Did you know that TextIt can be used to build applications capable of managing an entire organization’s customer-facing communication channels? A. Barr Simpson (A. Barr), a company that installs, services and maintains fountain soda & mixed gas products, has done just that. From customer registration to service requests, A. Barr’s TextIt application handles all customer-facing communication, providing targeted information and distributing requests where appropriate. No customer goes unanswered, and their requests are immediately processed. Best of all, they do so without integration; each flow utilizes TextIt's core features.
A. Barr uses a series of flows to:
- provide A. Barr's mailing address and contact information via a keyword.
- provide a menu that directs customers to the flow that meets their need: signing-up, putting through a product or service request, submitting a question or comment, requesting A. Barr's mailing address, and updating the customer's profile.
- register up to 4 businesses for each customer.
- process product orders and schedule deliveries.
- process service requests and schedule appointments.
- provide delivery notifications one day prior to delivery.
- process customer questions and comments.
- provide targeted instructions after a particular products are delivered.
Building a Menu
As organizations like A. Barr have found, menus are essential to automated messaging and voice applications. Simply build your menu and use the Start Another Flow action to link each category to the appropriate flow. A menu might be triggered by a specific keyword, which can be assigned to a particular group or open to all contacts, or an uncaught message trigger, which starts a flow for any contact who sends a message not handled by a keyword you've already created. It's also a great way to account for miscellaneous messages.
A. Barr uses an uncaught message trigger to direct contacts to the menu flow and alert an employee of the inquiry.
Alerting Employees to Customer Actions
A. Barr uses the Send Message to Someone Else and Send Email actions to send product and service requests to employees. Values such as the service request and request time are collected from either flow, then to employees using flow variables.
Triaging Service Requests
A. Barr uses a simple RuleSet to understand the severity of the problem. This information is then used to determine response time (ASAP, today, tomorrow, within a week, or during the customer's next scheduled delivery). An employee is alerted of the request and its severity via text message, allowing them to immediately contact the customer.
Managing Notification Schedules with Campaigns
Onboarding your contacts is important when introducing a TextIt app that supplements or even replaces one of your organization's communication channels. For this reason, A. Barr has set up a campaign containing a single-message flow that follows up with new customers after they've completed their first interaction to remind them of what they can accomplish via the the application.
Go with the Flow
For Example:
- An E-commerce company can use TextIt to improve funnel abandonment by texting discount codes to customers who put something in their cart but don't purchase.
- An on-demand company can push text notifications when their delivery is on the way or manage a fleet of workers who won't be on computers but will always have their phones.
- Any company can measure Net Promotor Score or Customer Satisfaction by sending messages that are more likely to be read and responded to than any other form of communication.
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