SMS Marketing
RGM° · Training
Conversational SMS and AI
Emerging discipline. Use cases, platforms, design, HITL, compliance, measurement.
Why conversational SMS
Conversational SMS uses AI agents to handle inbound replies, complete purchases, answer questions, and recover carts. Higher conversion and customer satisfaction than one-way broadcasts. Emerging discipline; mature programs piloting now.
Use cases
- Cart abandonment with conversational recovery.
- Product Q&A via SMS.
- Order status inquiries.
- Customer support routing.
- Survey completion.
- Personalized recommendations.
- Reservation / appointment booking.
- Attentive AI conversational features.
- Postscript AI.
- Klaviyo conversational features (emerging).
- Custom-built on OpenAI / Anthropic + Twilio.
- Specialized: Voxie, Yotpo SMSBump conversational.
Design
- Use case scoped (not general chatbot).
- Fallback to human clear.
- Response time SLA (immediate ideal).
- Tone matching brand voice.
- Limitations communicated.
- Multi-turn conversation context.
HITL
- Escalation thresholds documented.
- Human review queue for edge cases.
- Live agent handoff capability.
- Approval for high-value transactions.
- Audit trail.
Compliance
- TCPA still applies.
- Disclosure of AI where required.
- Sensitive data handling.
- Records retention.
- Privacy compliance.
- Transactional vs marketing classification.
Measurement
- Conversation completion rate.
- Resolution without human escalation.
- Revenue from conversational SMS.
- Customer satisfaction.
- Time-to-resolution.
- Cost per conversation.
Advanced
- Use case piloting before scaling.
- Brand voice training.
- HITL escalation gates.
- Live agent handoff capability.
- Compliance review of AI handling.
- Customer satisfaction tracking.
- Annual conversational SMS strategy.
- Cross-channel coordination.
- Cost monitoring.
- Stakeholder education.
Mistakes
- General chatbot deployed; not use-case scoped.
- Fallback to human unclear.
- Brand voice not calibrated.
- HITL gates absent.
- Live agent handoff broken.
- Compliance review skipped.
- Customer satisfaction not measured.
- Cost monitoring absent.
- Annual strategy review skipped.
- Stakeholder education missing.
Checklist
- Use case scoped
- Brand voice calibrated
- HITL escalation gates
- Live agent handoff
- Compliance review of AI handling
- Customer satisfaction tracking
- Cost monitoring
- Cross-channel coordination
- Annual strategy review
- Stakeholder education
Sources and further reading
- Attentive AI documentation
- Postscript AI features
- Yotpo SMSBump conversational
- Voxie conversational SMS
- Twilio Conversations API
- RGM AI Agents for Marketing series
- RGM AI Marketing Tools series
- Anthropic conversational AI
- OpenAI Assistants API
- Marketing Brew conversational SMS coverage
- MMA conversational SMS guidelines
- Klaviyo conversational features
Part of the SMS Marketing series.