2016-03-14 Meet Brinks, the SMS Messaging Bot

date: 2016-03-14 11:34:06+00:00

Hi there, meet Brinks! Brinks is your on the go text messaging (SMS) robot assistant that gives you information when you need it and helps update your inventory. With Brinks, you can text things like "How many customers do I have?" or "How many new signups today?". You can even ask Brinks to update your inventory by texting "apples set price 1.49" and Brinks will update the retail price of the apples you have this week to $1.49.

Setup

To set up Brinks, all you have to do is add your cell phone number to your admin profile.

1. Login to your dashboard

2. Click the link that says 'edit profile' at the top right of the admin page

3. Type in your cell phone number

4. Done!

As soon as you hit save, Brinks will create a brand new number using Twilio that has the same area code as your business line. Once Brinks has done that, he will send you a text message welcoming you!

What Brinks Can Do

Brinks is a pretty simple AI bot. That means he doesn't know a lot, but he will be constantly learning as we analyze the requests texted to him and 'teach' Brinks how to do more. His basic functions at this time are to provide information, submit support tickets, and to update your menu- all through text messaging on your phone.

Providing Information

Here are a few examples of questions you can ask Brinks. Remember, if you ask a question and Brinks doesn't know the answer, he will learn it for the future as we teach him to respond.

• "How many customers do I have?"

• "How many orders this week?"

• "What commands do you know?"

• "What's my skip percentage this week?"

• "How many emails are in the queue?"

• "How many cancels this week?"

• "How many new signups last month?"

Submitting Support Tickets via Text Message

Have you ever been on-the-go when that idea you couldn't remember suddenly pops into your mind? Need to send it off to our help desk in a hurry? Fear no more! Use the command 'support' followed by your message to instantly create a ticket for us to review. Here's a few examples:

• "support is there a way to email customers that have artichokes this week?"

• "support can I have a blog on my website too?"

• "support customer 53421 is saying her sub options are small, how do I fix this?"

Just by saying 'support' in front of your message, a ticket will automatically be created for you on the Kiva Logic's Zendesk help center.

Commands Brinks Knows

Updating retail prices

You can text Brinks to update the retail price of apples on your menu to $0.99:

apples set price .99

Updating in stock numbers

Watching closely how many strawberries you are selling and want to make more available? First you can see how many strawberries are in stock and reserved by typing:

strawberries strawberries set stock 46

Pricing

If you choose to use Brinks, it is an added cost to your monthly bill.

[pricing_table class=""]

[pricing size="one_half" featured="no" plan="Starter" cost="$21.99" per="month" class=""]

• 1500 messages

• 99.98% uptime

• Unique phone number

[/pricing]

[pricing size="one_half" position="last" featured="yes" plan="Advanced" cost="$34.99" per="month"  class=""]

• 3000 messages

• 99.98% uptime

• Unique phone number

[/pricing]

[/pricing_table]

Brinks Learns

Brinks is fairly young and doesn't know a lot about the world right now, but we're teaching him constantly. We review all messages sent to Brinks as a way to help determine what new commands he should learn or what new questions he should be able to answer.

So if you type something in that he doesn't know- don't be afraid to try it again in the future. He may have learned!

If you have any ideas for what else Brinks could help you do, please an email to support@kivalogic.com.

JULY 2016 UPDATE

You can now ask Brinks how many of a product are on a route. For example, "How many carrots on the orange route?" is what you would ask. To determine if this is what you are asking, this is what Brinks looks for:

a) did we find produce (or a product) in the question

b) did we find the word 'route' in the question

c) did we find the name of a route in the name question

if yes, then Brinks says:

**Total of 10 (lb.) baby peeled carrots on the route Orange**

Also, the weather update is live now too so Brinks can tell you the weather. You can say 'weather 04029', or if you don't include a zip he will pull the first latitude and longitude from the zip code table that he can find, and then sends it off to the Forecast.io API to tell you what the weather is.

Weather is triggered if he sees the any of these words: 'weather', 'temp', 'temperature', 'rain', 'sunny', 'rainy'

Bonus... he also looks up the name of the city for the zip code, and includes that, example if you type 'weather 04029', he says:

**Feels like 75.47 degrees here in Sebago. Light rain tomorrow through Wednesday, with temperatures falling to 71°F on Wednesday. (zip: 04029, data: forecast.io)**