Businesses today are always looking for effective ways to communicate with their customers. While emerging channels like Facebook Messenger, Apple Business Chat, and RCS messaging have each gained some traction as business communication tools, standard carrier SMS messaging remains a preferred choice for many customers (at least in the U.S.) and a scalable, personalized communication opportunity for many businesses.

To better leverage SMS and messaging capabilities, conversational analytics company Marchex recently acquired Sonar Technologies, a San Francisco-based firm focused on two-way text messaging between businesses and consumers. Sonar offers a platform for companies to engage with consumers via text messaging with the goal of increasing revenue and improving the customer experience.

Personal, two-way text messaging enables sales team to build engaging relationships with customers, says Matt Berman, CEO and founder with Sonar Technologies. This is especially true for considered purchases, such as buying a home, which require a more complex buying decision and potentially longer sales cycle. Sonar has found success in verticals such as real estate, automotive, insurance, consumer lending, e-learning, and other industries.

With SMS, Sonar can improve response rates, increase engagement, and convert sales. Using a system to ingest conversational data and train the model, Sonar also offers AI-powered automation solutions that can augment a company’s sales and marketing staff.

Sonar has taken off-the-shelf Conversational AI tools and added a logic layer to help specific bots perform better. In combination with automation and chatbots, the platform can help qualify leads at the top of funnel, provide 24-7 coverage, and re-engage cold leads.

The acquisition expands Marchex’s conversational dataset, recognizing the opportunity to understand consumer intent and leverage artificial intelligence tools to deliver actionable insights across voice and text.

Opus Research firmly believes in the value of Conversational Intelligence, which applies NLP, Machine Learning and Conversional AI technologies to help employees and support systems accomplish targeted business outcomes. Businesses can aggregate and interpret conversational data to improve both employee and customer workflows.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles