Implementing AI into Text Marketing Customer Service

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When overseeing a business, it’s crucial to understand your customers’ wants, needs, and concerns. You need to be able to address their questions, anticipate hiccups, provide recommendations, and gauge their sentiments toward your business. Not to mention, you need to do all of that in a timely manner.

Yes, ensuring your customer service experience runs smoothly can be a full-time job, and that’s exactly what AI customer service SMS features aim to solve. This technology is designed to help streamline your processes and enhance customer communication.

So, that brings us to the question: does AI-powered SMS marketing lead to higher customer engagement? Yes, AI-powered SMS marketing can lead to higher customer engagement as it helps your business have more personalized and tailored interactions, which can also help boost customer satisfaction and increase customer loyalty.

Tailoring Text Marketing for Personalized Customer Journeys

As a marketer, you understand the importance of personalizing the customer journey. After all, personalized content helps capture your audience’s attention and pique their interest, making them more inclined to interact and engage with your brand—AI can help enhance that experience.

So, how can AI personalize customer journeys through text marketing? While there are many ways that AI can personalize customer journeys through text marketing, three common uses include precision targeting, implementing dynamic personalization, and incorporating chatbots.

Precision Targeting

Precision targeting is when a marketer uses data to create customer segments and then applies rules to determine what kind of content to send to those groups. With a better understanding of your customers and their needs, you can use this data to influence your customer’s behaviors and decisions so that they align with your business goals.

Let’s say your business is hosting a special in-store sale at your San Francisco brick-and-mortar location, and you want to generate excitement around the event to increase attendees. Now, if you’ve segmented your customers based on their locations, you might send a text invitation only to those with Bay Area zip codes.

Your SMS invitation could say something like, “(Rugged Outdoors) Roy, you’re invited to our exclusive summer blowout sale on July 23 at our SF Union Square store! Will you be joining us? RSVP here.”

This is an example of precision targeting because you’re sending targeted messages to a certain group based on their demographics to increase attendance at your event.

Now, how does AI come into the picture? AI technology can help with precision targeting by analyzing vast amounts of demographic, behavioral, and psychographic customer data and identifying patterns that inform how you segment your customers. Furthermore, AI algorithms can help determine which rules to set and what kind of targeted content to send to those groups.

This AI feature can help marketers better understand and connect with their customers and encourage them to perform certain actions, but it can also cut down on the amount of time it would otherwise take you to manually collect and analyze the data. What might take you days to do might only take AI a few hours or even minutes to complete.

Dynamic Personalization

Dynamic personalization is another way to use AI for customer service interactions. This refers to using information you know about your customers to help create a personalized experience.

While dynamic personalization might sound the same as precision targeting, some key differences exist. To start, dynamic personalization involves using machine learning to analyze individuals’ behaviors and preferences and respond with customized content that addresses their needs. This differs from precision targeting in that it focuses on the individual rather than groups of customers and relies more on one’s personal journey than your business goals.

For example, you could create a personalized message for a customer based on their past purchase with your brand. Your SMS message could say, “(Rugged Outdoors) Roy, since you recently purchased a GG sleeping bag, we thought you might be interested in our new line of GG tents. Check them out here!”

Again, AI technology can help you gather these insights about your customers and generate automatic messages that appeal to their individual interests and preferences. Relying on these AI customer service features can free up time for other tasks while creating a more personalized experience for your customers.

Conversational AI

That brings us to conversational AI, which refers to the technology chatbots use to interact with customers via text. As its name suggests, conversational AI is designed to have human-like conversations as it can understand, process, and generate human language. The technology collects data from previous text conversations and customer insights, such as demographics and preferences, and uses it to generate meaningful and productive text conversations.

That said, can AI-powered chatbots handle customer service inquiries via SMS? Yes, AI-powered chatbots can handle customer inquiries via SMS. That’s exactly what they’re programmed to do. These chatbots use AI for customer service interactions, which allows them to answer questions, handle issues, provide support, and offer recommendations.

Regarding personalization, chatbots use customer data to customize the customer service experience. For instance, when texting with a customer, the chatbot can include the customer’s name, information about their recent purchase, shipping details, and even suggestions based on their purchasing behavior.

To see this kind of AI for customer service text generation in action, let’s say a customer texts your AI customer service bot because they want to know the status of their recent purchase. In this case, the chatbot will interpret the customer’s message, track their purchase, determine if it’s shipped, and provide its scheduled delivery date. And because a human customer service representative doesn’t man the chatbot, it can reply to the customer immediately, no matter the time or day, and quickly handle the matter.

These AI customer service bots provide quick and efficient service, helping to enhance the customer service experience.

Understanding AI-Powered Text Analytics

Let’s back up a minute. What is AI-powered text analytics? AI-powered text analytics describes training a computer to “learn” the human language. It can pick up on words and phrases that indicate intent and sentiment. The more the program understands the written language, the more it can extract insights and elevate the customer experience.

How can AI-powered text analytics be used to improve SMS campaigns? AI-powered text analytics can improve SMS campaigns by helping analyze customers and gather feedback.

Analyze Customers

Just as you can read a text from a friend and determine that they’re sad or angry based on the words they use, AI customer service technology aims to do this, too. AI can scan texts to determine customer intent and emotions and, using those insights, generate an appropriate response to support the customer in the best way possible.

For instance, if an AI customer service bot recognizes a customer’s discontent or unhappiness during their text exchange, it might flag the conversation and send it to a human representative. Even though AI is becoming increasingly advanced and intelligent, sometimes human intervention is needed.

Gather Feedback

AI-powered text analytics can also help you learn from your mistakes. The technology can review SMS text exchanges, look for pain points, and identify opportunities for improvement.

Let’s say, after analyzing 2,000 of your SMS exchanges, AI finds that “broken links,” “error pages,” “website issue,” and other similar words and phrases popped up 20% of the time. Of course, this suggests your website is giving your customers issues and that you need to focus on improving your website experience. Using this insight, you can fix your website and hopefully prevent future customer discontent.

Measuring Success: From Open Rates to Churn Prevention

As with any marketing campaign, tracking your metrics is a crucial step in determining the success of your efforts. And the funny thing about AI technology is that you can use AI tools to analyze the success of your AI-powered campaigns!

So, how can you measure the success of AI-powered SMS marketing campaigns? You can measure the success of AI-powered text marketing campaigns by looking at sentiment analysis, churn prediction and prevention tactics, and key performance indicators.

AI Sentiment Analysis

You’ve probably heard of sentiment analysis, which refers to analyzing texts to determine the tone of the message. For example, you would use sentiment analysis to decipher whether a customer had a positive, neutral, or negative interaction with your business.

AI sentiment analysis is the same thing, but instead of a human manually reading and interpreting texts, AI does it for you. As you can imagine, this is a much more efficient and time-effective strategy. Not only does AI have the power to comb through massive amounts of data at one time, but it can also categorize and interpret that data for you.

Why is this important? Well, if you have mostly chatbots communicating with your customers, you might not be aware of whether your customers interact positively or negatively with your brand. Understanding your customers’ emotions when interacting with your business can help you improve their satisfaction and enhance their experience.

For example, your customers might get angry or frustrated if you’re not resolving their issues. When using sentiment analysis, you can pinpoint these interactions and determine ways to better respond to and address their concerns. This might involve providing your conversational AI with more information to better support customers or directing certain customers to human customer service agents.

Churn Prediction and Prevention

In the marketing world, churn is when a customer stops interacting with your brand. This might mean they’ve stopped engaging with your SMS messages or unsubscribed from your text marketing program.

You want to avoid churn as much as possible, and that’s where AI customer service tools can help.

So, how can AI predict customer churn and prevent it through SMS? AI can predict and prevent churn through SMS by analyzing sentiment and looking for trigger events.

As mentioned above, AI can use sentiment analysis to gauge your customers’ emotions, helping to identify at-risk customers. AI technology can also look for trigger events that indicate churn. Using these insights, you can focus on proactively engaging via SMS messages with those who may be veering away from your brand.

For instance, maybe your AI customer service technology determined one of your customers recently had a negative interaction with your chatbot and hasn’t purchased from your business in over six months.

To help improve your relationship and encourage the customer to do business with your company again, you might send a personalized SMS message with a special promo code. An example message might say, “(Rugged Outdoors) Roy, we’ve missed you! Here’s a special promo code just for you. Use FORYOU20 to receive 20% off your next purchase.”

Key Performance Indicators

Monitoring key performance indicators is another way to measure the success of your AI-powered SMS campaign. This involves tracking open rates, click-through rates, engagement rates, conversion rates, and other metrics to determine if the results align with your campaign goals. For example, are customers continuing to sign up for your text program? Or are your opt-out rates on the rise? It also helps to compare your metrics to your previous campaigns to see if your results are trending in the right direction.

Depending on the data analytics tools your SMS platform uses, there’s a good chance AI technology is involved in this process, too. After all, AI can help collect data, analyze information, and provide insights and predictions based on those numbers. It might identify patterns and correlations, which can help paint a bigger picture of your SMS campaign.

With a better understanding of your SMS campaign’s performance, you can use those results to make data-driven decisions that improve results.

Seamless Omnichannel: Incorporating SMS into the Customer Experience

An SMS campaign with AI customer service is just one part of the puzzle. To have a well-rounded strategy that reaches and resonates with customers, it’s crucial to interact and engage with your customers across multiple channels on various devices. This multi-channel approach is known as an omnichannel customer experience.

An omnichannel customer experience covers all the touchpoints, so your customers can engage with your business around the clock, whether in-person at your store, through text messages on their mobile devices, or even on your brand’s app. It includes having an AI customer service bot on your website, sending out email newsletters, and sharing social media posts.

So, can AI be used to create a seamless omnichannel customer experience? Yes, AI can create a seamless omnichannel customer experience, as it helps provide cross-channel consistency, personalization, and data integration.

Cross-Channel Consistency

When engaging with your customers across multiple channels, delivering a unified brand experience across all touchpoints is important. All your messages and interactions should have a similar look and feel that your customers automatically associate with your business.

With the help of AI text generators, you can craft SMS messages, emails, website copy, and social media posts with the same voice and tone, providing helpful and engaging information relevant to your customers.

This technology can also support the same message through different channels. For instance, because SMS messages are meant to be short and sweet, you might send out a marketing text that teases your latest product and includes a special promo code to use once it’s dropped. Then, to follow up, you might send a marketing email with photos, videos, and a link to a blog post about the new product, giving your customers a more detailed look. These two messages work in unison to deliver a cohesive brand message.

Personalization Across Platforms

Just as you can rely on AI technology to create cross-channel consistency, you can use it to personalize your communication across all channels. Using the data it collects based on customer behavior, AI can generate tailored content and recommendations for individual customers via multiple touchpoints like email and SMS messages.

If we go back to our example in which the brand suggested tents to a customer who had recently purchased a sleeping bag, this same applies to cross-channel personalization, too. Using AI insights regarding the customer’s purchase history, the brand might send out that SMS text with a link to the tent collection and follow up with a more detailed email with not only tent recommendations but also sleeping pad and headlamp suggestions.

This customized communication helps create a more holistic approach to customer engagement.

Data Integration

No successful marketing strategy works in a vacuum—you need to be able to see all the moving parts to understand how they work together. Again, that’s where AI steps in.

AI technology unifies customer data from SMS, email, and other channels, offering an integrated view of all your marketing strategies. It helps organize your data and gather insights from all your marketing efforts, from your email newsletters to your SMS campaigns, giving you a bird’s eye view of your entire operation.

The Future of AI in Text Marketing

AI continues to evolve, so staying at the forefront of the latest trends is important to ensure you get the most out of this technology.

So, what are the next big trends in AI-powered SMS marketing? The next big trends in AI-powered SMS marketing will continue to focus on hyper-personalization to deliver bespoke experiences, predictive behavioral marketing to anticipate customer needs and integration with voice assistance for more advanced multi-channel engagement.

Embrace AI-Powered SMS Marketing

With advanced features like AI Reply and AI Compose, EZ Texting is already harnessing the power of AI to enhance the SMS marketing experience. If you’re ready to see how SMS marketing can elevate your business, try our free 14-day trial today!