Hello @michaelm,

Thanks for sharing your question with the Klaviyo Community!

One means you can go about accomplishing this would be creating a metric triggered flow for the event Sent SMS. This event/metric is meant to trigger whenever a customer responds or send an SMS to your sending number. With this sort of flow, you can leverage the use of either conditional or trigger splits to evaluate the responses your customers give to route them to a suitable SMS response. 

For example, if you had a conditional split with the definition of “Sent SMS, Message Body contains 02111 (Zip code of Boston” and a customer responds with “02111” they can navigated down the YES path of the split and be sent a message pertaining to Boston. If they send a different zip code, then they would be brought down the NO path which would typically have another conditional split evaluating them to see if their response matches again and so on and so forth. 

This sort of strategy uses similar aspects as those found in a product specific flow. To learn more about creating such a flow, I would suggest taking a look at the following Help Center articles which may prove helpful in building your own flow out!

• Creating a Product-Specific Flow
• How to Add a Conditional Split to a Flow
• About Flow Triggers and Filters

I hope this helps!

David

Hi David,

Thanks for the helpful suggestion! I was able to set it up how you’ve described it.

One thing that’s really bothering me… there is a 3-5 min delay between the customer texting the number and the number replying to them. Is there anyway to speed this up?

(In my SMS conversations window, I can see the customer’s text almost immediately, so I know Klaviyo is receiving quickly. Klaviyo just isn’t quick to send the reply text)

Michael

Hi @michaelm,

Thanks for your follow-up reply.

Glad to hear David’s recommendations were helpful to you.

When you start including multiple trigger and/or conditional splits in your flow, Klaviyo takes time to evaluate these conditions which may impact sending speed. As an alternative, you may want to clone your flow (as many times as needed), and thus set up separate flows for each sending scenario i.e flow 1 triggered off of “Sent SMS” and only include message body code X, flow 2 triggered off of “Sent SMS” and only include message body code Y etc. to circumvent “loading up” a single flow with several splits, you may see increased delivery time this way.

I also recommend stripping down your filters to only include the most essential filters required to differentiate these users in each flow.

I hope that is helpful!

Thanks, Dov! I’ll give that a shot.

I guess a broader question I have before I get too deep:

It feels like I’m trying to use Klaviyo SMS for something that it’s not specifically built for (I'm pretty much trying to build an info SMS bot, it’s built for e-commerce functionality). I want to use Klaviyo SMS because I want my SMS list to be in the same spot as my email list.

Does anyone know of a different program that’s built more for responsive SMS-bot functionality, where I could still link it to a Klaviyo number and list?

Thanks!

Michael