3 Ways to Personalize Customer Experiences With Automated Text Messaging

In creating a winning customer experience, personalization is key. Automated messaging allows you to create unique, hyper-personalized conversations that will lead to measurable results for your company.

Research shows 42% of Americans say that if a company doesn’t provide them with a personalized experience, they’re likely to switch brands. But what’s really interesting is that if a product or service disappoints, 72% of consumers say they’ll give the company a second chance if it provides a personalized customer experience.

While we all know creating individualized experiences is key, only 33% of businesses feel confident they have the tools to properly personalize the customer experience. By using automated messaging you can be confident that customers and prospects are all receiving memorable experiences.

How to Personalize Customer Experiences with Automated Messaging

1. Deepen profiling with keywords

Often, companies think keywords are only used for opt-ins. While that’s important for compliance, you can use keywords beyond the opt-in. Keywords allow you to understand more about someone, add to their profile and trigger information or actions that the keyword says they want.

For example, let’s say you have a campaign running for higher education, prospecting for new students. You canvas highschools and promote your top 3 programs: engineering, business, and nursing. To start with, you ask students to opt-in with one of four keywords: ENGINEERING, BUSINESS, NURSING or OTHER. Now, you immediately know something about them vs just a yes/no opt-in. This information about what they are interested in goes immediately into your CRM in a status field and begins building a profile.

Next, you can trigger an automatic campaign that starts to send them information about the school or college they asked about. In this case if a student used the keyword ENGINEERING you could trigger the response “Did you know we are the top-rated engineering school in the state? Check out this article to learn more.”

From there you can continue sending more information or choose to deepen the profile by asking another question. We recommend doing both. Send them relevant information and then ask what they are interested in. This should be something relevant that you need or want to know next, such as, “Are you interested in CLASSES, DEGREES, or CLUBS?”  Then automatically trigger pre-written information about what they choose.

Every keyword gets stored and your profile deepens. Then when a recruiter gets on the phone they have all of this information.

2. Package the profile

With automated messaging you can package up a profile and all of the conversations you’ve had with a prospect and deliver it to your recruiters. Instead of receiving a generic profile, recruiters have a detailed, personalized profile that is specific to each individual. So as they get into a 1-1 convo they have all of the conversation and are immediately relevant. This gives a highly personal touch to every interaction.

You can also automatically capture the recruiters conversations and share those as things move along. If a student wants to talk with an advisor about a specialty, that advisor can now view all conversation history, from the initial message to the personalized conversations with the recruiter.

3. Create an interactive personal experience

In the example we are using, automated messaging gives students an interactive personal experience throughout every conversation they have with a university. This goes from the help desk to application automation to sending information about on-campus activities.

University resources are often strapped. With automation, your recruiters are able to handle more applications without more effort. Recruiters can easily help a student apply by quickly notifying them about their status and sending them what else is needed to enroll. The application is automated and you can remind them when things are due. If there are questions, the student gets directed to chat with someone immediately.

Thanks to automation, the university receives more completed applications while spending less time and energy. Students are always up to date and feel cared for and know they will always receive personal service on demand. Thus, your university stands out amongst the others.

The Bottom Line

With an automated message system, you’ll create more personalized customer experiences leading to higher conversion rates and a more loyal audience. You will:

• Deepen profiling with automated messaging.
• Give recruiters and reps access to profiles and conversation history, making them immediately relevant and leading to more personal experiences overall.
• Create interactive personal experiences, leading to higher conversion and completion rates.

Your audience will appreciate the thoughtful responses and conversations you provide thanks to the personalized experience you deliver thanks to automated messaging

Want to see how SMS-Magic Converse helps clients achieve all of this with text messaging? Reach out and we’d be happy to give you a personal tour and share examples from our clients!