How Botsplash and Twilio bring compliant communication to sales teams
Time to read: 4 minutes
Challenge
Botsplash wanted to make seller communications more effective by helping agents interact with consumers in the ways they actually want to be engaged.
Solution
Botsplash created an all-in-one platform that incorporates messaging channels into one dashboard so its clients can engage with their end consumers from one place.
For those with the privilege of owning property, the mortgage process is high on the “most stressful life moments in life” list. While purchasing a home is a big accomplishment, the experience can be a real pain in the white picket fence for every party involved. The most common issue? Poor communication.
You would think that mortgage lenders would have a better way to communicate with realtors and borrowers throughout this complicated process. To be fair, it’s not easy to stay on top of every call, text, and email that comes in, or to gracefully handle customer questions and convert them post-loan.
If there only was a simple way to manage it all…
Enter Botsplash, a B2B2C omnichannel customer engagement platform that combines messaging channels such as SMS, web chat, WhatsApp, and more into one unified SaaS-based dashboard. While the concept was born from CEO and founder Aru Anavekar’s experience working in the mortgage industry, today Botsplash serves customers in insurance, automotive, real estate, solar, and more.
Together with Twilio, they are redefining enterprise communication strategies by taking a human-first approach to automation, helping sellers work smarter and buyers feel satisfied and well served.
Solving dual dilemmas
According to Anavekar, there is a gap between consumer expectations and what sellers understand about their customers.
“I was already at a place where I enjoyed text more than phone calls,” says Anavekar. “My personal expectation was that someone should text me and not keep calling. There were times when I'd be completely free and still not pick up that call.”
For buyers, it’s a who’s-who situation. Who is contacting me? How many different sellers are attempting to reach out? And more prevalent every day: How do I know if this is a real human or not?
For the seller’s dilemma, it all comes down to when and how to contact customers. While many tech-savvy consumers prefer texting, many businesses are not equipped to manage SMS at scale. Sales agents must resort to using their personal smartphones to reach out and engage with clients.
Seeing the clear compliance issues this posed, Anavekar knew there was a need for an easy-to-use omnichannel conversation platform that allowed agents to create meaningful connections with customers, ultimately increasing leads, conversions, revenue, and trust. And the stakes are high. If a company continues to ignore regulations around number registration and time and content requirements, their earnings and reputation could be destroyed with a single lawsuit.
“Some of our clients were hesitant to explore anything SMS-based because they didn't know if it was compliant,” Anavekar recalls. “With Botsplash, we manage the phone numbers for them. We look at proximity. If someone unsubscribes, we don’t just pick another random number to message. They get all of those compliance measures from us.”
“(Prior to Botsplash), some of our clients either didn't have a platform or their agents were using their personal cell phones – and not compliantly – without their employers knowing, because they knew consumers loved texting.”
Clean, compatible, compliant APIs
Botsplash is a leading provider of conversational chatbot and messaging solutions. The platform's highly customizable dashboard provides real-time analytics and reporting. It allows businesses to track chatbot performance and customer engagement and tailor responses and messaging to specific brand and industry needs.
From day one, Botsplash chose to partner with Twilio because of its reliability, highly-efficient customer service, early support of MMS, and best-in-class APIs. “(Twilio) APIs are the best among the providers out there. They’re clean and backwards-compatible. That rated very high for us,” Anavekar says.
In fact, it was Twilio’s tech documentation that first excited the Botsplash CEO, since she comes from a strong technology background. “We work mainly with mid- to large-scale, enterprise-level clients, so we are built for solving more complex journeys,” Anavekar says. “Having a reliable platform helps implement all those use cases.”
Botsplash recently introduced extended Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) hours because certain states prohibit sending a message on weekends and federal holidays. Giving clients tools to help reduce their risk while making sure their conversions are not impacted is very important. With a bad system, hard-earned revenues can be wiped out with one lawsuit.
Today, Botsplash uses Twilio solutions for SMS, MMS, and voice call forwarding, but is looking into new compliant messaging strategies to continue improving buyer and seller communication.
“Most people think if you're an SMS or Chatbot offering, you're looking to serve the support side post-sales. But for us, it's to drive more traffic, generate more leads, and of course convert more customers.”
A human-first approach to AI
While AI technology may feel brand new, the name Botsplash was coined in 2017 with generative AI in mind. But according to Anavekar, no one wanted to hear about it back then.
“(Businesses) thought AI was a fad that would never come to reality,” she explains. “We had our language models, which we tweaked for about 9 months before putting them to rest. We had to sell what customers wanted to buy.”
Then in August of 2022, Botsplash started implementing AI for lead distribution, predictions, and better conversions. Austin Miles, Director of Marketing at Botsplash, says the impact is clear.
“It's definitely helping reduce agent burnout, removing repetitive tasks so they can concentrate on things that are most efficient,” Miles states. “It also boosts conversions because those customers are getting attended to directly.”
How else does Botsplash use AI technology to improve the agent experience? One way is with Blurb, their conversation summary tool that quickly generates summaries so agents don’t have to sift through old transcripts and notes. Another is Suggested Responses. If the agent needs help asking the next question, the system can prompt them with some questions.
And that’s not all. Knowledge Based Chat crawls websites to gather data and train itself to provide more relevant and accurate responses without agent intervention, and Sentiment Analysis analyzes a conversation and figures out if it's something that should be escalated over to a live agent, or if it's something that AI can continue talking to based on if it's a positive or negative sentiment within that conversation.
“A big differentiator for us is that we combine AI-powered chatbots with live agent interaction. The combo delivers exceptional customer service and makes everything more efficient.”
Calming the chaos of communication
The future is getting very efficient—but Botsplash is taking a pragmatic approach to what lies ahead by letting real interactions guide when and how to use automation.
“AI is not going to solve the need for a good CRM,” says Anavekar. “But any place where we don't need agent involvement, or where our clients’ customers say they don't need to talk to an agent or want self-help tools—that’s where we'll be pushing more for AI.”
While AI is surely improving and simplifying complex engagement journeys, it would be all for naught without a solid, reliable foundation to innovate upon. Twilio’s global network of Tier 1 carriers, real-time routing, and exceptional delivery insights combined with Botsplash’s user-friendly, unified SaaS-based dashboard, provides the trust businesses need to get on board with the next era of unique and personalized customer engagement.
