Business Text Messaging During a Crisis
How prepared is your business to continue normal operations when a crisis strikes? Here’s the thing: Despite your best efforts to keep your business safe, it’s likely your business will experience a couple of crises during its lifetime.
According to a survey by the ODM group, 59% of business decision-makers reported experiencing a crisis in the current or previous company, and at least 79% of leaders believe they will get a crisis within the next couple of months.
During this pandemic period, communication for businesses has been a crucial part of their business continuity strategy. Not just communicating, but communicating well is just as important. The pandemic forced both businesses and government institutions to maintain operations, and that’s where business text messaging comes into play.
What Makes Business Text Messaging tick?
Accessibility
Due to the social distancing restrictions across most parts of the world, we now have more people staying and working from home before the advent of the pandemic.
With all the challenges people are going through at home, juggling office work and family tasks, it becomes evident that most people will less likely check their phones for emails or answer phone calls. Therefore, text messaging becomes the best medium for sending important messages.
Efficiency
People are quite responsive to text messages. It’s been reported that business texts have a response rate of up to 80%, and the average response time for a text is 90 seconds. With such a high response rate from users, it is possible to quickly resolve customer queries, ensuring that your customers are well catered for.
Personalized
During a crisis, people craze for personal connections, and business SMS solutions make it easy to personalize SMS messages on a large scale. This is how it works: Business SMS solutions can retrieve an individual’s data from custom fields such as Name, Age, Gender and insert that information into an SMs message. This enables your team to provide a highly personalized customer experience.
Best Practices For Business Text Messaging During a Crisis
Business text messaging stands tall as the ideal solution for texting during a crisis. However, there are several best practices that your business can embrace to make the experience better. For example, you should consider the following:
Stay Relevant
Don’t divert from the messaging theme your target audience subscribed to by opting in to be receiving your message, or else they will opt-out. During a crisis, people are generally scared, nervous, or concerned. Therefore, consider those emotions when sending them your content.
Be Responsive
During a crisis or pandemic, the business environment changes quickly due to government policy and restrictions; stores could open only for a few hours while others are temporarily closed. Therefore, strive to communicate with your subscribers on time. Use keyword-based auto-replies, which can help you manage incoming queries.
Respond to Queries 24/7
The beauty of business text messaging solutions is that you can respond after hours when your team is off work by setting up an auto-reply to respond after hours. You can set up the auto-reply feature to respond based on keywords. Many businesses use the auto-reply feature to provide answers to FAQs.
Personalize Content
During a crisis like the current pandemic, people have temporarily separated from their communities due to the numerous social distancing measures imposed by their respective governments. This results in people craving for that personal touch, which you can easily provide by inserting their customer’s name, using a natural tone in your SMS messages with them — a gesture that shows them they are engaging with a human being and not a bot.
Don’t Bombard Them with Texts
As businesses try to navigate and adjust to a new norm during a crisis, they will undoubtedly send many SMS messages to their customers. While it’s important to keep your customers updated, avoid bombarding them with SMS messages. Please keep it to a minimum.
Importance of Business Text Messaging During a Crisis
Business text messaging provides numerous benefits to businesses, more so during a crisis. Here are a couple of ways business text messaging adds value during a crisis:
Urgent Company Notifications
Important company announcements need to be shared quickly, such as closure notification, hours of operation adjustments, and business text messaging is your best bet to deliver these messages.
Send Order Notifications
Home deliveries will naturally increase due to lockdowns. Therefore, there will be a lot more orders than usual coming in, leading to delays. Keep your customers informed about their order status with quick SMS updates.
Answer customer questions
With so many changes, customers are bound to have many questions about your operations, deliveries, opening hours, etc. Business text messaging provides your business with an efficient way to answer questions and resolve customer problems.
Educate Your Customers How Your Product or Service
If you have a product or service relevant to your customer during the crisis, you may want to let customers know how it can help. Use a business text messaging solution to let your customers know how to use your product or service to make their lives easier.
MessagePost Can Help With Your Crisis Management Communication
No matter your business or industry, MessagePost’s easy-to-use SMS messaging platform can help in crisis management communication with timely, branded SMS messages with your company name, logo, tagline, and banner image.
MessagePost SMS messaging platform automatically formats phone numbers to ensure greater global delivery, and direct-to-carrier routes allow for high delivery and conversion rates.
Click here to learn more about MessagePost branded business text messaging solutions.
