Mobile phones have changed the way we live and work. Your customers are probably already texting your business line, and you don’t even know it.
While your business may still use landlines or VoIP, it's a matter of fact that most of your customers will communicate with you via cell phone.
This recent change in business communication brings a different set of interesting issues. For example, 58% of consumers have responded by text to a missed call from a business.
The problem? Most businesses aren't set up for SMS, and the messages are lost forever. The businesses simply aren’t aware that their customers are trying to contact them — and that's money down the drain.
Fortunately, getting set up with SMS for business communication isn't as challenging as you think. We'll walk you through exactly how to establish SMS within your business.
How to Get SMS for Business Communication
People answer texts more than they answer emails — so texting is a channel that you can’t afford to avoid.
- 8 trillion texts were sent last year and 95% of those were read within 3 minutes.
- Only 14% of phone calls to businesses were answered without being placed on hold,
- Only ~20% of emails were ever opened at all!
While many focus on whether they can or can't get SMS, Atlantech takes companies one step further and shows you how.
You no longer have to weigh the pros and cons, or decide if it’s feasible. Instead, all you have to do is follow our three simple steps, and you’ll be ready to send and receive SMS text messages in no time.
Step #1: Determine Your Needs
The first step to enable text messaging for your business is to determine your company's specific needs. SMS software options can provide a wide variety of capabilities, and their ease-of-use varies drastically.
Before you get started, ask yourself questions like:
- Do you want two-way communication, or just to know when customers are messaging you?
- What tools do you want to integrate with?
- What types of data are you interested in tracking?
- What are your pricing restrictions?
- How many people in your company need to have access to texting?
- How many locations do you need to provide text messaging capabilities for?
- Do you have different departments?
- Would it be helpful to have automated bots that can route conversations or send automated messages like “I’m on the phone, I’ll call you right back” when you’re on the other line?
- What is your overall strategy for using texting — customer service, job applications, sales leads, staff communication?
Once you have a robust list of requirements, you can start researching vendors that can provide the features that you need.
Step #2: Research Your Options
Not every texting service is the same, so it's essential to look at each one and compare it to your company's needs.
For example, some applications — like Whatsapp — provide excellent two-way communication, but they fail to offer a way to mass text your customers. If this is something your business requires, these apps won't be a good fit for you.
There are also options for companies who want the ability to mass deliver text messages with software like EZTexting. EZTexting offers mass texting and one-to-one, but you can only run one company per account. If you have multiple companies, this software might be more difficult to use.
Weigh each provider against your list of requirements and make a decision that suits your needs. With Atlantech Online, we offer SMS as an additional feature to our current Unified Communications platform. You can call us today to add SMS to your plan.
Step #3: Select Your Platform
Now that you've done your research, all you have left to do is select your platform.
What weighs heaviest with your company's needs? Do you want the ability just to read a message when someone texts you? If so, finding the cheapest option will work just fine.
But if you want to harness the full power of SMS, you should select a platform that provides data so you can comprehensively strategize your approach. A robust system will give you the ability to:
- Archive texts so that your history is searchable.
- Provide automated bot capabilities.
- Allow multiple people in your company to send texts.
- Give you the ability to send texts from multiple locations.
As long as you have business lines, most services can connect and give you texting options. However, if you already have a Unified Communications platform, you should consider it a first option for SMS, so all communication resources are together.
SMS for Business Communication with Atlantech
Business texting isn’t a trend — it’s here to stay. SMS messaging, in its current form, was born in 1995. It hit the mainstream around 2006. In the past decade alone, texting volume has increased by nearly 8,000% percent.
Adopting SMS texting capabilities for your company does not need to be costly or complicated. At Atlantech, it's as easy as adding the service to your existing Unified Communications account.
There is nothing extra to purchase or hardware to install. You can log into your account and quickly turn on the service.
We offer cloud-based text messaging to receive and respond to messages that have been sent to their business phone lines. Atlantech offers SMS for business communication and makes setup as easy as flipping a switch.
