customer satisfied with a clear solution to their problem.

Call quality monitoring, on the other hand, is the ongoing process of gathering data about customer service phone calls and analyzing that data to find ways to improve a contact center’s performance.

Importance of Call Quality Monitoring in a Contact Center

When customer service has such a large effect on customer experience, sales, and customer retention, contact center managers have to work towards optimizing their team’s performance on the phones, and call quality monitoring is the most effective way to do that. The following analogy will explain why.

A top-tier sports coach adjusts their training regiment based on the weaknesses they perceive through closely observing players in action. They know that assigning dribbling practice to a forward with already dizzying foot skills is a failure to use training time as efficiently as possible.

The contact center manager must follow the same coaching strategy in order to consistently improve agent performance. They have to uncover the various weaknesses of each agent, as well as the overall team, through effective call quality monitoring.

By identifying shortcomings in how agents handle calls, the manager can give personalized training assignments or reference material to agents, such as a specific technical white paper or objection handling script.

Managers can also change their contact center processes to eliminate the shortcoming across the entire team.

For example, after diving into contact center analytics, you might find that calls tend to fail when customers ask about “technical issue X”. You could then educate their agents on that product problem and update the call script with language they can easily reference mid-call.

How Contact/Call Center Teams can Monitor Call Quality

The ultimate aim of call quality monitoring is to increase agent performance by identifying weaknesses in call handling and then implementing corrective action.

To monitor call quality, contact center managers set up systems to collect and analyze information about customer interactions to uncover insights about how to improve customer service.

They may use the following to collect information about customer calls:

• Call recordings
• Customer surveys
• Social media mentions
• Data from other channels — live chat, email, etc.

To visualize this in practice, imagine that you record all of the agents’ phone calls, along with the customer survey results about those conversations, in a contact center platform.

Whenever a customer leaves a poor review, you listen to the phone call with the agent, pinpoint the reasons why the call failed, and then instruct the agent on how to improve next time around.

If the issue is common enough, you may also update your team’s standard operating procedures or script to prevent it from happening again. You might also share the advice you gave the individual agent to the entire team in a team meeting.

As you can imagine, call quality monitoring gets tricky when there is a large number of calls to track. It’s impossible to listen to all of them, and difficult to tease out the most common flaws in agent call handling.  With that in mind, here are some best practices to follow to ensure you monitor call quality efficiently:

Automate Call Data Collection & Analysis

Call data consists of call recordings, live metrics, historical reporting, and other call-related metrics like average handle time (AHT).

Many companies use a cloud contact center solution to capture this data automatically during conversations. The software also helps them analyze that data, making it easier to identify calls that failed, as well as why they failed.

In sum, automating data collection and analysis with the right software is an essential step in creating a systematic approach to call quality monitoring.

Listen Critically to the Recordings

On their own, the metrics you collect through automation won’t give you the entire picture of how the agent, or your process, is falling short.

To truly understand the nature of the problem, you need to listen to call recordings, asking questions like the following:

• Is the agent following the script?
• What causes customer friction? Are there certain talking points that come before it?
• What types of questions is the agent asking?
• When does the call seem to fall apart?
• Were there any missed opportunities to provide clarity?
• Is it evident that the agent is lacking some fundamental knowledge about the product?

A close, critical listen to an agent’s conversation with a customer can uncover subtle issues with the agent’s technique that you can help them overcome to unlock their true potential.

Track the Impact of New Processes

Whenever you implement a new call handling process or make changes to your script, it’s crucial that you track the impact of that shift. That way, you’ll come to know if your plan is actually paying off, or if you need to go back to the drawing board.

To track the impact, compare team-wide metrics like average handle time or average CSAT from before and after the implementation. Ask yourself whether there is a significant bump in these numbers. If it’s succeeding, great job. If not, you may have misdiagnosed the issue.

Conclusion

Monitoring call quality with an eye toward improvement in agent performance is an essential practice for leaders in contact centers. Only through ongoing call quality measurement and analysis can true progress occur.

If you’re looking for a tool that will help you monitor call quality and bolster agent performance with features like call whispering and agent dashboards, check out how PlivoCX can help.

If you plan to send bulk text messages or make marketing voice calls — two common uses for Plivo’s SMS API and Voice API — you must gain consent from recipients before you launch your campaigns.

The requirement for consent has been in place for a long time, starting on the voice side. In the US, the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) put restrictions on telemarketing and set out consent rules. Without explicit consent from consumers, companies must adhere to strict solicitation rules and honor the National Do Not Call Registry. TCPA also sets forth consent rules for SMS. Telemarketing in the US is also subject to the 1995 Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR), administered by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

Meanwhile, the European Union has its own laws. The EU’s 2002 ePrivacy Directive states, in part, “The use of automated calling and communication systems without human intervention (automatic calling machines) … for the purposes of direct marketing may be allowed only in respect of subscribers or users who have given their prior consent.” The GDPR further codifies regulations around consent.

Other countries have other regulations. And in addition to country-specific laws, industry groups such as the CTIA also provide consent guidelines.

Many countries also maintain “do not disturb” databases of people who register their numbers to deny permission for businesses to send them unsolicited commercial communications. For instance, the US has a National Do Not Call Registry, while India has a National Customer Preference Register (NCPR), informally known as the Do Not Disturb registry. However, businesses are allowed to call consumers who have given express agreement to receive calls, even if their numbers are in the national do not call registry.

The key takeaway from all of these laws and guidelines is that businesses should send messages to customers only after receiving opt-in permission.

We don’t need to explain why these rules are in place, do we? People don’t want just anyone reaching out and giving them an electronic tap on the shoulder. They don’t want to have to waste time fighting off unsolicited attention. People want to maintain control of the communications they receive via electronic channels, no matter how well-intentioned those communications are.

How to manage consent

So if we’re all agreed that consent is A Good Thing as well as the law, how should we follow consent best practices?

• First, collect consumer consent yourself. Don’t use consent acquired from a third party — that’s prohibited in the US, and in some other countries as well.
• Make it easy for people to opt in. You can use keyword opt-in via text message (“text START to 75486 to subscribe to our notification services”), web opt-in via a form (perhaps displayed when consumers register for an account, or, old-school as it is, paper opt-in, by filling out a paper form at a store or kiosk. Notice that in all of these cases, the consumer explicitly contacts you before you contact them.

If you use a web form, make sure that consumers give their consent with a clear affirmative action. In other words, people must take a deliberate action to opt in — pre-ticked boxes don’t count as consent. And you can’t make opting in to messaging a prerequisite for purchasing goods and services — that’s prohibited.

Consent for voice calls must be expressed and informed. Under the TSR, consent is express if it’s affirmatively and unambiguously articulated by the consumer. Consent is informed when a consumer receives appropriate and relevant required disclosures prior to giving consent.

• When people opt in, send them (or, on a web page, display for them) a confirmation message that includes details about what they’ve opted in for. Mention the use case, possible charges, and whether they’ll get recurring messages. You should also tell them how to withdraw their consent — opt out, in other words.

Here’s an example of a good confirmation message to be sent via SMS:

Welcome to Plivo developer outreach. Reply HELP for help, STOP to cancel. Message and data rates may apply.

Carriers, mobile network operators (MNO), and cloud communications platforms like Plivo bear part of the responsibility of delivering potential spam to consumers, so they (we) are likely to suspend or terminate messaging services of any organization that fails to comply with opt-in guidelines.

How consumers can withdraw consent

So you’ve obtained consent — that’s great, but consent lasts only as long as your recipients want it to. You must allow users to opt out of your messages easily. To do that for SMS, provide opt-out instructions in your messages, particularly for informational, marketing, and promotional messages. Plivo recommends adding “Reply STOP to unsubscribe” or “reply STOP to cancel” to the end of your message.

Your systems must not send messages to contacts who have opted out. A general best practice is to send recipients a confirmation that they have been opted out and add instructions on how to opt back in; for example:

You replied with STOP, which blocks all the texts from this number. Text UNSTOP to receive messages again.

Not providing an opt-out option or sending people messages after they have opted out is another kind of violation that could result in the termination of your messaging campaigns.

Consent for recording

So far we’ve talked only about consent for marketing outreach, but there’s one more common case where consent is a concern: call recording. Some jurisdictions have strict consent laws that require you to obtain consent from all participants before recording calls; others require consent of at least one of the participants. Since you may not know where all parties are calling from, it’s good practice to follow the rules for the strictest cases.

If you plan to record phone calls, disclose that fact to your users and obtain consent from all participants beforehand, and keep a record of how you obtained consent. If a participant revokes consent, you must no longer record their calls.

Another consideration is where call recordings are stored. Plivo, for instance, stores call recordings in a cloud instance hosted in the US. Some countries prohibit data from leaving the country. Check your local requirements.

Determining what laws apply to call recording can be complicated when participants are in multiple states or countries. In today’s world, you can’t be 100% sure where a participant is calling from. Nevertheless, you must familiarize yourself with the laws and standards that apply to your business and use case so that you record calls in a legally compliant manner. Ultimately, you are responsible for ensuring that your business complies with all applicable laws and regulations.

We are not a lawyer

If you follow all of these guidelines, you’re on the right track for managing consent for both messaging and voice marketing. However, please don’t take this post as legal advice, and don’t imagine we’ve comprehensively covered the topic.

We’ve talked here only about US and EU policies here; plenty of Plivo customers live elsewhere in the world. It’s Plivo’s business to know the consent and opt-in requirements for each country and each carrier we work with so that we can serve our customers, but it’s your responsibility to know the guidelines that apply to your business so that you don’t accidentally violate them and get yourselves cut off from your campaigns and your customers.

We’ll let Sharita Passariello, Senior CRM Manager at Fluent and a guest in a recent Plivo webinar, have the last word: “It is extremely vital to me that we have expressed consent for these SMS messages. [so] the user knows exactly what they’re going to receive, what kind of updates they’re going to get, and who the updates are coming from. That’s so critical because it helps with overall long-term sustainability and performance. At the end of the day we’re using SMS to provide a service to our consumers. We’d like to help them.” In other words, consent isn’t just the law — it’s also good business practice.

In today’s world, does it still make sense for companies to provide a toll-free number for voice callers?

If consumers can text or email you, do you even need a phone number? You do. An Invoca survey found voice calls to be the most preferred communication channel (68%) when consumers are having a problem and need help. Have you ever tried to contact a business and failed to find a phone number on their website? It’s frustrating and a poor customer experience.

Voice calls are also useful for other reasons. Consumers still call retailers to find out if an item is in stock, call pharmacies to find out if prescriptions are ready, and call take-out restaurants to place orders, even though they might use digital channels too.

So you need a phone number, but do you need a toll-free one? Well, we know for sure that some businesses don’t. Toll calling is only a factor for geographically dispersed businesses, so it’s fair to say that local businesses never need toll-free numbers. In fact toll-free numbers can be detrimental if you want your customers to feel that you’re part of the same community, as they’re more likely to do if your company’s phone number shares your customers’ area code and maybe a local exchange.

But before we consign toll-free numbers to the same dustbin as printed phone number directories, let’s consider some of the arguments in favor of toll-free numbers.

Why you might want a toll-free number

We see three reasons why you might want a toll-free number, and the first two are hard to quantify.

One argument in favor of toll-free numbers is brand image. A toll-free number lets consumers recognize a brand nationwide, and fosters feelings of familiarity and trustworthiness. Having a toll-free number makes a business seem more established and authoritative. A vanity toll-free number in particular — such as 1-800-TMOBILE — enhances your brand identity. And if someone remembers your number, they’re more likely to call you than to look for an alternative.

Another argument has to do with perception as well. Most businesses, if they use toll-free numbers, do so for general business. By establishing a separate toll-free number for a specific use case, you can elevate that use in consumers’ minds. For instance, if you set up a toll-free number for customer service, your customers can judge that you’re serious about providing good support.

The final argument in favor of toll-free numbers is cost. Though you do pay more per call for inbound calls on toll-free numbers, at least on a cloud communications platform like Plivo, you actually pay less for outbound calls in countries where outbound calling on toll-free numbers is available. If you run the numbers for your expected use case, a toll-free number might be more cost-effective than one or more local numbers.

How to rent a toll-free number

Fortunately, it’s as easy to procure a toll-free number as it is a local one. A cloud communications platform like Plivo keeps a large number of unassigned ones in inventory.

Monthly number rental fees for toll-free numbers are much lower than you might think. In the US, Canada, and the UK, you can rent one for $1 a month. We have similar low rates in other countries — check our Voice API pricing page.

You also incur charges for outbound and inbound calls, but per-call charges are low and you pay for only as much time as you use — Plivo doesn’t require a monthly usage contract. (However, if you’re spending more than $1,000 a month on voice calling, you should talk to our sales team about the possibility of a volume discount for a committed level of usage.)

Using a cloud communications platform for voice calling offers more advantages than just price. Voice quality is a key metric for any calling platform, and Plivo’s Premium Communications Network provides the best possible voice quality. Reliability is also huge — you want to be reachable at all times. Plivo promises 99.95% uptime, and a 99.99% service level agreement is available.

You can get started exploring Plivo’s Voice API services by signing up for free. If you already have a toll-free number from another provider that you want to keep, you can easily port it in to Plivo at no charge. If not, visit our Phone Numbers > Buy Number on the Plivo console. Under Type, tick Toll-Free, and under Capability, tick voice, then click Search.

If you want a particular number — say one with an 800 prefix, or some numbers that match certain letters on a phone keypad as part of a vanity number — you can enter them in the number field, then pick one from among the returned numbers.

The bottom line

So to answer the question we started off with: If you already have a toll-free number, keep it, because surely you have customers who use it. If you’re deciding whether to procure a new one, first compare the monthly cost for your expected call volume, taking into account both outgoing and incoming calls. A large difference might make your decision for you. If the numbers are close, then factor in the intangible factors like brand image.

Over the last few years everyone in the SMS messaging space has been coming to grips with 10DLC, the new standard in the US for application-to-person messaging using long codes. Mobile network operators (MNO), communications platforms as a service (CPaaS), and businesses that use SMS have all had a lot to learn. Plivo’s evolving approach has won praise from our users.

Plivo customer Fluent is one of many who’ve come on the journey. Fluent Senior Manager for CRM Sharita Passariello says, “I’ve gone through the 10DLC registration process with several vendors, and I see lots of advantages to Plivo’s approach. I love the self-service console and ease of use. With some other providers, I can’t sign on to their portal and register a brand or a campaign and have it approved within a couple of hours. It’s really nice that with Plivo I can go in and do it myself, and the turnaround time for approvals seems very quick. Most of the time I can get a campaign up and running within a day or two.”

Passariello also joined us for a webinar on the keys to SMS marketing success in 2023.

10DLC background

Where did 10DLC come from? To protect their customers, mobile carriers needed to make sure that businesses were registering their long codes for A2P use cases. When they register, companies have to provide details about their businesses and use cases (brands and campaigns) so the carriers can check them for legitimacy and appropriateness. Each carrier has come up with penalties for not registering 10DLC numbers, which include surcharges, fines, increased filtering, decreased throughput and deliverability, and the potential to be blocked from sending SMS messages.

If you’re using long codes for A2P texting, 10DLC registration is now mandatory.

Plivo lets you register brands and campaigns and link numbers to them through the Plivo console. The self-service approach makes 10DLC registration faster and easier than relying on a vendor’s support team.

10DLC is a win-win for both consumers and businesses. If you haven’t yet jumped on the bandwagon, register now to reap the benefits and avoid disruptions to your SMS business strategy.

Plivo’s Voice API includes a feature you may not be taking full advantage of: call transcription.

Call transcription is the process of converting recorded phone conversations into written words. It can help you in a number of ways. With a transcript, anyone can search or visually scan call conversations instead of listening to an entire recording — a process that’s more efficient than voice call monitoring. With phone call transcription you can:

1. Improve agent performance — Managers and agents can search and organize transcribed calls based on outcomes, and learn from them to create best practices documents or knowledge base articles. Transcripts can help you improve grading, quality monitoring, and agent and team performance. They can also help managers develop personalized training objectives for agents to improve their performance over time. Meanwhile, sales agents can learn from transcripts to improve their customer service, as well as identify cross- and upsell opportunities and identify effective ways to move leads further along the pipeline.
2. Reduce training time — You can share transcriptions among reps and during the new-hire onboarding process. They can serve as example scripts that illustrate what a rep should or shouldn’t say to a customer.
3. Do post-facto keyword analytics — Transcripts make it easy to analyze which keywords appear in call conversations and how frequently, so you can learn what your customers are saying and use that information to make better decisions. For instance, if you can understand what aspects and features of a product customers are happy or unhappy about, you can better prioritize efforts to improve the product.
4. Increase accessibility — For the hearing-impaired, transcripts make absorbing information easier. Inclusive practices such providing transcripts are not only good business, they may also be the law. For instance, in the US, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 says, “No otherwise qualified individual with a disability in the United States . . . shall, solely by reason of her or his disability, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance . . . .” The Office for Civil Rights enforces Section 504 in programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance from the Education Department, including public school districts and institutions of higher education. If your business has a presence in education, transcriptions may be required.
5. Enhance customer experience — For contact centers especially, customer satisfaction is crucial, and the best way to deliver on customer satisfaction is to have customer insights. Call transcripts unlock those insights, giving you an easy-to-review format and high-level perspective, which is especially useful when you have a lot of calls covering a number of subjects. Call transcription makes it simple to review information and discern trends, and identify instances where you should go back and listen to specific calls for more context.

The price is right

You might be willing to pay a lot to gain all of the benefits of speech-to-text, but with Plivo you don’t have to. Our speech transcription service is surprisingly inexpensive. Plivo charges less than a penny per minute of recorded speech — a fraction of what most cloud communication services charge — which makes it a trivial decision to say yes and gain all of the benefits.

However, before you transcribe any calls, make sure that doing so is legal in your locale. Some jurisdictions ban not only transcribing calls but even recording calls, or require informed consent by some or all parties in a conversation. Consult your friendly neighborhood lawyer.

How to transcribe calls

Now that you know why to use speech-to-text transcription, let’s talk about how: Simply provide an additional parameter to the Record Call API when you initiate a call. The transcription_url parameter defines the webhook URL to which the transcription should be posted. After the call completes, Plivo will post the transcribed text to the URL you specify, along with other parameters about the recording, as you can see on our API documentation page.

It’s really that simple and that inexpensive. If you’re already using Plivo’s Voice API but haven’t yet tried transcription, think about places where it might come in handy. If you’d like to get started, sign up for a free trial account and see all that Plivo can do.

Few businesses nowadays have receptionists answering phone calls. Automation is king, and interactive voice response (IVR) is the rule.

Poorly written IVR menus can alienate callers, and once someone hangs up, chances are they won’t try again. IVR best practices help you ensure that your callers’ experience is as smooth as possible.

Best Practices for Designing IVR Systems

IVR systems can streamline customer service, but a poorly designed one can be frustrating for customers and call agents alike. Start by designing a structure and navigation that is simple and clear and prioritizes the most popular options in the menu. Keep the main menu to four to six options using concise language that's easy to understand. Put the most frequently used functions at the beginning of the menu to help callers get what they need quickly.

As for the prompts, the shorter, the better — keep greetings to eight seconds or less and four seconds for menu options. Allow callers to interrupt lengthy prompts with their selection to avoid frustration. 

Finally, consider the customer experience. We’ve all been in positions where an IVR feels annoying rather than helpful. Always provide a clear path to connect with a live agent if callers can't resolve their issue through the IVR. Minimize repetition: don't make callers repeat information they've already entered, step after step. And, monitor calls for improvement to eliminate any obstacles preventing your IVR from performing well. 

Here are some tips on how to create IVR menus that satisfy callers’ needs.

How to implement an IVR menu

By following these IVR menu best practices you should have more satisfied customers and prospects. When you’re ready to start implementing an IVR phone tree in code, Plivo makes things easy for you. We have documentation in the form of IVR use case guides in seven common web development languages.

If you’re not already a Plivo customer, sign up for free today and see how easy it is to create IVR phone trees.

If you’re in real estate — whether you’re an agent for sellers or buyers, a property manager, a home sharing host, or a home inspector — chances are you live on your mobile phone. Your potential customers — homeowners, buyers, and renters — are just as connected. That’s why you’re probably putting listings on Instagram or Twitter. So why not deliver messages directly to people who already have phone in hand by using SMS, a.k.a. text messaging.

What’s the benefit? SMS messages have an open rate of 98% — higher than email. Most people read their text messages within five minutes. But most importantly, people prefer texting to other forms of communication;68% of home buyers and sellers say they want to receive property information and communicate with their agent via SMS.

Chances are you’ve already seen that preference for texting in your person-to-person communications with your clients. But you can automate application-to-person text messages with an SMS API and get even more benefit.

Benefits of real estate texting

You can use SMS to send messages with news, promotions, updates, and other relevant communications to clients, prospects, and leads. Using text messaging gives real estate businesses several benefits.

Use cases for real estate texting

Here are just a few ways to leverage text messaging to enhance customer relationships and improve revenue.

Best practices for real estate texting

Text messaging is part of a larger conversation about marketing, in which the goal is to stay in touch so customers think of you when they have a transaction to make. You might employ email, voice calls, and direct mail as marketing tools; each communications channel has strengths and weaknesses.

For the SMS part of the process, don’t cross the line into sending too-frequent messages that recipients consider spam. Do, however, follow these best practices to increase your response rates.

• Make sure you have a clear reason for each message you send. Each message should be about something your recipient cares about, and bound to a specific time and place.
• Keep your messages short. If you have a lot of information to convey, include in your message a link to a website that conveys the whole story. In your text, stick with the key points.
• Use an informal but competent tone to convey your professionalism and trustworthiness. Avoid real estate jargon. Try to sound like the best version of your in-person self; that’ll help you enhance your relationship with your customer.
• You’re sending a text message because you want the recipient to do something. Make sure you include a clear call to action, which might be getting recipients to click on a link to bring up a web page, tap a number to phone you, or some other action.
• Create a template for different kinds of messages in your communications application, then have your outreach program populate your templates with specific details for each new message.
• Measure the conversion rate each time you send a message — find out how many recipients take the action you want them to. From time to time, make changes to your templates to see if you can improve conversion rates.

Another best practice involves the number type you use to send messages. There are three possibilities: long codes, toll-free numbers, and short codes. We wrote a whole blog post on how to choose the right phone number for your business.

Use SMS for real estate

Sold? Given all of the potential use cases and the benefits you can derive from using SMS in real estate businesses, the only question you should still have is: how do I get started? Check out Plivo’s SMS and Voice APIs for real estate communication. You can sign up for a free trial and get enough usage credits to use our communications APIs in a pilot project.