Nexmo Partners with HelpSocial to Offer SMS in the Contact Center
At Nexmo, the Vonage API Platform, we’ve long been focused on aiding our customers in providing true omnichannel customer experiences. This means any conversation with a customer, whatever channel it occurs on (SMS, social chat, etc), can be threaded together into a single conversation, retaining its context wherever it goes next.
With this in mind, we’re thrilled to announce our strategic partnership with HelpSocial. “Our mission has never been to have a siloed focus on any communication channel,” says HelpSocial. “We created HelpSocial…to help service agents assist customers faster by having an omnichannel view (view of all channels) of the relationship.” Traditionally, they’ve done this by bringing social media chat apps (Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc.) to the contact center, so a customer conversation that began on social media can be transitioned seamlessly to the call center without a hitch. With the help of Nexmo, HelpSocial’s platform now offers SMS and MMS right alongside its current social channels.
Why SMS?
SMS has been and remains the most affordable, highest-response-rate channel for reaching and engaging customers. One-way SMS has grown exponentially over the past 5 years, as companies use SMS for coupon codes, delivery notifications, customer surveys, and countless other CX functions.
What companies haven’t done nearly as often is allow customers to text them back, but that’s changing. SMS is entering a renaissance of its own as businesses realize two-way SMS and MMS has huge potential for improving the customer experience. It’s less expensive than phone calls, and customers like using it. But it’s overwhelming to think of sending out an alert to 100,000 customers and getting 100,000 responses in a matter of minutes.
This is where bots come in.
Bots and SMS
As AI and chatbot technology continues to mature and improve, it’s becoming more and more feasible to scale 2-way SMS communication with your customers. HelpSocial’s open API allows its customers to tie their own bots into “the same channels, service workflows, and reports as they use with human agents.”
Now when a customer sends an SMS to your company, a bot can intercept and determine whether the customer needs to speak to a human or not. In many cases, of course, the bot will be fully capable of answering FAQs and handling other low-level inquiries, reducing the number of phone calls and other communications pouring into your contact center. And if a human agent is required, their job is instantly easier because the SMS history and functionality is accessed via the same interface as phone calls, emails, and social apps.
A Perfect Marriage
With Nexmo integration, HelpSocial users can access SMS as a low-cost, scalable customer service channel working seamlessly alongside existing communication channels. Nexmo’s matchless global reliability and access to messaging networks around the world make it the perfect match for HelpSocial. SMS is what we do best, and with HelpSocial you can now bring our industry-leading SMS and MMS services into the contact center alongside social apps and bots. With HelpSocial and Nexmo, companies can add compelling and high-value omnichannel communication to their customer experience strategies.
Here are two ways HelpSocial and Nexmo can be used together:
Contact Center Integration
Customers who want 2-way digital conversations (SMS, WhatsApp, etc) built into the agent interface of the contact center system can use HelpSocial’s integratable conversation app to bring Nexmo messages into the contact center with very little (if any) development work. HelpSocial is pre-integrated with Genesys PureCloud and NICE inContact CXone.
AI Message Processing for Bots, Routing, and Other Automation Systems
HelpSocial’s natural language processing and machine learning systems analyze every inbound message from Nexmo and add meta data showing the message intent, sentiment, and conversation topic (as defined by the customer). The system also adds relevant contextual customer info from integrated CRMs based on the message intent. This is available from an open API that turns each simple inbound message into an enriched, actionable message ready for immediate response from a system or agent.
By integrating bots with the Nexmo and HelpSocial technologies platforms, businesses can now add omnichannel capabilities within a single interface that empowers them to quickly and efficiently help address customer needs across different communication channels.
We’re very excited about this newest partnership and can’t wait to see how your CX flourishes with Nexmo and HelpSocial.
