Appointment Scheduler SMS Bot
Scheduling appointments is ubiquitous in almost every line of business and is a perfect use case for conversational assistants, maximizing your efficiency as well as ROI. Say goodbye to your receptionist and say hello to AI 👋🤖
Looking for an appointment scheduler bot for your business?
Among the plethora of messaging applications that we are so familiar with, SMS or Short Message Service still remains one of the most important communication channels that we use on a day-to-day basis. Being the preferred communication channel, nearly 80% of consumers say that they’re likely to have a positive perception of a company offering SMS, meaning they actually want to receive text messages from businesses. The communication method is so powerful that nearly 50% of individuals would consider taking action after receiving an SMS.
That being said, combining Conversational AI with SMS can prove to be an invaluable asset to your company. Using automation, we have the ability to send bulk SMSes reaching out to 1000s of customers at the blink of an eye. Adding Language Understanding and Intelligence into the mix now opens up the possibility of having meaningful text conversations with your customers at scale, on complete autopilot - optimizing time, budget and conversions.
The use-case : Scheduling Appointments
A study by texting Company ZipWhip revealed that appointment reminders are the most popular form of text that users would like to receive from brands. Around four out of five Generation X respondents said they’d prefer text over other channels for these reminders. This makes it a no-brainer to develop AI assistants that can automatically schedule appointments with your customers and send them follow-ups, in a seamless conversational interface.
"Human language is the new UI layer, bots are like new applications, and digital assistants are meta apps"
- Satya Nadella, CEO Microsoft
My role :
As the lead Chatbot Developer, I was responsible for managing the development and deployment of the SMS Conversational Agent from start to finish. I also monitored user data and continued to update and tweak the agent after deployment, ensuring the overall success of the application.
Features :
Schedule SMS Campaign
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Easily schedule and send SMS campaigns by uploading user contact list.
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Reach out proactively to leads who have consented to receive texts from your company.
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Send personalized text messages based on customer-specific data.
Schedule Appointments with interested Leads
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Let the SMS bot converse with qualified leads and automatically schedule appointments.
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Generate email notifications to support agents when a user schedules or reschedules their appointment.
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Sync all user data to your CRM or ERP, so it all stays in the loop.
Automate Reminders and follow-up texts
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Schedule follow-up sequences for leads who haven't responded, minimizing leaks in your SMS funnel.
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Send out timely reminders to users who have scheduled a call-back.
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Optimize conversions and increase show-up rate by being top-of-mind with your customers.
Architecture :
The tools :
Results :
The result was a fully automated conversational appointment scheduler, that could be broadcast to thousands of consumers at once. The SMS bot is initiated when a new text campaign is scheduled and the outbound message is sent to the inbound leads. The messaging is centered around the Call-To-Action, in this case, scheduling appointments for the next hour.
Welcome Message :
The anatomy of good welcome message
1. Personalize the welcome message
2. Add context to your message
3. Focus on CTA (Call-To-Action)
Following the welcome message, users can either choose to schedule the call for the next hour or more likely, choose to schedule the call sometime later when they're free.
Users can always reschedule their appointment and the bot automatically syncs the data and notifies the agents of the updated scheduled date & time.
Once the call is scheduled, the bot sends the users timely notifications reminding them of their upcoming call.
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Finally, for unresponsive users, the bot schedules a 5 message follow-up sequence before unsubscribing them, to maximize abandoned chat recovery and engagement rate.
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To conclude, the SMS bot project as described above proved to be quite the successful strategy for the campaign managers. It completely automates the conversations and lead qualification with users and frees the agents to focus on the more important tasks for their business, cutting down costs while optimizing productivity and ROI.