You don't know jack about SMS | Hacker News Reader

You don't know jack about SMS

bluepnume.medium.com

28 pointsbluepnume6 comments

Don't waste my time by forcing me into a conversation though. If I want to talk to someone, I have plenty of friends and family for that. If I'm interacting with a service, I know it and want it to be as efficient as possible. Don't force me to write messages and to guess what to write to achieve my goal.

If it's more efficient for me to have a link in the first text, I'd prefer it to be there. The advice to use the correct domain is good, I don't like it when I don't know where a link leads. And make it easy to copy it manually, I'm using a dumb phone currently and may prefer to do stuff from my laptop anyway. Easier to copy does not mean shorter, words are easier to read than random strings of character, but it helps.

Totally fair. But my goal would be to make it so you don't have to guess. If your response can't be automatically handled, it should fall back to a human who can do exactly what you need.

Take a cart recovery: If I send you a link, I'm just blindly assuming you forgot and your only objective is to complete your purchase.

But if I ask you a question, there's an opportunity for you to tell me one of the myriad of things you actually want. You may want to complete your purchase, or schedule it for another day, or check the delivery time first, or change what you ordered -- or even just opt out of texts.

The majority of your examples require either superb NLP + conversational AI, or a person individually texting/replying to every user.

> Q: Want us to send you some every month?

> A: That would be amazing

Even your subscription confirmation example would be really hard to process automatically. Error prone at best. It's why most text interactions ask for REPLY YES OR NO.

We've actually found a mixture of automatic replies, backed up by a human, is the way to go.

1. Do it manually

2. Automate the common cases

3. Goto 1

The other trick is to build good tools to make it stupid-simple for an agent to do the complicated part, like setting up a subscription or a scheduled order.

Are you text enabling businesses existing phone numbers, pushing businesses to go to a provider like Twilio, or porting out the main public facing number then call forwarding the number (and adding hundreds of milliseconds of latency to incoming calls) used for texting?

Also, any thoughts on The Campaign Registry and the recent changes they have made?

Honestly most brands so far are perfectly happy having a new number specifically for SMS.

Campaign registration and 10DLC stuff is annoying but not the end of the world. Honestly, we prefer doing real-time messaging based on user events rather than mass-campaigns, so it's less of a problem when you're spreading messages out that way.

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