The One-Minute Rule: An AI Receptionist’s Ticking Clock for Texting

By Yaniv Masjedi, Chief Marketing Officer at Nextiva

While phone calling is still the most popular way customers reach out to a business, other methods are gaining popularity. One of them is texting. As Nextiva’s Customer Patience Benchmark survey found, “Some customers prefer the speed and informality of chat or text, while others require the detail and assurance of a phone call.”

For many businesses, texting with customers can still feel like an almost revolutionary shift. One-way texting has long been a norm. Organizations have used SMS (Short Message Service), MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) or RCS (Rich Communication Services) for marketing or reminders. But they’ve had no way to receive messages back, or no one to monitor and respond to replies.

Those days must end. In an era of unified communications, customers expect to be able to reach out across any platform at any time. That's especially true for younger people, who report that they’ve replaced more phone calls with texting.

Most businesses don’t have enough staff to handle all the phone calls coming in, let alone texts. That's why AI answering services are so important. As businesses adopt these technologies, they must recognize that voice agents to answer phones are only part of the solution -- literally. A high-quality AI receptionist will also respond to text messages.

The Speed Imperative

Those responses must come quickly. When customers opt to reach out in writing, their expectation of immediacy doesn’t diminish. In fact, it can intensify.

Our research found that when consumers text a business, nearly three-quarters (73%) expect a response within five minutes. More than a third (34%) expect it in less than one minute. The longer they wait, the more likely people are to move on to a competitor.

But being fast isn’t enough. That initial response must be the start of a conversation. A generic message -- like one saying that no one is available, so please wait -- won’t do. It’s the texting equivalent of putting someone on hold. In this era, that's the last thing any customer wants.

So when considering communications tools, organizations must look beyond which AI answering service can respond to texts. They must consider which tool responds to texts successfully.

Natural, Intuitive, and Knowledgeable

It starts with transparency. Just as an AI receptionist should introduce itself to a caller as an AI assistant, it should do the same by text. As I’ve explained previously, customers have made clear that this is a mandate. Some say that even if they already trusted a business, they would lose that trust if an agent did not acknowledge that it was AI.

Then, the answering service should immediately ask about the customer’s needs. My team designed XBert, our AI receptionist, to ask, “How may I help you today?” When a customer responds, the receptionist understands the language the person is using, including industry-specific lingo. It has no problem interpreting typos and misspellings.

A quality AI agent must have access to up-to-date basic information so it can fully answer frequently asked questions (FAQs). And it should know the right follow-up questions to ask. The goal is to take the customer as far as possible through to a solution up to a point in which a human agent is needed.

Then, it should either put the customer right through to an agent who takes over texting, or offer to have someone text or call within a certain time frame -- and pull through on that promise.

Beyond the Basics: Predictive Personalization

The best AI answering services go further. They might even know a great deal before the customer even gives details. If it’s a returning customer, the platform recognizes the number and immediately pulls up a complete record of the individual’s history with the brand.

That way, your AI receptionist knows the customer’s preferences and predicts their needs, offering solutions most likely to help. It can even adjust its own language, style, and other outputs to match how the customer likes to communicate.

All this takes precision. Customers want AI agents to be friendly, but not too friendly. They want the agent to seem somewhat like them, but not too similar. The best AI answering service will toe all these lines successfully, and adjust in real time to keep customers satisfied.

How can this be done? By opting for an AI receptionist built on the unified customer experience, harnessing the power of big data to transform the customer experience (CX). In seeking a tool that combines calls, texts, chat, and email and more, that's where to start.

As organizations move into this era,  the differentiator won’t be having a tool that texts back; it will be having a tool that texts back right. Organizations must make the change right away -- before time runs out.