Introducing Intercom SMS: Connect, engage, and activate with two-way SMS
Table of contents:
- How can Intercom SMS boost customer engagement?
- How does Intercom SMS integrate with existing channels?
- What kinds of messages can I send with Intercom SMS?
- How do I get started with Intercom SMS?
- I'm already using SMS but want to introduce two-way SMS to my support offering.
- How can I maximize two-way SMS?
- How can I try out Intercom SMS?
Today, we’re excited to launch Intercom SMS – increase engagement and encourage action with two-way SMS that connects you to your customers anytime, anywhere.
For businesses looking for a reliable, fast, and effective way to communicate with their customers, SMS is a no-brainer. With an open rate of 98%, you can almost guarantee that your most crucial messages will reach your customers – and not only that, 95% will read those messages within three minutes.
But what comes next? Customers receive these important notifications with no way to respond or ask questions. They find themselves in a one-way conversation – not a good start to any relationship.
That’s why we’ve released Intercom SMS, a true two-way SMS solution that facilitates real conversations between businesses and their customers – building relationships and bringing engagement to the next level.
“Intercom SMS offers customers a direct line to your business so they can feel heard, and you can stop missing crucial engagement opportunities”
Boost your customer engagement with Intercom SMS
Relying on one-way SMS means you’re missing vital opportunities to grow your relationship with your customers. Intercom SMS opens up the conversation.
Two-way communication means better conversations
Drive immediate engagement by allowing your customers to take action while you have their full attention. Intercom’s two-way SMS solution means customers can ask questions and give feedback in the most convenient way, at the most convenient time. It offers customers a direct line to your business so they can feel heard, and you can stop missing crucial engagement opportunities.
Single platform offers a seamless customer experience
Talk to customers via SMS using the same Inbox your teammates know and love. That means customer data, conversation histories, and context – all in one place.
Some 85% of business respondents agree that their customers prefer helpful context to follow them from channel to channel for a seamless brand experience. With a single platform, not only will your support team save hours of tab-switching, your customers will enjoy more personalized, helpful support experiences.
“80% of customers are more likely to do business with a company that offers personalized customer experiences”
Targeted and personalized outbound messaging
According to our research, 80% of customers are more likely to do business with a company that offers personalized customer experiences. So if you have an important message for your customers, make it personal.
With Intercom SMS, you can leverage the rich, first-party customer data you already have within our platform to send personalized messages to specific groups of customers based on behavior and user data.
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“The biggest benefits we’ve seen using Intercom SMS are higher engagement and completion rates, as well as significant time savings on our team. Our patients prefer SMS and it used to be a very manual process, but Intercom makes it easier for everyone. Our disengagement rate is now only 3% with outbound SMS due to the preference of patients of SMS over email.” – Daniel Leung, Head of Product & Strategic Growth at Curex |
Intercom SMS works with your existing channels
When marketing, sales, and support channels are separate, teams can lose valuable context on customer interactions. Having a single record of customer conversations equips every team with a rich customer history that they can continue to build on.
Intercom SMS works alongside all of our in-app, outbound, and mobile channels – because Intercom is one unified platform that keeps all of your customer conversations in one place, and allows your team to answer customer queries efficiently and effectively. Every interaction with a customer – across a wide range of channels – is stored and actionable within Intercom.
Use Intercom’s integrations to maximize the value of SMS
Tracking and monitoring: Uncover deeper insights about your onboarding, promotional, or re-engagement campaigns by connecting product analytics tools like Heap, Fullstory, and Amplitude to Intercom and continuing to optimize your customer communications.
Scheduling for outbound sales: Integrate scheduling tools like Chili Piper and Calendly to create a smoother experience for prospects and customers by allowing them to set up a call via a link in an SMS.
System updates: Make sure your customers keep up-to-date with important news by proactively sending system updates via SMS.
Your most important messages reach the right people, in the right place
With an incredibly high delivery and open rates, SMS gives your crucial messages the best chance of reaching, and being read by, your customers. Here are just some of the ways you can use Intercom SMS to communicate with your customers.
Promotional
Notify your customers about sales, discounts, upsell opportunities, or newly released features.
Example: Want to offer a discount to customers who haven’t used your product in a while? Use Intercom SMS to target your messages to that specific customer group, based on data you’ve already collected through Intercom and offer discounts based on their interests.
Transactional
With that 98% engagement rate we mentioned above, text messages are the ideal way to remind or update your customers about something important.
Example: Send an SMS reminder about an upcoming appointment and give your customers the option to reply and confirm, reschedule, or ask a question.
“Give your customers the comfort of knowing they can reach your business when they need to, in a way that suits them”
Give your customers a direct line to support
Give your customers the comfort of knowing they can reach your business when they need to, in a way that suits them.
Example: Send your customers a text as soon as they purchase your product to let them know they can reply via SMS with any questions.
Re-engagement
Send account updates, follow up on abandoned carts, or check in on customers that have been absent from your product for a certain period of time.
Example: Have you noticed a decrease in product usage among some of your customers? Then sending an in-product message may not be the best approach. Send an SMS after 90 days of inactivity to tell your customers about a new feature, suggest a new way they could use the product, or invite them to reply with any questions they have.
Onboarding
Lay out the best path to value for your customers with onboarding texts, omnichannel nurture journeys, and reminder texts for outstanding actions.
Example: Remind your customer to invite friends or colleagues to use the product, and include a link to bring them directly to the relevant area within your product so they can take action straight away.
Follow-up
Make sure your customer starts getting value from your product from the moment they purchase. Check in to make sure they’re achieving their goals and discovering the features that can solve their problems.
Example: Send a text including a post-purchase survey to ask what the customer hopes to achieve by using your product, and offering to answer any initial questions they may have. Then, add them to a tailored onboarding flow based on their responses.
“SMS is an easy way to reach your prospects wherever they are, answer any questions they might have, and take the deal to the next stage”
Lead generation/Account-based marketing
Reach out to your accounts to check how they’re getting on with your product, and answer any questions they reply with. Whether they have an issue that’s easily fixed, or they need to hop on a call – you can organize it all via SMS. The same goes for your prospects. SMS is an easy way to reach your prospects wherever they are, answer any questions they might have, and take the deal to the next stage.
Example: Automate a follow-up workflow after a lead provides their contact details to send a quick text asking if they’d like to talk to the buying team about your product. Offer a follow-up call or answer any further questions over SMS.
Proactively support your customers
Offer your customers the help they need before they even ask, and increase engagement right from the start.
Example: Do you have a planned outage coming up? Will your support team’s average response time increase over an upcoming holiday? Let your customers know before they’re disrupted.
Getting started is simple
It’s easy to get set up with SMS – you don’t need to rely on other integrations or set up additional accounts. Our native SMS tool is designed for a fast and easy self-serve onboarding process.
Just sign up with Intercom, select your country (or countries), choose and confirm your phone number(s), and start sending and receiving messages. Once you’ve set up, you can start to configure your SMS settings to customize things like automated keyword responses, quiet hours, and two-way SMS settings.
Already using SMS? Reach the next level with two-way conversations
It’s as simple as a flip of a switch – enable two-way SMS in your account settings in Intercom.
Once you purchase the SMS add-on through Intercom, you can set up workflows for your support team, such as notifying customers of expected downtimes, proactively reaching out to new customers to get ahead of any implementation issues, or advertising your support number on your website or outgoing emails.
“Adding a two-way SMS solution to your support, sales, and marketing stacks is a massive upgrade for your customer service offering”
From there, customers can respond directly to your outgoing SMS messages and those responses will appear in your teammate’s Inbox. And since you get access to our next-generation Inbox, you can also start using macros or Inbox routing rules for SMS messages as well!
We suggest housing all your SMS communications in one platform to ensure a consistent customer experience and brand voice. However, if you are currently using another SMS solution to facilitate one-way messages, you can rely on Intercom SMS for your SMS communications that require a fast, personalized back-and-forth conversation between your support team and customers.
Create a seamless customer experience with two-way SMS
Adding a two-way SMS solution to your support, sales, and marketing stacks is a massive upgrade for your customer service offering – but there’s even more you can do to create a seamlessly engaging experience. Here are some of the ways you can optimize Intercom SMS to work for both your team and your customers.
Use first-party data to guide your messaging strategy
Intercom captures and stores rich, first-party customer and event data for you – giving you automatic access to powerful SMS targeting, orchestration, message personalization, optimizations, robust reporting, and more. Use these features and insights to learn more about the communication your customers want and need from you.
Implement powerful workflows to increase adoption and engagement
Add customers to specific workflows based on their responses to certain messages. Intercom SMS works alongside all other Intercom tools, including Series, so you can offer tailored customer service, at scale.
Leverage your existing Inbox rules to create specific SMS flows for high-priority customers
The same set of rules apply to your customers when they SMS and when they reach out to your business via any other channel. Identify your highest priority customers and create specific flows to take them on the right journey.
Use macros to tackle common queries with saved replies
Sending and receiving SMS messages within the Intercom Inbox means your support team has access to all of the tools they would usually use to answer customer queries. They can save time by replying with a saved reply – or create new saved replies to deal with responses from a bulk text.
Ready to try out Intercom SMS?
It’s never been easier to build a meaningful relationship with your customers via SMS.
