On your mobile phone, it’s a constant game of tap or scroll. For every message, it’s a quick decision of “Is it worth my time to read and click?” or “Should I just scroll?” So, what can a brand do to make its communications more “tapworthy”?

Mobile consumers increasingly want brand engagement – questions answered, offers made, goods bought – in real time and in sync with their personal experiences and habits. As a result, more than ever before, brands need to be able to anticipate their customer’s situational needs to remain competitive. Syniverse data integrations and event-triggered campaigns enable brands to send these contextually aware messages.

In Syniverse’s latest work in this area, we’ve seen the emergence of intelligent messaging as a solution able to handle the challenges above and one that will play a particularly crucial role in the next few years. In a nutshell, intelligent messaging relies on event-triggered messages, situational context, data and automation to achieve in-the-moment relevancy. It measures and draws on behavior patterns, preferences, and other data sources to continuously improve the customer experience, and at the same time enable brands to automate a large part of their mobile communication optimization efforts.

We’ve seen the brands that harness the power of intelligent messaging stand out from the rest, and this was demonstrated in a recent pilot program that Syniverse helped launch in partnership with City Tech Collaborative, Mastercard, the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) and ideas42. The program allowed train commuters on the Red Line north from downtown Chicago to voluntarily sign up for text alerts that informed them of heavier-than-normal CTA crowds whenever there were night games at Wrigley Field.

Red Line ridership is highest between 5 and 6 p.m. on weeknights, and on top of that, Cubs games, which start around 7 p.m., add to the rush. With these factors, the goal of the intelligent communications program was to improve rider experience during this time by sending messages to riders about less crowded travel periods on the Red Line in time for their commute.

The program succeeded in drawing more than 2,000 CTA commuters to sign up to receive text alerts, which were sent at 3 p.m. on game days and delivered through a mobile engagement platform provided by Syniverse. In the end, the contextual text alerts resulted in average participant ridership dropping 17.5 percent between 5 and 6 p.m. and shifting to adjacent hours.

Following the success of this pilot and other customer campaigns we’ve been involved in recently, we’ve received increasing interest in ways that intelligent messaging solutions can be integrated into a brand’s mobile strategy to transform the customer experience into a meaningful, real-time interaction. To help brands embrace this new age of relevancy, we’ve boiled down several of our top guiding principles and best practices below.

Intelligent Messaging Best Practices

• Drive hyper-relevant interactions – It’s critical to keep the focus on leveraging mobile activity and event-based data to deliver a meaningful message that will get your customers to act.
• Optimize channel and send time – Use a platform that is able to automatically decide the best channel and time of day to send a message based on the recipient’s preferences and past responses.
• Be secure and compliant – Privacy laws and cybersecurity regulations have become increasingly extensive and complex. For this reason, it’s vital to implement multi-factor authentication as well as automated validation of compliance and consent.
• Define success and measure it accurately – Make sure the platform is capturing the right data to track KPIs and clearly present the insights that will drive growth.
• Get expert guidance – Beyond implementing the best technology, one of the most important steps to achieve goals is partnering with experts familiar with an industry to advise, plan and continuously adapt the strategy and tactics. As a specialist in mobile for over 30 years and creator of an extensive portfolio of messaging and engagement services, Syniverse can serve as this partner.

Today’s mobile consumers have gained – and come to expect – the capability to interact with their favorite brands in personalized and instant ways. Consumers want to feel they matter to a brand, and brands must be able to deliver on those expectations.

Intelligent messaging marks an exciting new chapter in the evolution of mobile engagement and the customer experience. Syniverse will be right in the center of it because we love to help our customers find new ways to enhance relationships with their customers in new ways. We look forward to sharing more intelligent messaging insights and best practices with you here on Synergy.

Craig Winter

Craig Winter is Senior Product Management Director at Syniverse.