With PSAI, all of your leads will be funneled into a single convenient place: the Com Portal. In the Com Portal, you and all of your company's PSAI users will not only be able to view leads but actually communicate with them—through many different channels, all directly within the Com Portal.

This article provides an overview of the various ways you can use the Com Portal to send and receive messages from leads. Remember, prompt and professional communication is the best way to encourage your leads to take the next step with your company!

Different Ways to Communicate with Leads in the Com Portal

Real-Time Chatting 

The beauty of our AI chatbot Gia is that she does the communicating for you—24/7. Gia will automatically collect the lead's essential information, summarize it, record a transcript of her conversation, and automatically add that lead to your lead queue in the Com Portal.

The screenshot below shows exactly what you'll see when Gia sends a lead into your Com Portal.

You can completely leave the chat interaction to Gia and wait for her to send you the lead...or you can "take over" from Gia and directly chat with that website visitor in real-time—all from the Com Portal. Simply type your message into the field at the bottom.

Even after you jump in and start sending chat messages directly from the Com Portal, your lead will continue chatting from the same chat widget on your website. Whether you leave the conversation to Gia or take over yourself, the chat experience will be completely seamless for your website visitor.

Sending and Receiving SMS Messages

You can take over an active Gia chat at any time, but what about all of the leads who are not currently engaging with your chat widget? How you can start a conversation with them? It's also easy. As long as a lead has provided their cell phone number, you can initiate an SMS/texting conversation at any time.

You can start a new texting conversation—and continue to send texts and receive responses—directly from the Com Portal. 

The screenshot below shows what an SMS interaction looks like in the Com Portal. From your end, you'll see that it looks just like chat; from the lead's end, it's much more convenient as they're answering you directly from their cell phone.

Sending and Receiving Emails

Just like you can send an outbound SMS, you can also send emails—and receive responses—within the Com Portal. All response emails will flow directly into your Com Portal and be categorized into the lead's same activity thread. Again, just like chat and SMS, you can reply directly from the Com Portal without having to go to any third-party email application.

From your end, you'll simply type your email into the same thread, just as you would with chat and SMS. It's simple and streamlined.

Communicating with Leads by Phone

While you cannot directly call a lead from the Com Portal, you can view their phone number in the contact summary box, highlighted below.

You can dial the number manually from your office phone or if you're using PSAI on your mobile device, simply copy and paste the number into your keypad. 

Why Keep Your Communications Within the Com Portal?

With so many different tools available to reach out to your leads, you might be wondering why you should use the Com Portal. The short answer is that the Com Portal makes it much simpler to communicate with leads because you only have to look in one place.

By using the Com Portal as your primary source of communication, you will be able to:

• Keep track of all of your leads in the same location, no matter which PSAI marketing source or app they used to contact you 
• Automatically record all conversations, interactions, and activities for up-to-date information as well as future reference
• Provide a more streamlined customer experience, as different team members can easily review each lead's activity file and see what needs to happen next
• Grant and restrict access via custom user roles, allowing only certain team members to communicate with certain leads
• Look at a lead's activity file and see exactly what they were told, when, and by whom—helping for both record-keeping and customer experience
• Prevent manual errors resulting from copying and pasting email addresses, names, or other critical lead contact information

By directly engaging from the Com Portal rather than an outside tool, you'll also be able to run instant weather reports and share them directly with any lead by chat, SMS, or email.

Explore More Features of the Com Portal

This article is part of a loosely ordered series on understanding and using your Com Portal. Coming soon will be the rest of the series with many more tips, explanations, and best practices: 

• Overview: What Is the Com Portal?
• Searching, Filtering, and Navigating the Com Portal
• Communicating with Leads Through the Com Portal
• Taking Advantage of Predictive Technology in the Com Portal
• Assigning Leads in the Com Portal
• "Closing" Leads in the Com Portal

Next: Taking Advantage of Predictive Technology in the Com Portal