How to leverage SMS Automation using Chatbots and Keywords with Askneo
Here is a demo of what makes Neo so unique: SMS automation 🤖 After customizing their brand avatar (SMS chatbot) and leveraging SMS keywords, our customers asked if they could build entire scripts with multiple choices through texting 🤷♂️ So here is a video showing how to do just that 😎 Now any Neo customer can build SMS scripts with multiple choices in minutes to direct their audience to the right place and still be able to respond manually later 😇 And we’re just getting started! Stay tuned for more automation by SMS 🚀 Text “NEO” to (917) 451-5515 to see a demo and get your free trial 🙋
Launching Neo on iOs + Android
Today we’re launching Neo on iOs and Android! After voting on the next product update, a large majority of Neo users required a mobile app to help them answer customers on the go and never have to wait again to close deals by SMS. Neo is the no-code solution to personalize customer engagement through texting. Neo’s SMS platform is extremely simple and user-friendly: it unifies SMS marketing, sales and customer success in simple conversation threads. With the mobile apps, Neo customers can now manage customers by SMS from the palm of their hands. They receive push notifications that alerts them in real time when customers text, and answer right away to close deals. The Neo mobile apps help eCommerce business owners relax and increase their revenue faster. The Neo mobile apps work on every device, such as iOs and Android smartphones and tablets. Enjoy! How to download the Neo app? • Get an invite to Neo: Text NEO to (917) 451-5515 • Get Neo for iOs on the Appstore: https://apple.co/3qx7CMc • Get Neo for Android on the Playstore: https://bit.ly/3qCI68C
Launching AskNeo invites! 🥳
One year ago, in the midst of the first Covid lockdown, we quickly realized how much spam and irrelevant marketing we receive on a daily basis, and how terrible customer service had become. We were outraged by countless spam emails, unattended web chats, and hour-long waits on the phone. We decided to build our own tool to ensure personal customer engagement in the most human and authentic way possible, and that’s how Neo was born. Customers don’t mind getting messages as long as they include these three key elements: • Messages have to be relevant to customers in a personal way • Customers can reply easily, leading to a human-to-human conversation • The conversation leads to a result and/or resolution with zero friction Following these three principles, we decided to focus on two-way texting for small and medium businesses, and become the best conversational text messaging platform ever built for SMBs. Neo is the best way to personalize sales at scale, drive targeted marketing campaigns, and ensure customer success in the most efficient way. No more spam, no more unattended chat, no more wasting time. Neo empowers Founders and Marketers to connect with customers human-to-human and achieve 100x returns. Among them: 👩🏼⚕️ Sperling Dermatology achieved a record 250x ROI with Neo. 🧼 Iron Lion Soap’s packages got sold out in 10 minutes with Neo. 🏃 The Public Run Club successfully conducted a week-long coaching session with Neo. Today and hundreds of customer-led iterations later, we decided to switch Neo to invite-only, to build up the Neo Club and exchange best practices around human-to-human customer engagement. The goal is to keep focusing on quality for our customers. We’re beyond excited to launch the new Neo website with testimonials, tips and resources. And by switching Neo to invite-only, we’re giving another superpower to our early adopters: the ability to give invites and decide who should become the next members of the Neo club. So if you are looking for the most personal way to drive sales, marketing and customer success, join our movement by requesting access to Neo today, and help us make a difference by building a more authentic world! Text “NEO” to (917) 451-5515 to request access or visit askneo.io 🙂
How personalization can help you build massive customer trust.
Gen Y and Z are now representing the majority of the consumer market, and they want to feel special. How can small and medium businesses build trust with them? Personalizing the customer experience can be time consuming, so it’s crucial for SMBs to use the right tools and language. But what do Personalization and Trust really mean? Personalize*: to change or design (something) for a particular person. Trust*: assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something. In other words, changing or designing the experience around each customer can help you become a more reliable business. Let’s dive in with Eitan Katz, CMO of Sperling Dermatology and see how personalization helped him grow his business: “Lio Slama: In the 1 hour or 30 minutes after a customer abandons the cart, companies say “hey, I noticed you like the skincare products, so here’s 20% off if you purchase in the next two hours”. Just click and boom! Eitan Katz: Yeah, it’s something that a lot of other companies also intuitively know but they don’t necessarily do which is: the goal of a text message shouldn’t be to purchase. It’s not a great customer experience to me to get a text and then self-serve a purchase unless it’s really targeted. You want to ask the exact question that’s going to get someone to be excited and interested in texting you back! For us a really good question is: “which area are you looking to treat?” If someone is looking at our stuff, it means that there’s a part of their body that they’re frustrated with and they want to change and so when we asked them, that’s an emotional question that elicits a response so often. It’s a really powerful question. For other people, maybe if you’re a t-shirt store, your question is, what kind of t-shirt do you want to buy? It’s like a more specific question that elicits engagement to me. And again, if you’re not doing that, then a tool like Neo is less valuable because the point of Neo is to have a conversation. So if you’re just trying to get them to buy based on a trigger, there’s a bunch of tools out there that will integrate with Zapier and do that. But what takes it to the next level is when you turn Neo into this advisor. The way that I explained it to the people that I just hired is that Neo has to act as an advisor. It’s an advisor. So Lululemon has this new thing now where you can speak to an advisor and they help you pick out which is the right thing for you like “I really like this shirt. Are there other shirts similar to this that maybe I should try?” or “I’m looking for pants that’s good for commuting but also for warm weather” and it’s like if you were in the store talking to a salesperson and they have your full attention. To me, that’s the part where Neo shines and what that means is you need to ask a question or say the thing in the text that’s going to elicit a response, and that’s when you start building trust and really get to the core of what they want. And then you can sell them the product that they want and will have the highest satisfaction with. They’ll come back for more. By the way, almost every conversation that I had, whether it ended in a sale or not, I said: “I’m here anytime. If you have any questions, text me back” and who knows? I promise you in a month, someone’s going to text me and say: “Hey, I’m ready to buy” and that’s because they feel like they’re my friend now and they can text me. Another powerful thing is the segmentation, and the triggers and the automation, but don’t forget about the one-to-one, start the conversation, get them to converse with you. If you get them to converse, you’re way more likely than even if you send them a discount code to me because now you’re a friend, you’re not a business. It’s amazing.” — If you have any questions or feedback, text Neo to (917) 451-5515 or visit www.askneo.io Check out Sperling Dermatology here: https://www.sperlingdermatology.com (*Merriam-Webster dictionary)
How Texting Can Help You Build Trust With Customers
Wherever I’m traveling, I always initiate the conversation with strangers. Some of my friends even ask me to “go talk to these people” because they’re too shy to do it themselves. Building trust with strangers is not the best way to make new friends, it is the only way. 81 percent of consumers complain about the difficulty of communicating with businesses. So if you own a business, especially B2C, you are confronted with this question everyday: How do I build trust with prospects and customers? Treat your customers as if you were their friend What is a friend, a true friend? It’s someone you’ve already built trust with, someone you can contact anytime about anything and you know they’ll get back to you eventually. Be this true friend to your customers: allow them to contact you easily about anything, whether they are already customers or just prospecting. But be careful, you might quickly become overwhelmed, so make sure to… Manage expectations You don’t build trust with generations Y and Z the same way you built trust in the 90’s. Yet the younger generation hates calling. We cannot waste our time waiting on hold or worse, being transferred several times to different departments. The online chat you put on your website can also be very destructive: the expectation is that someone is going to answer instantly. But if you are a small business owner, most often than not, this little online chat window will actually redirect to an email. I won’t even get started with emails. It became so noisy and spammy, if you still think email is a good way to build a personal connection with your customers, please take a (long) vacation. What about online forms? They can be effective if you don’t have a ton of customers, but they only go one way, so not the best way to build rapport with customers. Whether you’re asking prospects to fill a form or create a profile, you are creating a serious barrier before lifting their hesitation. So how can you answer their questions if you don’t have any of their info? Here’s how to build trust with these generations of consumers… Understand the window of opportunity When we’re surfing the internet, we’re like strangers traveling the world. Our span of attention for a certain wonder or a certain product rarely exceeds a few seconds or minutes. That’s a really short window of opportunity. You need to seize the moment and capture the opportunity. Want to be their best friend? Answer instantly. Want to be their good friend? Answer within 24h. Want to be an acquaintance? Take more than 24h to answer their text. You don’t get married after a first date. But you can fall in love after a first date. Ok then, how to make them fall in love? Allow customers to text Displaying a phone number for prospects to text on your website and social media is the best way to initiate a conversation with strangers. Prospects don’t have to call or register to anything: they type their question on their phone, and boom! “Text us at this number” is great, but what happens next if you don’t have a battery of customer service reps at your service? Who’s going to instantly answer hundreds, thousands of people? You don’t need to hire more reps or outsource them overseas anymore: that’s where a dose of Artificial Intelligence can help you… Let a bot answer first A simple bot answering prospects and customers’ texts instantly can go a long way: it alleviates the stress of consumers wondering “will anyone read my message?” and removes the feeling of being left behind. For you a small business, monitoring text messages within one dashboard makes it easy to answer customers in one click and collaborate with your small team. With the combination of a no-code SMS chatbot and ready-made dashboard, you can do it all by yourself without hiring more people. Alright but isn’t it ironic that we use a bot to create a personal connection with customers? Not if you do this… Make it personal every time Your bot is not here to replace you, it only helps you answer customers 24/7 and automatically recognize their phone numbers. If the number is not recognized when someone texts your business, it is most likely a new prospect. If the customer service software recognizes customers based on their phone number automatically, then bingo! It can greet them by sending a text back such as “hi Suzanne, how can I help today?” or “Thank you John for your message, I’ll get back to you asap”. Whether you’re already using a CRM or not, using an automated SMS CRM that can recognize people’s number automatically and greet people instantly is just next level. Now that’s a way to get personal! Excited? Great! Now go make a ton of friends! You don’t build trust in one day, but you surely need to start on day one. Making friends is simple: just show them you’re here for them no matter what. Allowing your customers to text your business is the best way to build a personal connection with them and produce customer success. It alleviates the stress of being left behind for them and the FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) for you. It aligns expectations so you work together and show how much you care on a deep personal level. Providing a service through texting customers will save you a ton of time and money as well, and will bring your business the peace of mind it needs to grow in the long term.
Neo 2.0 – Drive Sales Through Texting
• What is Neo and how is it going to change my life? Our mission is to help every purpose-driven business build their audience. Our vision is to foster trust between small businesses and their people. Neo helps you humanize sales by engaging with your audience through texting. The platform includes a customizable SMS chatbot to reflect your brand, a smart SMS CRM to save customers’ info automatically, and real-time conversation threads to send offers and answer customers’ questions all in one place. And if you invite staff members to collaborate on conversations, Neo turns into a shared inbox! • What’s new with Neo 2.0? – Pick your own phone number at checkout! – Larger plans available, up to 15k SMS/mo – Segment your SMS CRM by tagging customers – Send mass texts to one or more tags/segments – Track your usage and billing in real time • Why now? Between the restrictions due to the ongoing pandemic and the uncertainty related to the political climate, how does your business establish and maintain trust with customers? The way businesses behave is more scrutinized than ever before, and if you haven’t thought about it as a business owner yet, well this is the time. People are desperate to connect to their core values, in a direct and authentic way. So how can you build trust in 2020? How can you, as a startup or small business, bridge the gap between a hesitant audience and your value-prop? You need a sales channel that is cheap, direct, and scalable to compete with big brands. You want to open a direct line of communication with your audience at scale. Who do you usually text? Friends and family. So why can’t we text brands we like? And why can’t they answer us? Texting customers is not enough. You need to text with customers, because building trust is a two-way process. • Who’s Using Neo? Our customers share the need to find a direct-to-consumer line of communication with their audience that is cheap, reliable, and scalable. Neo provides them with an immediate, no-code solution that helps them grow. Most of our customers are tech-enabled startups and small businesses in marketing, web development, and wellness. • I have a question and/or I want 20% OFF! Super excited to get your questions, feedback, and to get you on board! Text us to try it out or ask for a coupon! (917) 451-5515
We’re #1 on Product Hunt!!
Yaaayy! Super excited to be featured in Product Hunt Daily Digest after becoming the #1 Product Hunt product on September 8, 2020. Read the full article below: Texting is the new email | Product Hunt Texting is the new email. 83% of millennials open SMS messages within 90 seconds of receiving them, according to an OpenMarket study. Yesterday, Lio Sl
SoHo Businesses use askneo.io to Connect to Customers
Super excited to be featured in SoHo Broadway Initiative this month to help small business owners drive even more sales than before COVID through texting with askneo.io. Read the full article here: http://sohobroadway.org/askneo-io-using-texting-to-help-businesses-connect-to-customers/
Techstars Demo Day
We had a blast pitching at the Techstars NYC Demo Day! Speaker: Lio Slama, CEO & Founder at SquarePlan Location: The Shed, Hudson Yards, New York NY. Date: Sept 27, 2019