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Comment by wewtyflakes | Hacker News Reader

Much of what you mention in your post seemed spammy; messaging regarding cart abandonment, etc. I aggressively label messages like that as spam, and I suspect others do too. I also suspect after blasting out messages like that, your accounts will get burned.

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We work with our customers to make those messages consent-based and feel non-spam.

To be clear, no matter how it is phrased I’m going to report any kind of “you left this message in your cart” message as spam.

Could you elaborate? What does that mean in practice?

So far what I’ve seen from your service seems to be yet another attempt at blurring the distinction between bots and human interactions, which is generally used for spammy content

We're working to bridge the interaction between humans and bots so that automated conversations feel more natural and comfortable for the end user. In circumstances where the user can't reach an actual human (e.g. off hours support), they're often faced with bots over SMS/RCS that feel non-conversational and therefore can't support them in the right way due to interface. We're working on building agents that can more comfortably interact with users during those situations.

What about RCS/SMS is the "wrong" way of helping the customer?

It's not the "wrong" way, it's just different. iMessage works well for businesses that want to create a conversational experience in their customer service that conveys care and attention

I am sorry. Can one not a conversational experience using RCS? What, in specific, does iMessage do that RCS does not which prevents RCS from having a conversational experience?

I suspect you are actually implying something different than conversational experience or using it as a substitute for a completely different concept.

This impersonates a person on a platform which has generally prevented that... so people will be more likely to have a conversation, as they don't expect it to be a bot. The fact that they'll have to rotate out iMessage accounts so the message history will kill any possible gain from the deception.

What I don't understand is why a business would want to bifurcate their messaging stack... this is a solution that only works for half of their customers... for a business that doesn't have an app.

So… You’re trying to hide spam by making it seem like human interaction.

That doesn’t address the actual issue with these messages… which is that they’re still spam, regardless how you try and dress them up.

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