Email, voice calling, webchat: today’s businesses need them all in order to stay connected with their customers.
The always-on modern world has seen a rapid and far-ranging evolution of the powerful, cloud-based technology upon which it all depends.
However, simple SMS is fast becoming the channel of choice — and smarter businesses are rightly putting it at the heart of their customer service strategy by deploying a communication platform as a service (CPaaS) that has messaging fully covered.
CPaaS provides an easy way for businesses to add new communication capabilities to existing applications without having to build those capabilities from scratch.
This can save businesses time and money, while also providing them with more flexibility in how they communicate with customers and employees.
In a recent survey, 85% of smartphone owners said they prefer texts to calls or emails — a reflection on how much we all look to our mobile phones to help us run pretty much every aspect of our lives.
Speed and convenience, it seems, are more important to us than pretty much anything else.
In the hospitality and travel sector — where those two imperatives are perhaps most at play — the ability to communicate smartly and effectively via SMS can be a potent differentiator.
Businesses that choose to partner with a provider that is on the same page are certain to capitalize.
“If you manage a travel or hospitality business, such as an airline, hotel, or homeshare, providing answers to travellers’ anxious questions — sometimes before they ask them — goes a long way toward improving their experience and elevating their satisfaction with your brand,” says Tony Graham, head of product marketing at leading global CPaaS provider Plivo.
“Nothing is better than text messaging to provide some comforting virtual hand-holding. By adding texting to your reservation system, you can keep in touch with customers at every stage of their journey.
“Travel businesses can let customers know that their transit is on time or that, for instance, a flight’s gate has changed. Hotels can provide helpful tips on things like where to park and when the in-house restaurant closes. Homesharers can text the code for a lockbox that contains the keys for their visitors’ home away from home. Restaurants can confirm reservations and remind patrons about table times when a dining date arrives. People much prefer all of those types of communication to come via SMS because their phone is always close by and access to them is easy.”
Via Plivo’s CPaaS, hospitality and travel businesses can also use automated voice and messaging to send promotional updates, provide alerts and notifications, enable reservation communications, facilitate travel and admission ticketing, and complete check-ins.
Later in the customer’s journey, they can share food and beverage coupons, inform homesharers when a property is ready, provide door entry security codes, and inform guests of unusual events, such as repairs.
Private information is securely protected via two-factor authentication and one-time passwords for web portal logins, lockbox codes, and other secure resources.
In another use case example, Plivo customer LAZ Parking, which manages parking properties on behalf of lot and garage owners, developed a system to send customers a payment link via SMS.
Patrick Ryan, vice president of innovation, says, “Each lot has a sign with a unique code. Customers text us the code, and we send the customer back a link they can use for that location. Using Plivo and using SMS gives customers an easy way to communicate with us.”
Brilliantly, it’s easy to add texting capabilities to organizations’ existing applications.
Plivo provides an SMS API that developers can call to send and track text messages. Texts go out over Plivo’s Premium Communications Network, a global network for reliable text delivery, and it offers a free trial for prospective new customers.
“If organizations are already familiar with using an SMS API from another vendor, they’ll find ours to be familiar and easy to use,” says Graham.
“Recent holiday travel chaos in the US highlights the need for texting as a channel of communication. With call centers and in-person customer service reps swamped, texts can provide gate change or departure updates and take some of the pressure off the other communications systems.
“We saw with certain airlines that they were unable to communicate with crews and notify them of assignments as their systems failed. Having a reliable cloud communications partner can help keep
alternate lines of messaging communication open, with limited effort or development time required.”
Learn more about how Plivo’s hospitality and travel API can help your business.
