Mobile Sales Tips | Connecting with Customers Using SMS & Customers.ai

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Below is a transcript of the Chatbot Marketing Training Course by Customers.ai and Isaac Rudansky, of Adventure Media. Get the full course here and become a messenger marketing master.

Howdy chatbot fans and welcome back.

In this lecture, I’m going to teach you step-by-step how to create a very, very powerful connection using Customers.ai and Zapier to send text message reminders to specific people based on certain things happening in Customers.ai.

Now this is really, really useful for any company that has agents in the field, plumbers, HVAC specialists, Internet service providers, nurses.

There’s just tons of people who are out and about throughout the day, and many of you are — have businesses that are like that, trucking companies, etc.

And it’s really useful to have a chatbot monitoring your leads and asking if anybody wants a call back.

And if somebody’s on Facebook Messenger and says, ‘sure, I’d like to get a call back within the next 30 minutes or I’d like to get a call back from one of your specialists’, you could then automatically have that person’s cell phone buzz with a notification that this person is requesting a call back.

Here’s their number, here’s their name, give them a call back within the next 30 minutes.

They get that on their phone, and they’re able to then service at least from wherever they are.

And all that back-office stuff, all the generating the leads, all the nurturing of the contacts is all happening through Facebook Messenger, thanks to your Customers.ai chatbots and chatbot flows that you’re building and thanks to connections.

And the connection I’m going to show you now, you could really take advantage and up your service game by getting notifications on-the-go with SMS.

So let’s go into Customers.ai and walk through this process step by step.

Here we are in our Customers.ai dashboard. And I created a page for a ‘request a call back’.

This is primitive, it’s straightforward. You guys might build it out in a more sophisticated, in a more fun way, but this does the trick especially for illustration purposes.

So the quick question. Widget starts off with a couple of fun emojis, of course.

Remember emojis work, they work really well, help increase engagement, ‘hey, first name, would you like one of our HVAC specialists to give you a call back within the next thirty minutes.’

And then I ask them — and then the response that they could — and then the response is, ‘Yes, please.’ You might have also a ‘No, thank you’ response, but again, this is just for illustration purposes.

And the next follow up quick question — and note, how this is not necessarily a form?

You don’t need to do everything based off of the form widget. ‘Sure thing, what’s the best number to reach you on?’

And I save that attribute as phone number and the input type is a phone number to make sure that — and the — and I save that attribute as a phone. And I select the input type as phone, so Customers.ai can verify that the user is actually sending back a phone number before they trigger this zap.

Now that I have this page set up as I want it to be setup, I’m just going to quickly delete myself as a contact, just to make sure that the test eventually works once we’re ready for that.

And we’re going to go now over to connections. And as you know, by now, we’re going to create a new connection.

It’s going to be a webhook, and we’re going to title our connection ‘SMS to, let’s say, Bob in the field’ because we’re going to have to send this to a specific person, to a specific phone number.

And you could add a description, we’re going to continuously send contact data from an audience.

I’m going to use all contacts for now for the sake of illustration.

You’re going to send this out based on when a specific widget is reached, or you’ll create an audience around people who requested a callback or around whatever specific goal you’re using to trigger this SMS notification.

Through Zapier now, we need to get our URL. So let’s go to zap your — and get our URL.

So we’re going to create a new zap. We’re going to name as net — we’re going to name the zap, ‘SMS Bob’, and we’re going to search again for Webhook by Zapier.

And we’re going to do a catch hook again, save and continue. Skip the next step, continue.

We’re — and we’re going to grab my URL copy to the clipboard, go back to Customers.ai, paste that URL in there and add a couple of attributes.

So we want to do first name, right? Add attribute, we want to do; last name; and we’re going to add phone number.

And we’re not going to add email because Bob doesn’t need to get the email, the person just requested a phone call back.

So we’re going to type an email, use that as the attribute. Wait for it to save.

Fantastic. Test the connection to make sure that URL that Zapier provided us is working as it should be working.

Test at test.com. Send the test, and success, right?

So we were working well. We could X this out, and now we know that the URL that Zapier provided us is working as it should be.

I’m going to toggle this connection to active. Remember that we need to do that in order to make sure that everything is working as it should be.

I’m going to go back to pages, go back to my request a callback form.

And before I test the page — remember, before you test the page, make sure that you click OK.

I did this. So Zapier is now told to actually look and be on the lookout for information coming into the webhook

So I’m going to click OK. I did this.

If I get the spinning wheel now. I can go back to Customers.ai and I could test this page and open up Messenger to see how this all plays out.

‘Hey, Isaac would you like one of our HVAC specialists to call you back within the next 30 minutes’, ‘yes, please’, ‘Sure thing, what’s the best number to reach you on?’

And I’m going to put in a number. Let’s just call it 218 777 6666, that’s my number, that’s the number I want to call back on.

And now that process is complete, I don’t have in my chat flow anything following up past that.

But that’s okay, obviously, we would have a thank you or be on the lookout or so on and so forth, exactly how you would set up your customer service flow.

But let’s go to Zapier. And test successful, fantastic.

Now we’re going to go ahead and click continue.

And we need to set up our action. So we’re going to search for SMS, and we’re going to use a service from Zapier called ‘Zapier SMS’.

And if we scroll down this list, we will find it, right over here ‘SMS by Zapier’, okay?

So select that action trigger. So click Save and continue.

And we’re going to need to connect an SMS by Zapier account. So click connect and I’m going to have to authenticate this.

So we’re going to send who’s number are we sending it to, so we want to send this to Bob.

But I need to actually connect this in real life so I’m going to put my phone number here.

So I put in my cell phone number, and I’m going to choose to confirm through SMS.

And I’m going to have them send me a pin. And I’m going to go check my phone, I have my pin, it is 6027436602743. Click continue.

And I got a test message from Zapier, and it looks like it’s working.

So now I’m going to click save and continue. And we’re going to set up our template based on the information that was just sent to the hook.

So under from number, we’ll just choose random. Because it doesn’t matter — It doesn’t matter to the sales representative in the field — the from number that this text message is coming from doesn’t matter, but the message is important.

So we’ll be like, ‘Hey, Bobby, we just got a new callback request from a prospective customer. Here’s their information name.’

And now I’m going to be able to add in some dynamic variables; and put a name, last name, up here will be first name, last name and phone number. And phone number will be phone number.

And that’s the phone number I put it in, 776666.

Fantastic. Now let’s go ahead and click continue. So it shows me a sample of the message that it’s going to send it right over here.

So now I could click ‘send text to SMS’ by Zapier, but I’m a little concerned that this might have too many characters for some phones for a text message.

So I’m just going to go back to edit my template and I’m going to be like — take out their information unnecessary, take out number. And I’ll — just take out first — we’ll just be – first, last, all right?

This should be fine.

Continue, retest this step, send test to ‘SMS by Zapier’. I should get a buzz and I do.

Look at this beautiful, ‘Hey, Bobbi, we just got a new call back request from a prospective customer. First name, phone number, last name’ could be –Could all the students see that?

It’s amazing guys.

This is really powerful stuff just by having a Zapier account, by being good at Customers.ai, by knowing what you’re doing.

We’ve now created a step-by-step zap that when a specific form or quick question or bot flow is completed and members are added to a certain audience in the Customers.ai, a text message goes out to whoever you want it to go out to.

And you could create multiple, you could have Bobby’s flow, you can have different flows for different sales reps and have their numbers and create multiple zaps.

There’s nothing wrong going to have many, many, many zaps going out to all different.

And you could send out the same message to five different salespeople who are in the field, or five different representatives, or people internally at your company.

This is a useful zap for myself.

Sometimes we get a leader — I get a specific information request from Facebook or from whatever it is and I’m not on my computer, it will be great to get a specific text message to my phone, letting me know what’s going on and that somebody is requesting a callback.

So in order to make this app active, we’re just going to go ahead and click finish and we’re going to toggle this app on. And you’re done.

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