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Business SMS and IM Adoption: The 2 Best Ways to Get Your Team Behind It
Picture this—you’re thinking about conversational commerce and what it can do for your organization. You’re sitting through a demo to learn how easy it is to add texting to your current phone line when it hits you … AHA! This is a lot easier than I thought!! So what do I do next?
First, you’ll want to get buy-in from your team. If your employees don’t believe in this new strategy, it will be more difficult to get your customers to trust it. To tackle this, consider this two-pronged approach:
- Explain how adding SMS texting and instant messaging will help your team.
- Explain how it will help your business.
How Texting and Instant Messaging Will Help Your Team
The first approach to get your team behind your new SMS and IM plan is to show them how it will make their work simpler and more efficient. Are your employees being stood up too often by no-show customers not making their appointments? Are their processes held up by waiting for important customer information? Through the use of automated appointment reminders and faster responses via text or chat, your workers’ pain points with customers can be reduced considerably.
An instant message platform can also make collaboration within the team and the organization effortless by allowing other workers to see the status of a conversation and, if needed, jump into it to bridge a knowledge gap and seamlessly facilitate service to the customer.
Another growing practice of business chatters is the use of IM for internal communication. When “80% of adults message daily” and, “51% of people say messaging has replaced other forms of communication,” it’s probably safe to say that most of your employees are among these stats. Why not engage with them using a method that they prefer? That survey on where to go for the next team outing will likely generate more input if sent via text or chat.
These are only a few of the benefits that instant messaging for businesses provides. The more your associates learn how chat can make a task more enjoyable, the easier it will be to get them to use it.
How Texting and Instant Messaging Will Help Your Business
Give your team the big-picture view of the benefits instant messaging will bring to your business. Are you losing sales to unanswered emails? Are your customers frustrated with using your call center to get their questions answered? By outlining a messaging strategy that addresses these problems, you provide your team with the appropriate selling points to deliver to your customers.
You can also go through each step of the customer journey and see how that step could be improved by using instant messaging. For instance, if you normally promote a new offering by email, walk through the steps of completing this process (i.e., how long it takes, how many people it takes, the average rate of customer conversion, etc.). Then go through those same steps using an instant message strategy.
Using reported statistics like:
- SMS open rates = 98% vs. Email open rates = 20%
- SMS response rates = 45% vs Email response rates = 6%
It shouldn’t be hard to convince your team how business texting can improve performance and growth for the company.
Success is a Team Effort
Ultimately, the triumph or failure of a business messaging strategy will depend on the people using it—how well they are using it and how often. Buy-in from the internal team is critical; if the employees are not on board with your instant chat plan, then it’ll be a hard sell to get the customers to use it. Taking the time to stress the value of instant chat for both the company and the team will go a long way in ensuring that win. Add in the adequate training and ways to provide input in adoption procedures and you’ve got a bona fide recipe for success.
Need to fortify your chatting strategy? Chatfully can help! Click here to learn more.
Sources:
1. Jeffries, J. (2018). Email Marketing VS SMS Marketing the Stats [Infographic]. [online] business2community.com. Available here. [Accessed 22 Aug. 2019].
2. Unknown (2018). Why Messaging Businesses Is The New Normal. [online]
facebook.com Available here. [Accessed 22 Aug. 2019].
More and more consumers are growing comfortable with the idea of texting businesses to make their voices heard. The savviest of businesses understand the importance of this trend and is choosing to engage numerous customers using bulk SMS. Bulk SMS is changing the way businesses communicate and nurture relationships with consumers by empowering businesses to send messages at scale, without sacrificing the personal touch of their messages. For those interested in dabbling with bulk SMS, did you know you can take your current phone landline and convert it into a platform that enables 2-way bulk text messaging? You don't even need to change your landline phone number. All it takes is a quick call to your service provider. It’s so quick and easy In fact, you could easily text-enable your landline within the day. WIth flexible pricing plans depending on your needs all without disrupting your current business workflow. Soon you’ll be able to send tens of thousands of messages efficiently and effortlessly.
Texting with prospects and customers is a new marketing channel for most businesses, but the benefits are staggering.
As you’re learning more about conversational commerce, you may start to feel defensive about your current email communication strategy. It seems to be working for you and you're comfortable with the system in place. Why put time, energy, and resources into implementing a new process, like using SMS texting and instant messaging, that may not work for your needs? It’s a natural way to react to any type of change—probably more so in business where you’re not just risking your personal reputation and money, but your business’ as well. It’s the responsible reaction to question anything that claims to be “better for you.” So to all of you cautious decision makers—we say bravo and applaud your thoughtful judgment. We are not here to convince you that you need to completely change your communication plan. Rather, we are here to provide insights into how you may augment your arsenal to enhance what you’ve got and make it even better. We’ve got nothing against email. On the contrary, we’ll show you how to improve your email strategy while adding SMS texting and instant messaging capabilities as options for your audience. Before we do that, we will first address some common concerns about using SMS and/or IM for business purposes. Then, we’ll outline when to use instant communication with your audience and when to use email. Common Concerns about SMS and IM Concern #1: They’re intrusive. Some people may find getting a text or chat message from a business on their personal phone as an invasion of a sacred space that should only be designated for trading emojis and gifs with your nearest and dearest. That’s a fair point if the customer did not opt in to receive SMS or IM from the company. However, standard practice for most organizations is to request permission before contacting a consumer. By doing this, businesses know whether the consumer wants to hear from them or not. In addition, companies usually offer a way to opt out if consumers change their mind or were contacted by mistake. So, ultimately this choice of communication style is left with the consumer. Those people who find it intrusive can opt out—they would be among the minority anyway. When Facebook surveyed daily messaging app users, 61% of those surveyed in the US told them “they had messaged a business in the past three months.” The same statistic from other countries was either the same or higher. It’s clear most people around the world don’t find SMS or IM from companies intrusive at all. Concern #2: No access or limited access. There may be a cost barrier that limits or prevents people from receiving text or instant chat messages. Those consumers have the same choice as above—they can opt out of receiving these types of instant communication altogether or choose the chat platform that’s most accessible to them whether that be SMS, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, or the like. Businesses can access all of these mediums through a unified platform, like Chatfully, that will keep the conversations organized and open for teams to view and collaborate on the best solutions. If the targeted recipients do opt out of any instant communication, hopefully, they have the option to be reached by email, phone, or postal mail instead should they have questions about your product or service or want to be alerted about sales promotions. Concern #3: No records. For everyday personal use, it may not be possible to keep a history of your texts or DMs, and if one did, it would take up precious space on your device. For businesses, however, there are services, like Chatfully, that can help you maintain records of all your conversations (no matter the platform) for however long you want to keep them. So if you’re looking for that complaint sent over Twitter or that billing question sent via WhatsApp, you can easily find it through a unified platform like Chatfully’s. But which tool is best? Now that we have addressed the common concerns about using SMS texting or web-based instant messaging, for the rest of this article, we will refer to both of these mediums as “instant chat” and compare “instant chat” to email. The other pros and cons in certain situations for both SMS and IM are the same so both will be grouped as “instant chat.” This guide will help you choose the best tool for each of the following areas: Scheduling Customer success Sales Marketing Use Cases for Instant Chat
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