Intercom SMS Can Engage Your Customers with a 98% Open Rate
Intercom, as a centralized customer engagement platform, excels at unifying every aspect of the customer journey. Intercom has been a leader for web and app engagement – enabling companies to initiate a conversation with a prospective lead, to then continue engagement through onboarding, and eventually provide support once a lead becomes a customer. Intercom’s new SMS feature connects companies to their customers anytime, anywhere. If customers are not active on your website or app, it will be much more difficult to engage them. However using SMS, you will be able to communicate with your customers in a much more universal location. In fact, Intercom reported that SMS messages have an open rate of 98%, including a 95% open rate within 3 minutes of the message being delivered.
One of the things Intercom has focused on over the past year is opening up multiple channels and options of communicating for customers. Last month I wrote a blog on Intercom Switch, a new capability within the platform that allows customers to transition from voice to chat in seconds. One of the reasons this was groundbreaking for the platform is because while Intercom’s chat platform has a reputation for being industry leading, it was not omnichannel in voice or SMS. Having an omnichannel platform personalizes the experience for the customer. Different customer preferences or circumstances might impact how a customer would contact your organization, making omnichannel solutions more holistically prepared to support all customers. Intercom Switch was a fantastic start to creating a more omnichannel platform. However, Intercom’s new feature, Intercom SMS, opens an even wider door of possibilities for omnichannel communication.
Use Cases for Intercom SMS
In their announcement, Intercom detailed multiple use-cases where engagement could be improved through SMS. Some examples include sending an order confirmation after a purchase with a direct line to your support team, re-engaging an inactive customer that hasn’t used your product in 90 days, reminding a customer to invite friends or colleagues in exchange for promotional incentives, and sending a post-purchase survey to learn more from your customers. All of this was possible previously using custom development with tools like Twilio, and still is, but for existing Intercom customers, it becomes even more accessible and integrated in the existing engagement platform, with SMS actions available natively to Intercom tools like Series and Inbox macros.
Where Intercom SMS shines, is as a two-way conversation platform – giving your customer service representatives access to SMS conversations in their existing Intercom Inbox. This comes with all the benefits of having first-party data – your customers’ interaction histories are automatically available through Intercom.
I think what’s most exciting to imagine is how SMS will blend into the existing features of the platform, rather than individual examples of SMS use-cases. For example, an online shopping center that uses Intercom might already be able to recognize when a logged-in customer is on the checkout page with items in their cart, but forgot to submit their order. Instead of attempting to re-engage this customer through an app or website notification to finish their order, they could send them a text message. The text message would have a higher open-rate and contain a link for the customer to finish their order.
Vision Point Systems is really excited to see how Intercom SMS will blend into our current customers’ Intercom systems, as well as what new opportunities will arise from the feature. If you’re interested in learning more about what Intercom is and how it could help your organization, learn more about our practice here.
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