SMS marketing is so much more than simply sending a text to a customer. It entails targeting messaging to individuals, measuring performance for tactical improvements, and deepening engagement through two-way conversations. More importantly, brands need to figure out how to successfully execute these tactics at scale. Enter SMS AI.
When SMS and AI are used in the same sentence, often chatbots are the first idea that comes to mind. And while the two-way communication capabilities enabled by AI are impressive, this isn’t the sole use case for artificial intelligence.
Here, we’ll explore how Voxie’s platform leverages SMS-specific AI to execute sophisticated SMS strategies at a national scale.
The reality is that franchises need to operate at a scale that’s impossible to manage manually. Our AI doesn’t replace human strategy; it amplifies it. A single marketing director can now oversee sophisticated, personalized SMS campaigns across hundreds of locations, with the AI handling the heavy lifting of personalization, sentiment analysis, and performance tracking.
Tim Hitchner - VP of Product at Voxie
AI SMS Chatbot With Natural Language Processing (NLP)
We’re all familiar with the upsides of a customer services chat bot—they’re available 24/7, have no wait-time, and lessen the strain put on your human customer service resources. However, we’ve all also encountered their limitations in the past—they’re limited in the kinds of questions they answer and their ability to understand complex phrases.
Voxie has invested heavily in leveraging purpose-driven AI to greatly reduce such pain points, as well as evolve general SMS chatbot capabilities. This includes:
- Extracting underlying information from conversational language
- Retaining information from past interactions to help personalize chats and help users find answers faster
- Integrating with other software to pull information from a variety of resources
- Continuously evolving its knowledge of your brand voice and knowledge base through machine-learning, improving with each interaction
Additionally, as part of Voxie’s focus on serving the needs of franchises, the platform grants higher-level admin visibility into text interactions between customers and the franchisee locations.
Learn About Voxie’s Two-way Message Hub Feature
AI-Powered Sentiment Analysis of Incoming Texts
In the above section, we touched upon how SMS AI tools like Voxie enable improved customer service interactions via text messaging. However, there’s one element of this and related features that should not be brushed over: AI’s ability to accurately understand implied context beyond the literal words in text messages.
This means the SMS AI can unearth implied satisfaction levels behind mixed feedback like, “The wait staff was great, but the nachos came out cold,” and correctly identify that customer service was perceived as good but food quality was subpar.
Such AI capabilities can be helpful to your chatbots and marketing in numerous ways, including:
- Text-based customer surveys - AI can analyze free-form text responses in customer surveys to understand sentiment, identify key themes, and even flag specific issues, eliminating the need for numeric scoring. This allows for more natural customer feedback and deeper insights.
- In automated customer service interactions, identifying when to escalate issues to a designated point person (and which one) - When a customer expresses frustration or a critical issue, the AI can detect this sentiment and automatically route the conversation to a human agent. Better still, the AI can forward the communication to specific departments based on the identified need, whether that be shipping, finances, or technical support.
- Triggering the right directive of a multi-path drip campaign based on satisfaction - Based on a customer’s expressed satisfaction level, the AI can direct them down different automated communication paths. For example, highly satisfied customers could receive prompts to leave public reviews, while those with mixed feedback might receive offers to rectify their experience.
Quick Blast AI Message Assistant for Improved Marketing
Every marketer knows that generic AI tools can aid in overcoming writer’s block. However, Voxie’s SMS AI tools go well beyond the creative capabilities of ChatGPT.
Firstly, our Quick Blast AI Message assistant specializes in one thing and one thing only—SMS. This means that the texts it creates will directly reflect data-backed studies into what verbiage and composition practices yield the best SMS results.
More critically, the platform’s AI develops a deep understanding of your brand’s unique identity, resulting in suggestions that would markedly differ between a taco franchise and a fitness center chain.
AI-Fueled Campaign Tagging for Deeper Reporting Capabilities
Raw data, without intelligent organization, remains just that: raw data. This is where SMS AI comes in—it analyzes texts across your entire franchisee network, automatically tagging them by various themes. This not only frees franchisees from manual tagging but also eliminates inconsistencies in nomenclature.
Do BOGO promotions yield higher promo-code redemption than 30% off offers? Do holiday-themed texts have lower engagement metrics than non-seasonal campaigns? Does a GIF-based MMS perform better than one with a stagnant image? Accurate, automated tagging of texts makes it possible to swiftly answer these questions so you can continuously improve your strategy.
To dive deeper into this topic, read SMS Marketing Analytics to Quantify Campaign Results.
Additional Voxie SMS Automations to Boost Productivity and Performance
- Real-time list updates to assure TCPA compliance
- Integrations with third-party tools to inform text content and list segmentation
- Automated text flows activated by text or non-text interactions, capable of multiple routes based on responses
- Brand-managed deployment of SMS messages accredited to localized numbers
For more insights, read SMS Automation to Galvanize Your Text Message Marketing.
Strategically Deploy AI to Augment Your Franchise’s SMS With Voxie
Voxie leverages advanced AI alongside a franchise-friendly dashboard and robust toolset, delivering the premier SMS solution for multi-location businesses. This dual focus provides a range of practical benefits and features for franchise text messaging, including:
- Refining platform accessibility and data visibility based on user roles
- Customizing approval processes according to user permissions and campaign types
- Analyzing SMS performance data by both campaign themes and franchisee locations
- Building franchisee-specific SMS lists that update in real time
- Controlling SMS flows at the national level while maintaining localized messaging and phone numbers
We listened to the unique SMS needs of franchises and built software tailored to this specific business model, resulting in a solution that lifts engagement across the full ecosystem while streamlining operations and safeguarding brand integrity.