Maximize Customer Engagement With Anvil Pro’s Messenger Feature
8/22/2024Staying competitive in today’s digital dealership landscape means engaging and interacting with more customers in innovative ways. Traditional means of customer communication – using separate email accounts and cell phones for outreach – are being replaced by centralized communication platforms that provide greater flexibility, recording past interactions and allowing all team members to stay in contact with customers and prospects from one location.
To these ends, we created Messenger, an essential feature of the Anvil Pro Dealer CRM solution that enhances dealer-to-customer communication by enabling seamless MMS and SMS texting directly from within Anvil Pro. Using a robust API built on Twilio, an industry-leading cloud engagement platform, Messenger helps your team meet customers where they are, enhancing the overall experience and driving deeper connections.
Let’s examine how some of the Messenger features within Anvil Pro align with these crucial communications objectives.
Centralize customer interactions within Anvil Pro
The most prominent benefit of the Messenger feature is its centralized communication workspace. Because it is integrated directly within the Dealer CRM – but accessible from anywhere within the Anvil Pro platform – any employee can use the feature to send, view, and respond with text messages to customers and prospects.
Send messages from a single business number
Messenger allows dealerships to choose a dedicated phone number (or one among multiple preferred numbers) for all text messages sent to customers or prospects. This means that regardless of who is sending a message from within the app, the dealership’s business or department phone number will appear as the sender on the recipient’s phone, allowing teams to maintain a more professional impression.
While this might not seem revolutionary, when you consider the implications for an employee sending messages from their personal phone in the field or outside of work hours, you can start to see just how powerful this capability can be to enhance engagement and stay in contact.
For instance, if a sales rep has been in contact with a prospective customer about a specific piece of equipment but is currently out of the office on sick leave or vacation, your team can still maintain contact several ways:
- The original sales rep can view customer messages directly on their mobile device through the Messenger feature and send text messages using the dealership’s number.
- A different sales rep can view the texts from a specific contact and reply on their mobile device with the same dealership number.
- Employees working in the dealership office can access Messenger and maintain communication with the customer from any computer or device where Anvil Pro is being used.
Centralizing customer engagement ensures there are no lapses in communication, leading to higher satisfaction and loyalty rates and decreasing the chances that the customer will simply reach out to another dealership while waiting hours or days for a reply.
Use the “Outreaches” feature for increased campaign effectiveness
In addition to sending texts manually to individual customers, with Messenger you can automate messaging to broaden the scope, cadence, and overall efficacy of your outbound outreach efforts. The “Outreaches” feature allows you to schedule sophisticated and self-sustaining text messaging campaigns using flexible parameters and inputs you can create and revise.
Let’s say your sales team wants to send a text message to every dealership visitor within the last 15 days without a completed quote associated with their account. You can set up an Outreach to run once a week (on a given day) to a segment of customers that meet that criteria. Every time you prepare to send the Outreach again, Messenger’s smart list-building technology automatically filters to include only those customers who still fall into the set criteria and sends messages to this selected group.
You can then include dynamic information about the specific account by personalizing the message to include the customer’s name, date of the visit, etc. Because this automation allows you to “set it and forget it” (within reason), employees only have to set up the outreach and conditions once, and Messenger does the rest.
Additional dealership benefits of adopting a best-in-class customer messaging platform
There are a few third-party software options out there that bring texting capability to dealership operations, and most sales enablement platforms for dealerships select one preferred vendor to integrate with. But most of these systems fall short in capturing the full potential of each customer interaction. By integrating with Twilio, one of the most comprehensive messaging platforms out there, Anvil Pro enhances dealer communication with advanced text messaging capabilities.
The following are some of the advantages of adding Anvil Messenger to your dealership’s technology toolkit.
Easy to configure, easy to use
Installing and configuring new software can be a real pain for dealership employees. Fortunately, the Messenger feature is a fairly easy lift and can be configured by anyone with administrator access to Anvil Pro. After creating an account with Twilio and registering your selected phone numbers, you can connect your account with Anvil Pro’s platform. And once you’re set up, Messenger is a breeze to use within any Solution or view within Anvil Pro.
Provide superior customer service over your competitors
Are your competitors beating you at the engagement game? By meeting your customers where they are via the power of MMS and SMS text messages (which have an average open rate of 98%, compared to roughly 20% with email), you ensure all your communications are seen and acted upon, boosting customer interactions and response rates and enhancing the overall customer experience.
Improve response rates to and from customers
Eliminate the need to relay messages from individual employees to the team or to switch between different messaging applications. A streamlined approach allows you to respond faster and ensure that no message is missed. Likewise, responding quickly to customers fosters trust and encourages them to further the discussion, leading to increased sales and higher turn rates.
Track communications history to increase sales opportunities
Anvil Pro’s Messenger feature organizes all past customer interactions by integrating texts (along with phone calls and emails) within the Dealer CRM. With enhanced visibility of historical outreach efforts, you can increase engagement rates to drive more sales opportunities and close deals faster. And in the long term, having a comprehensive view of customer engagements helps you better understand and meet the needs of your customers.
Expand outreach coverage and engage more prospects
Because Anvil Pro integrates with your inventory and quote systems, all your communications are automatically logged into the record for that customer, quote, or deal. After adding Messenger, sales reps will have access to more detailed insights needed to tailor their communications to different segments based on purchase history, indicated preferences, and other relevant data. And with the ability to text on the go, sales teams can expand their coverage to position their dealership as the reliable option among their competitors.
"If they text you and give you a heads up that I'll be in the area this time and we should hook up and like look at some of this stuff, such as some numbers on a tractor, look at some tillage equipment and then they know what's on the lot...If you shoot a text message to a guy, I know they can kind of get overlooked for a while, but at least you got that bug in their ear."-Quentin Connealy, Independent Farmer, on the usefulness of texting to communicate between farmers and dealers
Enhanced customer communication is just the beginning of Anvil Pro’s capabilities
If you are looking for a dealer intelligence platform that brings a measurable return on investment for your business, look no further than Anvil Pro. By integrating with your internal and external systems and connecting all your customer, quote, and inventory data in one place, you have the power to optimize and streamline nearly every process of your operations. Learn more about how connecting business systems and adopting sales enablement can bring real value to your dealership.
For complete visibility, centralized management, efficient team collaboration, and maximum customer engagement, Anvil Pro is the clear choice for dealerships of any size. Learn more by booking a demo today.