There has been a dramatic change in the way brands and customers have been interacting over the past few years. With everything going digital, consumers are increasingly opting for ways to communicate that are accessible, simpler and faster. Similarly, brands are looking for opportunities that will elevate different forms of customer engagement.

Marketers no longer want to conform to the conventional forms of marketing and are always on the lookout for newer opportunities to engage with its users. After social media marketing, the shift has been to a more direct form of marketing through messaging. The shift has been gradual but now has acquired momentum with the emergence of OTT apps like WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, WeChat and more.

Chatbots as transforming customer experiences:

A chatbot is a service, fuelled by both rules and artificial intelligence. End users converse with a chatbot using a chat interface. This chat is similar to how they would talk to people in real life.

Below are the four ways chatbots are going to transform marketing and how brands are going to capitalize on this:

1. Improved engagement with customers: Engagement in online advertising is defined by clicks, likes, shares and comment. The parameters of engagement therefore remain restricted. With chatbots coming into play, customers can deep dive into real-time conversations which enables them to have an interactive experience and a better understanding of the brand when compared to the traditional form of advertising.
2. Feedback directly from users: The best practices of collecting customer feedback has been through surveys and emailer. However, the problem lies not in the amount of feedback collected but the usefulness of it. With chatbots, brands will be in a position to engage in a highly personal and interest-based conversations with the customer. This will result in collecting constructive feedback.

Trending Articles on Chatbot Marketing:

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3. Personalized customer experiences: Brands are always looking for ways to engage with its customers. Interactions that are appealing enough to trigger responses and targeted based on their interests. With Chatbots, brands will be able to make the most out of it. Brands can filter their interests through a series of quick question and suggests relevant solutions over a short span of time to the users- something that every customer seeks out for.

4. Build brand awareness: Brand awareness through online videos ads, banner ads and billboards have been the most common and now considered traditional forms of marketing. With chatbots, marketers can go beyond the conventional forms of marketing and introduce its brand colors, stories and more in the conversations.

How can chatbots built by Kirusa add value to your business?

Kirusa provides Kirusa Konnect™, an omnichannel Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) for enterprises that help bolster brand-customer engagement through chatbots available across RCS & OTT apps such as WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Viber, Websites and RCS.

Kirusa’s technology and connectivity to OTT messaging platforms and RCS providers and carriers, including Google, enables enterprises to build and deploy chatbots seamlessly.

Enterprises can use these chatbots to have conversations with their audience with rich media, natural language processing, and machine learning over OTT messaging apps, and the built-in Android messages app using RCS.

For more enquires, drop us an email at ipmessaging@kirusa.com

When APIs were first introduced to encapsulate business functionalities for internal end users, who would have thought that external users such as business owners, customers, or suppliers could also leverage its benefits?

Today we have the solution to integrate our web and mobile applications by working with third parties for their software.

For a long time, marketers have invested in call centers and telecallers to reach out to their customers. An elaborate system of call centers had emerged to cater to this marketing requirement of enterprises. However, now, marketers can do more with less, with the help of Voice APIs.

As per Twilio, a voice API is a tool for software developers to make and receive phone calls with a simple, easy to understand Application Protocol. Behind the scenes, a voice API bridges the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and applications connected to the internet. By using a voice API, software developers can program voice calling into their applications without specialized telecommunications knowledge and hardware.

Using a voice API enables developers to build call logic that extends to users on any device, over any network, anywhere in the world. It also allows developers to add full VoIP functionality to apps to make and receive calls over the internet alone, without interfacing with the PSTN.

Software developers can integrate outbound and inbound voice calling into their application without the pre-requisite of gaining specialized knowledge about how a call works.

You may adopt voice APIs for any of these five use-cases:-

Payment reminder

In the banking and Insurance world, payment reminders always need a touch of politeness and personalization. Sending on-time payments is a task for every business, but one should check their text’s tone before asking the customer for payment. They have to ensure that their customers do not get flustered. It is better to send automated reminders instead.

Reminders via outbound calls can be set up for users whose insurance premium fall, for example, within the 10th of each month, using the outbound call API.

Promotions

The digital space is oversaturated with millions of ads. According to Apifonica, viewers remember only 10% of the content when it is being read.

A smarter choice is to use inbound calling tools such as a ‘snap call’ to transform your marketing campaign. By telling a customer to leave a missed call on an assigned number, you can call back those customers with the desired information about a product and service.

Travel updat­es

Planning to go on a trip? Now you can receive travel updates via a phone call! You may receive automated calls to inform you that the time of flight departure has been postponed on the day of your journey. That is known as OBD (outbound dialler).

Pre-recorded messages/audio of choice

Outbound calls playing the desired audio content can be initiated for users who have subscribed to or interested in some category of audio/voice-based services.

Make use of voice API’s to explore IVR or interactive voice response. It is a method used by enterprises to create a dialogue between the enterprise and the customer by pre-recording a voice message without having to attend to each customer manually.

Are you planning to run a marketing campaign via Voice APIs?

In that case Konnect with Kirusa!

Kirusa Konnect is an enterprise suite composed of 10+ communication channels for enterprise needs. It is an all-in-one premium messaging toolbox for your enterprise needs.

Outbound dialers (OBD) from Konnect’s CPaaS portal enable brands to leverage the power of voice, delivered programmatically to their audience.

Brands can seamlessly launch voice communication campaigns to their audience, with just a few clicks — powered by Konnect’s CPaaS portal. Additionally, with advanced customization, reporting, and analytics, brands can fine-tune their campaigns to optimize marketing ROI.

The attention of your audience is worth every penny of billions of dollars. Communication in real-time can solve half of your business problems with the help of Konnect.

By harnessing the power of voice APIs, enterprises can deliver 24/7 customer support or send essential reminders and updates with easy-to-use Konnect APIs!

Enterprise marketing campaigns often suffer from myriad challenges of database management, campaign creation, and ease of delivery to consumers. Since mobile is a ubiquitous device nowadays, it is a moot point that businesses now have to market to their consumers through mobile as well.
Service providers are increasingly introducing new and improved ways for mobile engagement to leverage the power of mobile in launching and sustaining their marketing campaigns.
CPaaS, Communication Platform as a Service, is a cloud-based communication platform to bolster audience engagement over mobile channels. With no other platform allowing cloud architecture and integration with telcos to run two-way omnichannel communication over voice, data, and rich media tools, CPaaS is clearly emerging a winner in this segment.
CPaaS allows the provision of software to integrate with SME’s existing application through APIs.

To understand how businesses can transition into this collaboration, read how CPaaS can support you in running your marketing campaigns seamlessly:

An outbound dialer (OBD) can be used to generate bulk calls to a broader audience, thus improving outreach and connectivity.
Suppose a non-government organization (NGO) wants to promote the dangers of the Ebola virus in Africa, the benefits of using OBD are tremendous as it assists in campaign management.
One can send out pre-recorded messages to the citizens of the affected region with the help of OBD to maximize prevention.

IVR, also known as interactive voice response, is a service used for handling customer queries through IVR dialogue, without the intervention of the representative.
If you are not happy with your purchase, call customer care. Press the right button pertaining to your issue. You will hear a pre-recorded message which attempts to resolve your query by further directing you on how to proceed.

Empower customer interaction with SMS tagging!
As the name suggests, SMS tagging means that service providers can roll out product information in SMS campaigns. This appears as an addendum to transaction messages appearing in your phone.

SMS marketing is still making the headlines — with good reason. No other medium of delivery reaches out to the mobile handset of all your consumers at one go.
Sending messages to thousands of people using bulk SMS is a cost-effective solution for improving brand presence. Make the most of it!

Making a Snapcall helps a consumer to leave a missed call on a company’s advertised number, thereby expressing their interest in the firm’s goods and services. Companies love this tool!

Are you planning to run a marketing campaign?

Kirusa is a global leader in communication solutions for enterprises. Their offering, Kirusa Konnect is the best omnichannel communication platform for launching robust marketing campaigns over mobile channels. Enterprises can mix and match tools to create stellar marketing campaigns.

Kirusa’s approach to innovation in Africa is unique. It has promoted Kirusa Konnect for social awareness purposes to enable enterprises to build connectivity where it was not possible. Companies in Africa are thrilled with this enterprise suite and are making the most of it!

When you place your order on the restaurant iPad, you are asked whether you want to receive information about special offers through SMS. This is a way of ensuring customer loyalty so that restaurants can take instant action by sending offers and promotions while customers are still eating. The open rate of SMS is 98% and restaurants love how useful it is.

The practice of SMS marketing has been an essential part of business strategy. Sending SMS is only a matter of seconds. It is fast, reliable and safe. Furthermore, it provides a huge opportunity to increase sales. It allows you to increase the overall satisfaction rate by sending promotion alerts, discount coupons, contest alerts, important information and so on. But how do businesses use SMS?

By collecting consumer information, businesses can send hundreds or thousands of messages through SMS. The SMS messaging provider offers an SMS API gateway to ensure a hassle free experience for sending bulk SMS. An SMS API is the programming software that allows you to integrate with your existing applications to send bulk messages.

Kirusa, a global leader in communication solutions, offers SMS APIs for developers. This means that developers can run communication campaigns on the cloud-based CPaas portal, otherwise known as Kirusa Konnect by invoking the Konnect APIs.

The SMS gateway protocol links the application of one system with another. It provides a passage for enterprises to create their own messaging service with the help of a third-party offering extensive reach and connectivity. Sending messages will be extremely tedious and laborious without SMS integration, indeed. The way in which SMS API works is through easy integration with the help of technical documentation and last but not the least, reliability.

Enterprises’ two-way messaging format can be easily implemented. For example, the outbound API can be used to send a password to validate a user’s identity on his mobile. Other examples of outbound API include sending season greetings, announcements about offers and promotions, transaction summary and so on. The inbound API, on the other hand, can be used to receive customer feedback, trigger subscription to a service, enhance customer engagement and lead generation.

Kirusa Konnect allows the data analytics team to record real-time responses during the process of running a campaign on the Konnect dashboard. The enterprises can test whether the service is working smoothly by logging onto Konnect.

We are surrounded by APIs everywhere.

For example, consider this hypothetical situation. A cyclone strikes a city. With the help of outbound SMS API, the government can inform the citizens of the country and spread awareness.

After you are done with the billing at the cash counter, you receive a message saying ‘thank you for shopping with us’ or promotional texts. Malls like Walmart use APIs to integrate with their existing CRM system and send these messages.

Another example among many would be the banking sector. Banks send OTP authentication messages using the APIs to verify the customer’s identity.

We are convinced that we would not be living in the world of digitalization without APIs.

Want to order pizza on Zomato app?
Even a child can navigate the app as there is a clearly defined method for proceeding on the app platform. Zomato APIs give you access to a vast amount of information about restaurant menus, ambience, locations across 10,000 cities globally.

For example, I want to access the ratings for all the restaurants around me to help my friend start her own online food business. She also wants to upload her menu, photos, reviews, etc. In this case, the function of Zomato APIs is to display the relevant information to me, and also, display the relevant information about my friend’s restaurant to the Zomato customers. The work of an API is to create a link between the app and third-party vendors and customers who use Zomato.

Since 2010, usage of APIs has soared. APIs helped facilitate businesses like Amazon, and there has been no looking back ever since. The internet provides us with so much data. Most of the innovation has taken place due to the prevalence of available information on the web. Where is this data coming from? It is being accumulated from various sources and delivered to us via APIs. On social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, the APIs enable users to access information about their friends, recent updates, photos, birthdays, anniversaries, and so on. The advent of APIs have enabled these social media to be more engaging and user friendly.

How do consumers get so much information before making a purchase? It is given to us through the APIs facilitating us to source things from places afar, increasing our access to as many options as possible.

It is an exciting era.

The speed of innovation has increased rapidly since the beginning of the decade. In the coming decade, APIs will marry itself with the concept of Al. Developers can use APIs to build applications which are capable of performing purchase prediction, facial detection, text analysis, and so on.
As Tom Freston once said, “Innovation is taking two things that already exist and putting them together in a new way.” Allowing application development to become more flexible is a vital part of today’s entrepreneurial IT vision. APIs will be the de facto protocol used by developers in the coming years.
As artificial intelligence is the bright future, apps will need to cope up with the newest technologies that are being introduced with the help of API providers.