An SMS Software that can Boost Customer Engagement

Every long weekend, entrepreneurs are persistently looking for more means to reach customers in today’s increasingly competitive marketplace. “How was weekend?” has transformed into “On-The-Go weekend.” Whether online or offline, buyers are always expected to engaged wherever they are. Because it is the most basic form of mobile marketing, texting may seem like a dated method of mobile communication to the fast-moving marketer. However, recent studies showed that texting drives significant customer engagement and return of investment for companies across United States.

The following are good ways to boost customer engagement

  • Sending Promotions: Disperse special weekend deals via text message, or promote special SMS codes in-store for next-visit discounts.
  • Create Contests: Build weekend cheer with SMS-based contests. With text-to-win offers, you’ll grow your lists while improving engagement across your entire existing customer base.
  • Encourage Charity: Support your company cause or a local charity through SMS. Also provide a common short code via your sales receipt for customers to text and donate a portion of their purchase to those in need.
  • Go Green: Eliminate paper receipt waste and promote and encourage customers to opt-in via short code to an eco-friendly record of their order or purchase.
  • Gently Remind: In the weekend hustle and bustle, even the most structured of customers may overlook an appointment or two. Use texting to remind your customers of important dates, appointments or meetings and eliminate costly cancellations.
  • Alert Quickly: Whether you are a financial institution protecting against fraud or a service provider with an important update, the ability to quickly alert your customers is vital to your business success. Alerts or calls exclusive of their phone ringing or vibrating, your customers are bound to read your alert in no time.

BroadcastBySMS – SMS software

BroadcastBySMS is a Voicent automated SMS software with two way interactive communications between the computer software and the person who receive the text message. It can be used to send customized messages to small or large groups. With this SMS software you can send group text messages in as few as 3 easy steps, then, automatically collect and process individual responses.

Text messages are immediate and personal, less intrusive than a call to a cell phone. That’s why texting has become the planet’s single most popular way to communicate—surpassing even telephone calls!

This SMS software is great for sending promotions, creating contest, promoting charity and alarming alerts that needs to be quickly delivered.  One of its key feature is interactive text messaging.  This capability, along with the message customization feature, allows the software to process text responses automatically. The second special feature is that Voicent SMS software does not require you to sign up with a SMS center. The software uses your own text plan from a cell phone company. It is the same as you sending out text messages from your cell phone.

 

Posted in SMS Usage |

An SMS Software that can Boost Customer Engagement

 

Every long weekend, entrepreneurs are persistently looking for more means to reach customers in today’s increasingly competitive marketplace. “How was weekend?” has transformed into “On-The-Go weekend.” Whether online or offline, buyers are always expected to engaged wherever they are. Because it is the most basic form of mobile marketing, texting may seem like a dated method of mobile communication to the fast-moving marketer. However, recent studies showed that texting drives significant customer engagement and return of investment for companies across United States.

The following are good ways to boost customer engagement

 

  • Sending Promotions: Disperse special weekend deals via text message, or promote special SMS codes in-store for next-visit discounts.
  • Create Contests: Build weekend cheer with SMS-based contests. With text-to-win offers, you’ll grow your lists while improving engagement across your entire existing customer base.
  • Encourage Charity: Support your company cause or a local charity through SMS. Also provide a common short code via your sales receipt for customers to text and donate a portion of their purchase to those in need.
  • Go Green: Eliminate paper receipt waste and promote and encourage customers to opt-in via short code to an eco-friendly record of their order or purchase.
  • Gently Remind: In the weekend hustle and bustle, even the most structured of customers may overlook an appointment or two. Use texting to remind your customers of important dates, appointments or meetings and eliminate costly cancellations.

 

  • Alert Quickly: Whether you are a financial institution protecting against fraud or a service provider with an important update, the ability to quickly alert your customers is vital to your business success. Alerts or calls exclusive of their phone ringing or vibrating, your customers are bound to read your alert in no time.

BroadcastBySMS – SMS software

BroadcastBySMS is a Voicent automated SMS software with two way interactive communications between the computer software and the person who receive the text message. It can be used to send customized messages to small or large groups. With this SMS software you can send group text messages in as few as 3 easy steps, then, automatically collect and process individual responses.

Text messages are immediate and personal, less intrusive than a call to a cell phone. That’s why texting has become the planet’s single most popular way to communicate—surpassing even telephone calls!

This SMS software is great for sending promotions, creating contest, promoting charity and alarming alerts that needs to be quickly delivered.  One of its key feature is interactive text messaging.  This capability, along with the message customization feature, allows the software to process text responses automatically. The second special feature is that Voicent SMS software does not require you to sign up with a SMS center. The software uses your own text plan from a cell phone company. It is the same as you sending out text messages from your cell phone.

 

Posted in SMS Usage |

SMS text message queue management

I want to develop a two way text messaging application for queue management. I have people that queue up for hours to do a certain activity on first come first serve basis. I want to get rid of the queue by having people SMS to the application. The application line them up on the basis the time the SMS was sent and how many people sent before it. The system will reply to the person by giving him or her the time and date he or she can come and do the activity. Thus removing the time spend in the queue which normally take several hours.

Answer:
Voicent BroadcastBySMS and IVR Studio have the capability to manage your text message for queue. This may require programming knowledge on your end. We do offer developer’s subscription to help you develop your own application. For detailed information, please see http://voicent.com/devnet/

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Designing custom messages in BroadcastBySMS

Is there a way in BroadcastBySMS to send more customized or specific to each person text messages?

BroadcastBySMS supports personalized text messaging to each of your contacts. Whether you want to include the contact’s name or some other specific information (such as money owed, specific discounts, address to go to, etc.) you can absolutely customize your broadcast with specific information for each contact. Here’s how.

Under “Broadcast” select “Message Designer” to get started. Here, you can customize your broadcast message however you like. In this example, for specific to each recipient information we will include the contact’s name and money owed to a fictional business. Additionally, we will include a response option where the contact will be able to respond with  ”paid” or  ”unpaid” depending on what the answer is.

In the Message Designer we will add some new message items, which will allow us to draw from the name column the contact’s name for each message. We will also include some normal text as a greeting and filler. Once you have selected Message Designer, you will need to click “new” then give a title your new message template. Then you will start adding message items for the actual text. These images will demonstrate:

To get the contact names in the message, simply select “Standard item” and click on “Contact Name.”

To get the money owed in there, we will need a new column for that. In the spreadsheet, you will go to “Edit” -> “Insert new column” and title it “owed” for this example. We will mark it as currency which will automatically mark numbers entered into this column as dollars.

Next, we specify this column to be entered into the message.

We will want to also fill in some text between these special items so that the message will make sense for our contacts, as in our example seen here.

Finally, we add some confirmation items by checking the confirmation box and adding two confirmation items. We will specify our own custom meaning as seen in these images.

Add another one just like that for “unpaid” and our message is just about set. Here is what the final message will look like in message designer:

Once we fill out our spreadsheet our message here will take care of the rest.

Our first message then will say: Hello Dave you currently owe $50.00 Please respond with “paid” if you have already paid or “unpaid” if the debt still owed

The second will say: Hello Mark you currently owe $25.75 Please respond with “paid” if you have already paid or “unpaid” if the debt still owed

Once sent, we can gather their feedback through “Broadcast” -> “Check Response”

The confirmation column shows us what they sent back, with Dave texting back “paid” and Mark sending back “unpaid” as his response.

This is just one small example of the customization options available to you with the built-in message designer in BroadcastBySMS. With custom columns you can personalize any aspect of your message using message designer.

Posted in SMS Usage |

Device capable of sending and receiving text message (SMS)

We often get questions about whether a particular device works with Voicent’s text marketing software (BroadcastBySMS). The first thing to check is obviously whether it can send and receive text messages. But how do we know whether it works with BroadcastBySMS?

To answer that question, here are the steps to check:

1. Get the device model and check online for its technical specification

2. Look for GSM standards that is supported by the device. For text message or SMS, the standard is GSM 07.05 Phase 2.

If it contains the above interface, it should work with Voicent software.

Posted in SMS Usage |

How to manually find the COM port being used by your USB modem

I’m having trouble getting the Gateway to find the COM port my USB modem is using, is there a way for me to find it manually?

Once you have your USB modem (with a SIM card inside) installed, it will show up in your computer as using a COM port. To find this information, go to the Control Panel, click “Hardware and Sound” then select “Device Manager” as shown by these images:

As the last image shows, our modem is using COM port 7. Now open the Voicent Gateway, click “Setup” select “Options” then go to the SMS tab.

As the images above show, select “Use the following” then click “Add” to bring up the window on the right. Select the COM port we found earlier and then restart the Gateway. Your modem is now connected and ready to use for SMS broadcasting.

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How to enable Auto-Detect COM port in the Voicent Gateway

I am using a USB modem with a SIM card installed that isn’t listed on your SMS setup wizard, how do I connect it to the Gateway?

The Voicent Gateway has a setting that will auto-detect the COM port being used by your USB modem for BroadcastBySMS. To find this setting, you will need to open up the Voicent Gateway, go to “Options” then go to the SMS tab. Select “Auto detect” and then restart the Gateway. If you see an SMS line started then your modem is connected to the Gateway.

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Call Center CRM: Dynamic Campaigns

The upcoming release (9.1.0) contains support for dynamic campaigns. Compared with normal campaigns, dynamic campaigns are Voicent CRM based outbound voice/sms/email campaigns that can be dynamically changed.

To start a dynamic campaign, follow these steps:

Step 1. Define call list

Open Voicent CRM, select Contact > Find Contact… from the program main menu. From the Quick Search dialog window, enter any criteria for the call list, such as a specific city name or area code.

Step 2. Start dynamic campaign

From the search result window, select Campaign > Start Campaign from the program main menu then select the type of campaign (predictive campaign, voice broadcast campaign, sms/text message campaign or email campaign) to run. The following is the SMS broadcast campaign window:

Make sure to choose “this is an dynamic campaign”.

Step 3. Choose the phone number column

In the CRM customer record, there are different fields for customer’s phone number, such as mobile phone, home phone, work phone, and other phone. You can choose the search order in the phone column window. Click OK to start the campaign.

To see all the current dynamic campaigns, select Campaign main menu, then select Show campaigns.

CRM campaign list

Add new contact to campaign

As opposed to a static campaign, dynamic campaigns will keep the campaign active even if it reaches the end of the call list. Once it reaches the end of the call list, a dynamic campaign will enter into a waiting mode. As soon as new customers are added to the CRM database, if the new customers satisfy the original search criteria, these customers will be added to the call list and the campaign will resume.

Everything described above will be executed automatically. So for example, when a new customer calls in, a new CRM record will be created automatically. This customer, if his or her record matches the campaign search criteria, will be automatically added to the dynamic campaign.

Add new contact using the web interface

You can also add new customers to a dynamic campaign using HTTP POST. This is a useful feature, for example, a call or email can be automatically triggered after a customer fills in a web-based “contact us” form. The following is the CRM update URL:

http://(gateway host name or ip address):8155/vxcrm.jsp

The required parameters are:

action: add
passwd: this is the CRM web password defined on Voicent Gateway
user: this is the customer ID if you are using Voicent hosted service, or 0

The rest of the parameters corresponds to the fields in Voicent CRM for customer table. They are:

first_name, middle_name, last_name, home_phone, work_phone, work_phone_ext, cell_phone, other_phone,
email, email2, fax, business, job_title, customer_catid, do_not_call, do_not_email

For custom fields, use cf_1, cf_2, …, cf_20

It is also possible to use the display name of the custom field. What you must do is to replace the space with underscore in the display name. For example, if you set the first custom field (cf_1) to “Age Group“, the you can set the parameter name as: Age_Group.

For the customer category, you can also use the display name. For example, instead of setting customer_catid to 3, you can set customer_catname to “Priority Customer“.

For address, use the following:

home_street, home_city, home_state, home_zipcode, home_country, work_street, work_city, work_state, work_zipcode, work_country.

Please note that adding a new customer to the CRM database may trigger multiple dynamic campaigns. As long as the new customer record satisfies the campaign call list search criteria, the new customer will be added to any current dynamic campaign where the customer fits the search criteria.

 

Posted in SMS Usage | Tagged , , ,

Alternative to short code

Short codes (also known as short numbers) are special telephone numbers, that can be used to receive incoming text messages (SMS messages). Short codes are easier to remember and are used for value-added services such as television program voting. Short code is normally linked to some back-end applications, such that when a customer text in with the word “info” or “stop”, more information will be text back to the customer or add the customer’s phone number to an opt-out list.

According to wikipedia, short codes can be leased at the rate of $1000 a month for a selected code or $500 for a random code. In addition to cost, short code are usually shared by a number of brands. In order to identify a particular brand or company, service providers may charge for these “keywords” or “service identifiers”. For example, an advertisement may state: text Morning News to 23456 to get daily news. The service identifier “morning news” is reserved for a particular news organization.

The good news is that with Voicent text message solution, you do not need short code. You simply use the the mobile number, the long code, that is associated with your mobile account. The reason Voicent can do that is that Voicent software uses your SIM card (with a SMS modem) directly, which is the same way your cell phone uses your text message service. Anyone can text your cell phone, ie. the device that contains your SIM card, without going through a short code.

Since you own the number, you do not need to get a service identifier either.

Best of all, you pay nothing more except your regular cell phone bill.

So how do you have your prospects opt-in to your newsletter?

Simply ask them to text [the number number] with [any keyword you choose].

Posted in SMS Usage |

T-Mobile SIM-Card does not work universally

Hi. I purchased Zoom modem model 4598. I bought it to work with Voicent BroadcastbyText through my T-Mobile SIM card. I tried it and it is not working, but it works if I use my AT-T SIM card. I thought it was because of the defected SIM card, but I replaced it twice at the T-Mobile store and still gave the same result. Help?

Zoom 4598 modem only supports frequency band of 850, 1900, and 2100MHz, while T-Mobile sends out data through frequency bands of 1700 and 2100 MHz. However, T-Mobile GSM card will still work depending on your location. If the location of your SIM card is near a cell tower that sends out 2100MHz, then you should be fine. But if you’re unlucky, there’s a chance that your T-Mobile card would not work as your location might be sending data through 1700MHz frequency band.

This information also holds true for AT-T 4G LTE technology. 4G LTE sends data through 700, 1700, and 2100MHz frequency band. Although, AT-T’s 2G and 3G GSM cards all well supported by Zoom 4598

Whatever card you have or location you are in, you should purchase a mobile broadband modem that supports the frequency bands that you are using. Hope this helps

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