When it comes to AI-powered SMS, Attentive delivers

No matter your lifestyle, hobbies, or fashion preferences, you’ve likely gotten a text from a brand powered by Attentive. They power 8,000 brands including sports franchises (the Milwaukee Bucks, for example), travel (Wyndham Resorts, for one) and retail (CB2 and Reebok among many others). 

Working with consumer brands means Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and all of Cyber Week are top priorities for Attentive. For the team, it’s not just a seasonal rush, it’s a week they spend all year preparing for. And because household name brands rely on Attentive for their SMS and MMS campaigns, Attentive takes uptime, dependable throughput, and deliverability seriously all year long.

Attentive’s approach to communications is being customer-centric. Nate Kliger, Senior Director, Messaging Strategy & Operations, shared that “Our marketing is very personalized and being in the SMS space primarily allows us to engage customers with the right message, at the right time, and that’s what we’ve seen be successful.”

“My biggest priorities are determining what partners we work with and we’re considering scalability, the product set available to us, and ultimately building really strong partnerships.” – Nate Kliger

Amplifying the power of SMS with AI

Attentive recently launched Attentive AI, designed to harness the power of artificial intelligence to help brands connect with customers in a way that improves efficiency, messaging performance, and customer experience. 

Eric Miao, Chief Strategy Officer, explained the impetus behind the new initiative  “Attentive AI takes the 2 trillion data points that we have, and makes them useful. Should I be sending a message? What should the content of that be? When should it be sent? To whom should it be sent? A lot of that is the workflow that marketers live in. And so there’s a lot we can do… to make it far more effective.”

Staying focused on Deliverability

In her role as Sr. Manager, Messaging Strategy and Operations, Caroline Cole manages the full message flow, from forecasting throughput, to diagnosing issues with individual phone numbers. “One of the main things is making sure we have the appropriate amount of capacity to actually send our messages. You don’t want to be in a situation where you’re sending 2.2 billion messages over Cyber Week, and you don’t have the capacity to do so.” said Cole. 

One of Cole’s other main responsibilities is monitoring outgoing messages using alerts and other insight tools to make sure the message is making its way downstream, all the way to the end recipient. Making sure any issues are caught early “can help mitigate the issue for our customers” Cole shared.

“Being able to have that visibility through the tools that Bandwidth is providing makes us a better provider to our customers. And it’s super exciting, to be sure that deliverability is the best it can be.”  – Caroline Cole

When it comes to deliverability, Cole takes compliance seriously. “It’s very important for us to actually adhere to those rules,” she stated, speaking of carrier guidelines. Taking compliance seriously, and investing in things like Attentive’s patented opt-in process, help ensure healthy traffic “that really does help us build trust with our partners, and with our carriers.” 

The right industry connections

Attentive is especially excited about Bandwidth’s new mobile carrier direct connection.

Kliger stated  “Direct connections are incredibly important for us, especially on these large holidays where we need to send a bunch of messages. The direct connections allow us to make sure that we have the right throughput and capacity to get those messages out.”

Prioritizing direct connections is just one of the ways Bandwidth invests in industry relationships, including those that arise naturally from owning and operating a redundant Tier 1 voice network. And that emphasis on relationships is a common thread through customer interviews.

Cole shared, “Instead of providing us with a standard support model with boilerplate language and processes, you really came to us and tried to understand what our requirements were for a partnership to make this successful as possible, and that makes all the difference.”

Bandwidth is proud to present Attentive as a 2024 Textie award winner. Learn more about the Texties here, and explore Bandwdith’s Messaging capabilities here.