Introduction

With 80% of people now saying text messaging is the best way to reach them and certain demographics (like those between the ages of 18-36) communicating almost entirely by text, it is clear that in order to best serve your audience you need to text them.

For many of the businesses and organizations we chat with, this means texting on a handheld device.

Owners of small businesses or organizations may opt to use their own personal devices and larger organizations often obtain multiple hand help devices for staff to use and/or share.

Unfortunately, using handheld devices for business texting is not ideal for most businesses or organizations.

This article will address the 5 reasons why you should never conduct business texting with a handheld device and explain how the CONNECTsms desktop texting application can help overcome them.

Let’s get started.

Reason #1: Loss of Personal Privacy

If you or your staff members are using a personal device to text your clients, you are giving away any chance at being able to distance yourself from your business.

Yes, your clients will enjoy having direct access to you, but some will take advantage of the situation.

Looking forward to a quiet evening at home? An uninterrupted Sunday morning with the family?

You can say goodbye to all that.

Some people will have no problem texting you at any time of the day or night, whether it’s weekday or weekend.

And you’ll be expected to answer immediately.

When you use CONNECTsms, this is no longer an issue.

You enjoy the flexibility of being able to reach your clients by text message, while at the same time preserving your privacy (and posibly your sanity!).

When you shut down for the day, your out of office autoresponder automatically kicks in, letting clients who text know that their messages have been received and you’ll get back to them during regular business hours.

Reason #2: Cost

If your business or organization is using staff cell phones to text your clients, then you know very well how expensive this is.

With CONNECTsms, you can enable all your staff or team members with the ability to text, but at a fraction of what it’s costing you to enable them with handheld devices.

CONNECTsms subscription fees are comprised of 2 costs: the volume of text messages you send and the number of “Users/Agents” you add to the system. The cost to empower a staff member with texting is roughly $5/month (that’s in Canadian dollars). How much is each cell phone costing you?

Reason #3: Oversight and Accountability

Most businesses or organizations have a series of policies governing their client communication practices.

But how do you maintain oversight over the conversations that your staff members are having and hold them accountable to your policies when these conversations are happening over a number of handheld devices?

Our CONNECTsms desktop texting software solves that problem as well.

It allows any User/Agent with adminstrator level access with the ability to review both the saved and ongoing text message conversations of any User/Agent on the system.

This can be done at any time, completely anonymously, without alerting your staff members.

Reason #4: Record Integrity

Before we developed CONNECTsms, we consulted with a number of businesses and organizations about the sort of features that would be most important to them in a desktop texting application.

What was the most important feature, as agreed upon by everyone?

To prevent the accidental or intentional deletion of text message conversations. To ensure message/conversation integrity for their records. 

To this end, CONNECTsms includes the option to disable your User/Agent’s ability to delete their conversations, whether they be active and ongoing, or “ended and archived.”

If record integrity isn’t a concern for you, you can enable your User/Agents to delete messages/conversations at their discretion.

Reason #5: Record Retrieval

Another big problem with using handheld devices for business texting is the difficulty you face when trying to obtain copies of critical conversations for your records or for your client managent software.

This issue is compounded when you’re trying to obtain records from multiple phones.

Not so with CONNECTsms.

It offers a number of ways to view, print or download your conversation records.

CONNECTsms: Why it’s the Perfect Solution for You.

CONNECTsms is already being used by many of your colleagues to send text messages to their contacts (see some of them here). Here’s why it’s also the perfect solution for you, too..

• It’s affordable (purchasing multiple phones for all staff members is simply not financially feasible).
• Sharing a handful of office phones between staff members isn’t efficient or practical.
• Sharing phones means your clients can’t have an expectation of privacy in
  conversations with case workers, since those messages are viewable by anyone
  with access to the phone.
• There’s no way to monitor messaging for compliance to communication policies.
• There’s no easy way to archive conversations or obtain records of them for your records.
• There’s no way to prevent messages from being deleted.

We also offer a 30-day unrestricted trial of the software so that you can confirm the software’s value to your organization.

To learn more, drop us an email (below) or book a call or a demo here.

For a one-page overview of the software, click here to download our PDF whitepaper.