Talking Text With Attentive

Speaker 1: Welcome to the In the Clouds podcast. In the Clouds is a marketing cloud podcast powered by Lev, the most influential marketing- focused Salesforce consultancy in the world. Lev is customer experience obsessed, and podcast hosts Bobby Tichy and Cole Fisher have partnered with some of the world's most well- known brands to help them master meaningful one- on- one connections with their customers. In this podcast, they'll combine strategy and deep technical expertise to share best practices, how- tos and real- life use cases and solutions for the world's top brands using Salesforce products today.

Bobby Tichy: Welcome to the In the Clouds podcast. This is Bobby Tichy and Cole Fisher. Cole, when do you start playing Christmas music?

Cole Fisher: I cannot play Christmas music until after Thanksgiving, although, admittedly, it's usually in my head before then, but I get really jacked up for it, as you know.

Bobby Tichy: So when you say you can't, does that mean you literally can't, like you go to push the Christmas song on your iPhone and your finger just won't let you hit play?

Cole Fisher: It's a no- go value. My brother and I used to... This was a thing in our family, as soon as Thanksgiving's over, Christmas tree's up, decorations are up. It's go time. But my brother has now with his seven year old boys, he's got Christmas up, like basically immediately after Halloween. So November 1st, it's basically Christmas. And then he keeps arguing that he gets twice as much Christmas now as anyone else, which I just think is poor lessons to be instilling in our youth if you ask me.

Bobby Tichy: Well, I can say it's a little early, but all I want for Christmas is text messaging and it's really good timing because we have Allison on from Attentive to talk us through the Attentive solution and the offering that they have. So Alison, first, thank you for joining us. And second, if you wouldn't mind, just doing a brief introduction of yourself and then Attentive, and we'll jump right into it.

Allison Kelly: Awesome. Well, I thought we were going to ask what was my favorite Christmas song or when do we start actually decorating for Christmas around here? I will tell you, my family is really into Halloween decorations and so those may or may not go up inside of our house at the beginning of September, with a debut outside the third week of September, because we really do go all out. Trying to catch up on the outdoor Christmas decorations though, too, just to be able to make sure we can compete with the Joneses next door, which yes, literally is the last name of our neighbors as well. Allison here, VP of partnerships at Attentive, a little bit of background on me real quickly. I've spent about a decade in the marketing technology space, working with next generation technologies in order to be able to bring personalization and surprising and delight moments through to consumers in new and innovative ways. Attentive, in fact, does just that in a channel that I think all of us are probably pretty guilty of engaging on, on a day over day basis, whether we're talking with friends, family, or brands. Attentive was founded in 2016 before text messaging really started to take off and become cool. I like to tell folks," We revolutionized the way that brands connect with consumers via text and helped create relevancy in text for brands to be able to have hyper connectivity for the perfect moment of engagement with a customer." We've seen, just over the last few years alone, especially during the height of the pandemic, our business just explode with new customers, new adoption, new use cases, new data that we're also too harvesting and mining. So we went, when we started, when I started here in 2019, just to give you guys an example, we had about 250 customers. We had about 60 employees. And where we sit today, we're right over 11,000 employees and right under 5, 000 companies that we work with. So it's been a really explosive period of growth and time, but how we've been able to help with our customers and the growth as well that they're experiencing on this channel is really by focusing on the monetization of text as a channel. In fact, we're driving 20 and a half percent of total online sales through text now across all of our customers and helping them make text a top three channel of revenue for them within a period of three to six months. So it's been incredible. It's been a fast paced year and it's been a really, really, really fun time on being able to take a channel that I remember back in my day existed, but it was kind of a spammy channel, flip it on its head, be able also to align that with product market fit and consumer behavior, and start to see a lot of really cool results that we were able to drive for our customer base and for the industry at large.

Cole Fisher: Yeah. And it's an incredible industry to be in right now too. You kind of mentioned, like years ago, it was spammy, invasive, kind of an intrusive thing to be in. And then mobile over the past less than a decade, honestly, has kind of mirrored the same growth that you guys are seeing, where it's just exploding as a revenue channel, as an engagement channel. That's really exciting.

Allison Kelly: It is. Yeah, for sure. And I mean, I think that you guys also too, I mean, obviously, you know when text existed and it had that kind of spammy nature, it was because there wasn't a lot of regulation really around the channel itself. But candidly too, consumers, we just weren't ready for it yet. Right? We really weren't at the point to where we were picking up our phone, on average, like 250 times per day. We were spending more time on different types of devices. And then throughout the shift and the change in technology and the shift and change in behavior, it really became a ripe season for Attentive to debut and to be in a really critical seat in order to get an increased adoption and increased innovation going. In fact, actually at the end of last year, we saw just a massive amount of escalation through an independent study that we actually did on the amount of consumers that were more willing sign up for text message programs. We actually saw a 67% increase year over year from 2019 through to 2020 of consumers signing up for programs, staying engaged in programs. And the average consumer, actually, will sign up for 20 text message marketing programs before you actually start to see an increase in dropout rates and optout rates.

Bobby Tichy: And I think one element that has really caught our eye from Attentive in working with some joint customers is some of the innovative ways that Attentive leverages SMS in the programs that those different companies are running. So for example, for those listening, and we know here for sure that Salesforce Marketing Cloud does a perfectly fine job of blasting out SMS messaging in a one way fashion, right? But as soon as we try to engage with our customers or subscribers, or do anything outside of the bands of just sending out a piece of text with some copy, we start to really hit the limitations of SMS within mobile studio and marketing cloud. And so I'd love to kind of have you talk about some specific, innovative ways that you guys leverage SMS and then, Cole, jump in, how you guys leverage it with marketing cloud.

Allison Kelly: Yeah, I'm happy to take that. And I think that we view this channel as communicative. We view this channel as being one of the easiest ways to be able to get started in conversational commerce at scale. And so every single thing that you may see come from Attentive specifically is catered around a couple of different facets. The first is realtime intent measurement, realtime engagement, meaning that if you've got a user or a browser that is looking at maybe pair of shoes on your website, and they add that to the cart and they abandon, but they're on their mobile device and we know that, the next easiest thing to do is think about, well, actually the next channel, let's go to text first. Because that's optimization and orchestration due to the channel, the user specifically, in which they were most recently engaged on. And those types of messages get viewed on average in about two minutes and 17 seconds, where we actually can tell the point of engagement from the time that it was sent to the time that a consumer actually will engage. It's about two minutes and 17 seconds. It's crazy. Right? And when you think about the ROI on that as a marketer, that's significant when you can engage at that level of intent with that type of time to engagement as well. The next is really being able to think through, how do we have this channel really seem and be as intimate as what it truly is? Cole and Bobby, I'm not sure if you guys do this. I know I do. I sleep with my phone. Anybody guilty of that? Come on.

Cole Fisher: I have it on the charger next to me. That's why I wake up with a full battery. But no, I can't sleep with it. I'd probably just end up throwing it around-

Bobby Tichy: Is this like a pillow situation? You've got it like...

Allison Kelly: Oh, yeah.

Bobby Tichy: You're clutching it with the pillow or...

Allison Kelly: It may be. I may be a little bit obsessed. So yeah, I started this a long time ago. And for those of you listening, I don't advise doing this if you're not doing this yet, so please, please, please do not follow my habits here. But the definition of a CrackBerry became very real to me about 12 years or so ago, and I developed a very bad habit of sleeping with my phone. But in the day and age that we are in, I think that that's pretty common. We take our phone everywhere with us. And so one of the reasons why, when we started to look at what other types of differentiated messaging do we really want to develop into, two- way communications was just a natural way for us to pivot. We actually are also too, we have a new product called Concierge that also too ties to two- way that continues on real human to human engagement within our product too. But with two- way communications, any message that is sent by Attentive, whether it's a marketing message or a transactional message, also too can have a subsequent response be set up within the product. And so one of the greatest examples that a lot of our customers will start with is keyword automation and responses in order to be able to gather first party or zero party data at scale, be able to gather preferences, be able also to engage with surveys and kind of gamify that channel to where it becomes a channel that, again, consumers just want to connect with more because it's not just," Well, one step here, one step here." It actually is readily available in the Attentive product to receive that response, know what to do with that response and have a lot of fun. Whether it is again a survey and gamifying the channel, or whether it is even connecting with customer service and making sure that the channel in which your question or your concern was actually initiated on is the channel that that communication from a service related perspective also too stays on. And when we have customers that are setting up two- way conversations, whether it's keyword automation, whether it is the integration with customer service platforms, like Salesforce Service Cloud is an example, and many others, or whether it is moving into that next kind of layer of Attentive's product called Concierge. We see on average, a 31% increase in total LTV across each subsequent subscriber that engages in two- way messages. And so that's massive and significant. And that is where, when we look at from an investment perspective, that's where a lot of our R&D and our innovation is currently being poured into, as we work to achieve our goal of true conversational commerce and shifting the way that businesses communicate to consumers at a massive, massive scale, so that people don't get annoyed when they sleep with their phone and it blows up, and it happens to be maybe Lucky Brand or another company that is saying," Hey, we saw that you looked at this pair of shoes. Would you like them in the color black?" as an example.

Bobby Tichy: Well, I think that what's really cool about that Concierge piece, and a point that you touched on that I think is really, really important, is that the initial channel that you start engaging on, whether it's for a purchase or for a problem, I would imagine that customers or subscribers want that same channel to be the one that it's resolved on. And the biggest example I can think of is if I'm on the phone with a customer service agent, I don't want to get off that phone call until my problem is resolved. Right? Same thing. If I'm text messaging back and forth with Delta, I don't want to have to be positioned to another short code or another phone number, or someone tells me email in, I just want that problem resolved in that chat that I'm in.

Allison Kelly: That's right. Yep. And that's the whole experience that, again, we've built the product in order to be able to solve for that exact experience. One of the things that we've added just over the last year, and we were the first to market with, is also this concept of a contact card. And so if I were to share maybe my phone number with Bobby and Bobby shares it with Cole, as an example, and it's just Allison, it comes through when you guys share it, especially on iMessage, it's like," Hey, this is Alison Kelly's contact." I can save the contact immediately to my phone. Well, we now also too do that with all of our brand customers as well. And that is intentional because it allows us to be able to not just have a short little five or six digit number that's associated with a short code show up in a text, but it's actually a branded image. And that helps with a lot of different things. The first is it actually helps with, again, customer experience, familiarity so that you know who this is, that's actually reaching out to you. And you also too, can better understand why they're reaching out to you when it's branded. But what a lot of people don't realize is actually having that contact card actually helps with deliverability too, deliverability of a text, because there's more familiarity on the carrier level with who this actually is, where it's coming from. And it helps with email deliverability, which is really funny too, if that's appended in the contact card, which we always encourage our brands to actually put their email surname and domain in the contact card, helps them with getting put into more of the correct email inbox versus going to the spam inbox as well.

Cole Fisher: Oh, that's really good point.

Allison Kelly: Yeah. It's interesting. And as the device types, like Apple, as an example, are starting to, with every iOS update... We can talk about iOS updates, I think, probably for 14 and 15 all day long. That's a hot topic, but I'm not going to go there today. One of the things that is rolling out within a lot of these updates is the ability to actually configure your text message inbox to where you can actually have a primary and then a post- secondary kind of spammy inbox, essentially, for text. And so if you have a contact card, you're always guaranteed to go to the primary too. And I see that as more and more of something that consumers will adopt too, and actually setting that up within their text inbox, as text also too becomes more highly adopted across a lot of different brands, whether you're retail or eCommerce or food and beverage, or even CPG, we're seeing a rise of here at Attentive to.

Bobby Tichy: So as we think about the use cases, which we've gone through quite a few of them, not only for collection and for engaging with customers and subscribers, but specifically as it relates to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, what are the key use cases that you guys are seeing or that you built for?

Allison Kelly: Yeah, that's a great question. So one of the primary value drivers of Attentive is being able to grow a subscriber list at scale. And oftentimes when we work with a customer for the very first time, they may have text, but they may not have a marketing opted- in list. Oftentimes if a customer does have text, it's traditionally been, they've got a transactional opted- in list and marketing opt- ins are very, very different from transactional opt- ins, when you start to look at rules and federal regulations around text as a whole. And so we have a suite of 24 different types of acquisition technologies that allow us to be able to grow a subscriber list to the point where you actually can get quick monetization of this channel too. And so we have our very first technology that oftentimes most of our customers will roll out is something called our" two- tap" sign- up unit. And essentially what that does is it's on a mobile device. And if you go to, again, any of the customers that you kind of think of when Attentive comes top of mind. And we're going to talk about Vosges Chocolate in a little bit, so I'll just throw that out there. You can go to Vosges Chocolates and check this out. When you get to their mobile site, you'll have a little popup that comes up. Now, popups are not new. And I remember when they were new, if that ages me any, and they were cool, right? But a little popup comes up and it'll ask you for your email address first. Well, you tap that little white box and you hit submit on your email. The next little screen that pops up is going to be another screen where you can actually tap into that screen. And when you tap into the screen, your text message app automatically opens up. It has a prepopulated message that's already filled out in your text app, and then you just hit the green arrow to submit and send. And you're instantaneously opted into text message marketing that is powered by Attentive. That one solution, believe it or not, actually gathers anywhere from three to six percent of all mobile website traffic on a month over month basis. So it's great at growing your subscriber base at scale. With Salesforce specifically, the very first integration that we built with Marketing Cloud is actually taking all of the contact data that we're collecting, again, an email and a phone number, stitching that together, and then actually sending that over to Marketing Cloud in real time, so that there is a unified customer profile that begins from the very first point of engagement. And you don't have to worry about going back and trying to unify channels. If you do text to join or if maybe you send out via email," Hey, sign up for our text program." take This call to action here, like either texting to this phone number or tapping here. What happens with that is that you start to form disparate contact profiles in most instances. And so this solution actually helps us with immediately merging identification from day one, so that you really can start to look at, what does that overall journey need to be at scale? Because you can tell from day one again, what does engagement look like, too, from that identification merge. So that's first use case. And I find that that helps us with being able to kind of do the second thing that we have with Salesforce as well, which is building into that journey's layer. Again, how do you orchestrate at scale? How do you take a lot of the unique advantages that Attentive brings with the growth and the subscriber list technology, with being the number one MMS sender in the United States, which we actually are. We also have the fastest thoroughput. And how do you take the two- way conversations at scale and build them into your existing orchestration layer and the existing customer experience that you're already providing, and your data layer too? That's when we debuted the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builder integration, that actually plugs Attentive in to the journey builder layer. And it opens up actually some advanced use cases, even for a journey builder, which is going to be like the ability to use MMS and also too the ability to be able to use our compliance as a technology, features that are built into our platform. And that's something called smart sending. That's fuzzy opt out logic. So Cole, if I sent you maybe a dirty four letter word in the text, if you sent it to me, if you were a brand, most of the time, you're going to get an error message back from a lot of other platforms. Attentive doesn't do that. Attentive automatically removes you from the list because we don't want anything to potentially happen. And we know that sometimes there's friction that can be caused in the channel, so we'll automatically remove you from the list. This also includes real time litigator lookups as well, which is really valuable for this channel. A lot of customers come to us and they have had challenges in the past. Maybe they've been involved in a lawsuit with this channel before. And the fact that we are able in real time to look up, is this phone number associated with an existing lawsuit, or is it associated with a preexisting historic lawsuit? That is huge. We don't even allow those phone numbers to reach the database. And so that's something that, again, gets built into everything that we offer in Salesforce, whether it is with that first integration, where we're taking the identification and the contact data, posting it back, or whether it's within the journey builder integration, where we're really doing a great job on dynamic content experiences at scale with MMS, being able to also to involve two- way conversations at scale, and then also being able to mitigate the risk of compliance challenges by being able to have that built into our endpoint that's there within Salesforce.

Cole Fisher: That's really exciting. And I think two of the problems, actually... So as you know, our customers are kind of clamoring towards mobile, and this isn't new by any means, but as they go to towards trying to expand into mobile, I feel like the two issues that probably come up the most are that data collection. Like I think there's a kind of a hazy understanding between transactional versus promotional in terms of data collection and what's allowed, things like that. And so there's one aspect of marketing collection for starting to build out an actual subscriber list. But then as well, there's the legal and compliance. And I feel like that turns into a red flag for a lot of folks where," This is just going to be such a hurdle that we just are really unsure to go into it." And so I feel like that prevents a lot of people from doing that. So it's really neat to have that. And I feel like the second big question that always comes up is two- way, which as you know, of course is, a gap in... Not really a gap necessarily, but just not a feature that Salesforce Marketing Cloud is able to do. So in sales and service cloud, I'm kind of curious as to what that two- way communication looks like when it's integrated into Salesforce.

Allison Kelly: Yeah, for sure. For sure. Happy to answer that. I call this, just so you guys know, and again, this is my geeky term, and this is personal. This is not something that Attentive actually calls it, but just for a Salesforce geeks here, I'll share this. I call this pivoting on a journey. So when we're talking about two- way, how do you actually handle a customer response to a message, and pivot on your journey in a way that allows you to be able to cater to the customer experience and the action they took in real time too? And this really is what led to us developing our Salesforce Service Cloud integration. Now we have integrations with about 12 different customer service platforms that exist out in the industry, but with the service cloud integration, one of the reasons why that was a really important integration for us to debut is because we wanted to be able to continuously keep a holistic journey and also to keep contact records, really uniquely identified with those customers that had both marketing cloud and service cloud. And we wanted also to do some cool things with digital engagement as well. And so for those customers that have service cloud and marketing cloud specifically together, if a customer or a consumer responds back to a text that is sent from the Attentive platform, what ends up happening is traditionally, what we'll do is it's a keyword response. So maybe yes or a no to a question that's built in. If the customer answers yes, that then will actually open up and log a new ticket and connect to an agent inside of Salesforce Service Cloud. And there will be a real time, true dialogue going on between service cloud and the agent, and then the consumer on the same communication channel and thread that marketing messages, which the consumer has already opted into, is also too receiving. And that type of information and data, again, kind of living and breathing inside of Salesforce, between sales and service cloud, and between marketing cloud, helps with being able to think through more intuitively," Where should I really pivot this journey with this customer?" as well. And it's been really cool to be able to see that debut and live itself out in real time, because we're seeing a lot of insightful data that can be used both to enhance a customer service experience, again, within the Salesforce realm, but also too being able to enhance on the marketing cloud front," What do I do with this customer next? Did they have a good experience? Did they have a bad experience?" And that's been really helpful for a lot of the customers that we work with across, again, both marketing cloud and service cloud today.

Bobby Tichy: So whether it's marketing cloud or service cloud, or maybe just a standalone Attentive solution, what does implementation look like?

Allison Kelly: Funny you ask. So you guys were talking earlier about how a lot of brands won't even get in and start with text because of compliance concerns or issues. And we try to keep everything that we do pretty keep it simple, stupid, right? Did you guys know there's like 6, 800 different types of technologies out in our industry that serve retail and e- commerce brands? That's insane. And when we were thinking about, how do we architect the platform? How do we make things very simple too? Implementation was part of that. And I've been at platforms where it's took 12 to 18 months to actually implement, if not longer. And then they still didn't work the way that I thought that they were going to. And the really cool thing with Attentive is that from the time that you sign up for a free trial, and we give everybody that is a Salesforce customer a 60 day free trial, just so you all know out there in the audience, we literally can get you launched in a matter of no more than two weeks. And that is crazy for a lot of the customers, especially that maybe have tried mobile before in the past and failed at it, or are looking for something faster to help grow that list and then also to connect with customers. That includes everything from installing our JavaScript tag into your tag manager. And so we will code the JavaScript tag for you, match it to all the parameters on your site. We hand that over to you. You just plug that into the tag manager. We also too will go through and throughout the process, we will go ahead and procure your short code for you. We have an ability to be able to get short codes at a rate that's like 3X faster than other providers in the market. And that's just due to great carrier relationships that we have, as well as our market position here in the United States, specifically, being the top provider to the IR 1000 by a long shot. And then if you want to get started with setting up your Salesforce integrations, after that, you just go to the app exchange, go to your Salesforce app exchange, go search for Attentive. You can download it there. Everything's in one package too, so when you do download it, you get the contact collection piece that I mentioned earlier for marketing cloud and the journey builder piece as well built into that. You just set up your custom data extension, and you're off to the races. So it is pretty simple end to end, but we also too have a lot of guidance that we provide to agency partners that maybe are setting up our customers, and every single agency partner actually also too has a dedicated agency strategist as well. So there's a lot of continuous help that we will provide behind the scenes, even from the Attentive front, if our customers are also too using an agency.

Cole Fisher: So if I'm your average marketer and I'm flirting with the idea of mobile or expanding into mobile or beginning to collect and things like that. And I'm looking at these red flags of compliance, legal and things like that, that may be above my head, what do you suggest?

Allison Kelly: Well, I always say it is really helpful to talk to a mobile expert, and we have a good bit of those here at Attentive, obviously, to go through maybe the questions or the concerns that you have. But we also too have a lot of information about these types of subjects on our website as well. In fact, one of the things that I'm trying to get pushed across the finish line, and maybe you guys can help me on, is a massive white paper around compliance mitigation and why that's an important part of your evaluation strategy, and what are some things that you should also too make sure that you look out for as you maybe are considering mobile too. So if you want to give me a nod over to maybe product marketing and marketing too at Attentive guys, I'm all for that because I think that it's something that, candidly, a lot of brands just do not really understand, or they maybe understand it from a bad past experience and also too don't know how it's changed and how Attentive has helped with that evolvement as well. But if you want to go do something fun and you want to be able to kind of do choose your own journey, did you guys ever read those books growing up? Like where you could actually choose the ending to the story and have all these different paths you go through? Or is that just me?

Bobby Tichy: I don't know how to read, Allison.

Allison Kelly: Oh, come on now.

Bobby Tichy: It kind of brought up a sore subject.

Allison Kelly: Oh, man. Okay, well-

Cole Fisher: I did, but if I went down that path and I didn't like it, I'd like," No, let's go back a chapter and pick a different one. I didn't like this one as much."

Allison Kelly: Just got to go back. Okay, okay. Well, okay. So secret guilty confession here. I loved Goosebumps growing up as a child. You guys remember those? Those are fun books.

Cole Fisher: Oh, I collected all of them.

Allison Kelly: Oh my God. Yes. It's great. And I still have a lot of them and my kids now have them, which is great too. So one of the things that Goosebump series books rolled out at one point in time was this ability to be able to kind of choose your own path and ending to the story. And I was just a glutton for punishment, and I would go down each and every path and read each one and probably have nightmares about that. But that's for another topic another day, maybe some therapy sessions I need to go to now because of that. Well, if you need some good text therapy, and if you want to be able to better understand, based upon where you are with maybe your time in market with text, or if you're exploring and you just don't know, or if you have questions around text, go choose your own journey through something called our Holiday Village. And I think that the guys here at Lev are going to send this out to you afterwards, but Holiday Village allows you to be able to come in and literally go through an interactive path that has answers to questions throughout that way that are dependent upon, again, where you are in your journey with text. And I can tell you guys this, across our customers too, there are phases even of text maturation too that we have been working and defining that are also built into Holiday Village. There's actually three phases, in fact, so list growth, understanding how this channel works for you, understanding what your goals and your measurement also too should be by data collection. And phase one is really important. Then there's phase two, where you start to go into advanced automations, keywords, customer service message types, that's phase two specifically. And then phase three is going to be more of your conversations at scale and really getting more sophisticated around your data anomalies. Anomalies will also too naturally emerge in this channel that tell you when you're ready to start to adopt maybe more human intervention, maybe some AI too, as we continue to develop that type of functionality here at Attentive. So Holiday Village will give you all that, and it won't give you a nightmare either, and you get to go on a fun ski trip through it as well.

Bobby Tichy: Awesome. Well, thanks again, Allison, for joining. It's great to learn more about Attentive and some of the problems that you all solve. As a reminder, go ahead and check out the Holiday Village by Attentive for more information on all your SMS and mobile needs. Pivoting over to completely unrelated, so the best text message you've ever received, which I just submitted, I don't know how to read. So I actually have to cop out of this one. I've never received a text message I could read. So Cole, how about you?

Cole Fisher: Well, so we've talked in the past about how I am the email checker that all email marketers can't stand, because I won't necessarily unsubscribe. I'll just delete some stuff. Maybe I'll just leave it in there. I have a whole junk account. Well, sometimes my mailbox is like that too. If I go out of town, I just don't check mail. I also think it's absurd that you can't unsubscribe from direct mail. It's just crazy to me. And so every once in a while, I'll just miss bills when they come in, because I'm like," Ah, it's probably just trash," and I'll just throw everything away. So if anybody has mailed me checks or anything like that, let me know because I probably didn't get them. But one of the things that happens is in Indianapolis, the power company got bought out not too long ago. And so I probably just didn't recognize their new logo and envelopes. I'm just throwing stuff away. Well, the power got shut off one day. I was like," Oh no, this is supposed to be a nightmare. And it's supposed to be a day to come reconnect things." And so I got online on my phone and I paid whatever the fee was. And I got a text message right away just saying," Thanks for the payment. It's being processed, and your power's being turned back on." And then like 10 seconds later, all the power came back. I was like," Oh, that wasn't so bad. I'll just let that be my trigger from now on."

Bobby Tichy: Boy, that's service.

Cole Fisher: "Iwon't get the mail at all." Yeah. It was actually really well done. I was kind of impressed.

Allison Kelly: Gosh, I wish that my power company would do that. I need to probably go figure that out.

Cole Fisher: I'd never heard of anything like that, but it's really impressive that they do that now. But anyway, Allison, what's yours? Hopefully it's better than getting your power shut off.

Allison Kelly: Well, I've had that challenge before too, I'll tell you, as the business has grown so often, and I also too pay all of our bills at home. There is one time that I did miss that and totally forgot. And my husband was like," What is going on? I'm here with three kids by myself and there's no power." It was great.

Cole Fisher: Happens to the best of us.

Allison Kelly: I know. Yeah. My mom wall of shame thing. But I actually really, really love the concept of gamification in text. And there are so many different cool things that I feel like I've seen a lot of our customers do in order to be able to engage the subscriber, help get them acclimated too, to having fun in text and treating it as a different channel from email, because it is a very different channel from email. Vosges Chocolates is literally my favorite. Not just because I love chocolate. Okay? But also too, because their welcome series is totally based around an international chocolate tour. And so they ask a series of questions back and forth to be able to figure out what country maybe would be the best interest for you due to your chocolate tastes, because chocolate is a very specific thing. And so I know that if you are a chocolate connoisseur, your palette for chocolate may be different. And so you may prefer chocolates from Japan or Italy or France. And so through this whole process, they just have a quiz that you go back and forth with, back and forth with, back and forth with as you're onboarding for the very first time as a tech subscriber. And then it actually spits out to you a true product recommendation. It links back over too to the products that you may like as well in the little short link in their text message program as well. And you can kind of go right there and purchase your chocolate. So who doesn't like that? Personalized chocolate recommendations. The next one that I want to do is beer recommendations though too, because I also too love beer and am a connoisseur there. There's a competition that happens here in our house on who has the most Taco Mac beer points in Brewniversity, which Taco Mac's this local restaurant here in Atlanta. So next time you guys get out from Indy or Florida and you want to come visit Atlanta, we'll take you to Taco Mac too. And maybe we can convince them to have a beer text message program for us connoisseurs.

Bobby Tichy: I just remembered my favorite text message I've ever received. I'm going to read it to you guys now. My actual name is Robert. So it's," Robert, come off 9 to 10 inches in 32 days with just two spoons per day, evidence by Shark Tank's here." So guys, the next time you see me, I'm going to be 9 to 10 inches smaller. I don't know if that's shorter. Is that waistline?

Allison Kelly: Yeah.

Cole Fisher: It sounds legit, Bobby.

Bobby Tichy: It's just two spoons a day. I don't know. I've never eaten a spoon before. It wasn't spoonfuls. It was spoons.

Cole Fisher: Forward that to Allison for the white pages on compliance and legal issues.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah, that's a good point.

Allison Kelly: Yeah, do that.

Bobby Tichy: I'm guessing you have a high recommendation for something like that within the Holiday Village.

Allison Kelly: Yeah, we definitely, definitely do. There's been a lot of crazy things that we've seen, a lot, throughout our period of receiving responses to texts too. We won't go into that today though. We'll save that for another podcast.

Bobby Tichy: Awesome. Well, thanks again, Allison. Really appreciate you joining us today and walking us through everything Attentive. Cole, as always, horrible to see you.

Cole Fisher: Likewise, Bobby. My pleasure.

Bobby Tichy: We'll catch up with you all soon. As always, if you have any feedback or any topics you want to hear about, feel free to reach out to us at intheclouds @ levdigital. com and we'll see you next time.