Send a Message (SMS or Email)

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Podium Solution Ideas

This guide gives a specific use-case for a set of Podium API Endpoints. Use it as inspiration to build your own solution that can help local business thrive.

Send Message: What is it?

Podium Customers manage their customers and prospects in a variety of different ways and in different stages of the customer lifecycle. The Podium customer will typically use many systems, have information sitting disparately among them and will want to use Podium to manage engagement with those customers or prospects. Send Message is what it sounds like, a way to send SMS or Emails out of Podium. Let’s explore how and when that might make sense.

Example Use Case

A small business uses a POS system and utilizes Podium’s Webchat solution to communicate via SMS/Email with their customers. The POS system might create invoices and require distribution that is not up to the retailer’s standards or not in the correct medium. If the retailer would prefer invoices to be delivered via text message, Podium could serve as that solution.

Another problem might be the necessity for prompt response. In the age of instant gratification, consumers expect expedient response to inquiries they send to retailers. If a Podium customer is slow to respond because they’re a small business with limited staff, a partner can solve for this by providing smart auto responses to inbound messages. IF a message contains X, respond with Y.

Think of scheduling an appointment. A message to a retailer may begin with “I need to come visit your store this Wednesday.” “Visit your store” could be one of many trigger words for a Send Message response with a link to schedule an appointment. Without this, a retailer may not see the message for some time, and by then the consumer has moved on to a competitor and scheduled an appointment with them.

In both Use Cases above, Podium’s Send Message endpoint would be used to deliver a message back to the consumer. The schedule link in the second use case would be triggered from an inbound message to Podium via our Message Webhook.

Send Message Contacts Value Propositions

That brings us to triggers, we briefly touched on two. The creation of an invoice or an inbound message. There are a myriad of things that may be a suitable trigger to send a message back to a consumer. If the consumer has interacted with a business in a transactional manner (purchased something, messaged the retailer, scheduled an appointment, etc) those are suitable reasons to trigger a message to the consumer.

The automation of tasks as simple as delivering a document or sending an auto response does a couple of things:

• Provides a modern retail experience to the consumer and relieves the pressure from the retailer to complete those tasks themselves.
• Frees up retailers to focus on the most important tasks and focus on their business

With these they are able to focus on expanding their customer base, manage business operations that can’t be automated, drive more business and ultimately be more successful.

What other systems, processes or use cases could serve as triggers for a response on behalf of a Podium customer?

Code Snippet

Contact syncs with Podium are very straight forward. You can see a full sample app which is available to clone/download on the Podium GitHub repository.