What is conversational SMS?

Conversational SMS is when brands have two-way text conversations with customers.

Whereas two-way SMS responds to specific words as prompts, conversational SMS uses a combination of automation technology and human agents to enhance customer service. But once brands feel comfortable using conversational SMS for customer service, they sometimes begin to use it for customer acquisition, too.

How to best use conversational SMS

  1. Enhancing the post-purchase experience: Send order and shipping confirmations, letting your customers know they can text back to ask questions about their order.
  2. Answering common customer service questions: Use automation to send answers to your most common questions from customers. Always offer to connect people to a human agent when requests become more complex.
  3. Sending high-value offers to VIPs: Reserve your highest-value offers for conversational SMS as a way to treat your subscribers with respect. You may even want to offer an SMS concierge service.
  4. Getting customer feedback: Ask your customers to reply with images and reviews for recently purchased items.
  5. Recovering abandoned carts: Use caution here—offer to answer questions about the abandoned product, rather than nudging to buy.

Benefits of conversational SMS

  1. More efficient customer service: Conversational SMS can automate responses to common customer questions, so your agents can spend time tending to more complex issues.
  2. A better post-purchase experience: Good communication is the bedrock of stellar customer service. Keep customers updated on their order at every stage, so they’re never left wondering where it is.
  3. More opportunities to collect customer data: You can learn a lot from your customers through your interactions with them via text. As long as you have express consent to do so, you can use some of this data to tailor product offers to them in the future.
  4. A direct line to customer feedback: Build better products with more feedback from the people who buy them.

Sign up for Klaviyo to set up conversational SMS. Start reaching your customers and enhancing your post-purchase experience with SMS, so you can increase retention and lifetime customer value.

Additional resources