Levante Brewing Company (West Chester, PA) has become the first brewery in the country to use a custom built texting service to interact with their customers. This text line will let customers know, in real time, what is being offered in the brewery.
Customers can text the service at any time to see the following:
• What cans are available in the taproom
• What food trucks are at the brewery that day
• What current draft offerings
They also use this platform to announce special beer tapping’s and events!
FOR AN INSTANT UPDATE, TEXT “FRIDGE”, “ONTAP” OR “TRUCK” TO 267-214-4211
We sat down with co-owner Jim Adams and discussed this new service that they are rolling out. Take a look at our conversation below:
BiPA: What made you build this platform?
JA: We wanted to bring something unique and valuable to our customers. We felt this was an innovative way to let people know in real-time, what canned beer we had to offer. We noticed that people would come to the brewery looking for the latest can release, only to have driven an hour to find out we had sold out. We can’t accept that kind of customer disappointment.
While there are companies that you can pay to provide direct to consumer texting, we wanted Levante to have our own custom designed software, built for us, by us, that meets our customer needs and is something we ultimately have complete control over. We wanted the ability to customize it quickly based on customer feedback and evolve the service to provide even more value.
BiPA: How has the response been so far?
JA: Quite frankly it’s been amazing. To date, we’ve received texts from people in 29 states and Puerto Rico. The usage increases by 30% month over month and there are thousands of unique customers leveraging this service. It’s simple for the customer to use and provides us a way to communicate in a more direct fashion with people who love our beers.
BiPA: Would you recommend other breweries do something similar?
JA: Many breweries have inquired about it, but it really depends on their business model. I would just impress upon them that people read text messages within an average of 90 seconds of receiving one. They may never see your social media posts because they’re bombarded and distracted by an abundance of competing content. Humans get instant gratification from receiving a text message. We all read them.
BiPA: Do you see this system staying for the long term?
JA: Without question. It continues to evolve. For example, it is also a chat-bot with full conversational ability to interact with the customer. It uses machine learning algorithms to figure out how to respond to inbound texts from the customer. I just don’t turn it on because we are still training it. Oh, and it can respond in a dozen languages. 🙂
See how simple a conversation with the Levante fridge is:
