Five Reasons Why Companies Aren't Texting

The Challenges of Business SMS No One Talks About

The highest-preferred communication channel, text messages are 134% more likely to be read than emails. Yet, only 39% of companies use SMS to communicate with customers or prospects.

Furthermore, only 13% of businesses enable recipients to respond to their SMS messages.

On the flip side, 78% of customers wish they could have a text conversation with a business.

What is the disconnect here?

Five Challenges of Business SMS

At Verse, SMS is our specialty—and we understand the many complexities that come with effective SMS strategies. Here are the five most common challenges that keep companies from texting.

Volume of Work

The two-way SMS communications that customers want require substantial labor, financial investment, and staff increases for businesses.

For a call center, texting differs from calls because:

• Employees need to juggle multiple SMS conversations at once.
• Customers may take hours or seconds to reply, and the employee must be ready to answer quickly or hop on the phone if the customer wants to speak.
• Speed to lead is measured over multiple texts (rather than a single call).
• Text conversations don’t have a set beginning or end like a phone call.

Texting is unlike a call where the call is over, and employees can move on to the next. With SMS communications, employees must monitor the conversation, sometimes over hours or days, to ensure speedy replies.

As far as speed to lead: if the ideal response time is five minutes, this can be measured per call. With texts, this is (on average) multiplied by 8 for a qualified lead, because qualified leads take on average 8 SMS replies before they’re qualified.

Now you’re measuring speed to lead 8x as much!

Workforce Management

Even if call centers are staffed with the adequate number of employees to handle texting manually, then come the challenges of training, scripting, and quality assurance.

Strategic management for texting includes SMS-specific:

• Training, including expectations for speed to reply and how responses should sound.?
• Scripting, including standardized written responses and guidelines for a large variety of scenarios.
• Quality assurance, including preparing for mistakes and enacting protocol for when these inevitably occur.

SMS Compliance for Businesses

While compliance is vital for all legal and respectful communications, SMS compliance is often the least-understood and most overlooked.

However, 44% of firms using SMS marketing are unfamiliar with the TCPA.

The TCPA, Telephone Consumer Protection Act, regulates telephone and text communications, with violations racking up fines of up to $20,000 each.

TCPA and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) guidelines have strict opt-in and opt-out rules that companies must abide by, or risk reputational and financial damages.?

The basics of upholding SMS compliance include:

• Understanding TCPA guidelines, including state “mini” TCPAs
• Gaining permission via opt-in forms
• Allowing subscribers to easily opt-out
• Not texting subscribers outside the hours of 8am-9pm (these can vary in certain states)
• Never texting spam
• Protecting subscriber data

Companies often don’t want to deal with the hassle of keeping up with regulatory guidelines, or risk violating them. Compliance is a big reason why companies just don’t text you.

Deliverability?

Carriers and deliverability go hand-in-hand with compliance. Failure to comply with carrier regulations can reduce SMS deliverability.?

The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA), can lead carriers to discontinue and block the texting services of businesses that refuse to comply with them.?

Because businesses do not have any visibility into whether their text messages are delivered or not, they must pay attention to carrier guidelines and aim to create good relationships with carriers.

If they don’t, they could be spending money on messages that are not even reaching customers.

Like with compliance, this is both a hassle and a risk that companies may not be equipped to handle.

Optimization

Because of the personal nature of SMS, it’s vital that texts are personalized, which can be very difficult for businesses. Customers don’t want to be talked at, they want to talk with your business. No one enjoys a one-way marketing blast.

This is why over 77% of marketers rate their SMS marketing sophistication level as average or below average. It’s a big struggle with text messaging, but if companies fail to do it, they could be going through all the other steps for a lackluster payoff.

Effective SMS strategies:

• Enable two-way texting for interactive and authentic communication with customers.
• Personalize marketing messaging based on known customer information.
• Use geographic data to text customers at the right time in their time zone.?
• Keep messages short, sweet, and personalized.
• Never trigger spam filters—which can be harder than people think. Brands must stay away from overusing CAPS, emojis, and exclamation marks. Messages also cannot contain certain words; for example, “free”, “urgent”, or “cash” can set off a filter.
• Incorporate multimedia messaging service (MMS), including images, gif, or videos, for marketing messages.

Why Companies Should Start Texting

Despite all the challenges that come with SMS strategy, it can be well worth it. When it comes to sales and marketing strategy, as well as customer experience, it’s difficult to understate the benefits of SMS.?

While email’s average open rates hover around 20%, SMS open rates are around 98%. SMS is the most-preferred channel, available from the convenience of a smartphone.

91% of customers want to receive text messages from businesses and 58% of consumers say texting is the best way for businesses to reach them.

Compared to emails, text messages are 134% more likely to be read.

In a survey, 63% of people would switch to a company that offered text messaging as a communication channel.

90% of texts are read within 30 minutes of receipt.?

Overcoming the Challenges of SMS

There is an easy, hassle-free way to overcome the challenges that come with SMS and reap all of the benefits. One simple way to do it all is Verse.ai’s fully-managed, human and AI-enabled, SMS platform.

Since our platform is fully-managed, we handle all of the work that comes with SMS so you don’t have to. In addition, we handle compliance for you with a team of compliance experts who already have great carrier relationships.

We help with scripting, deliverability monitoring, message content, and SMS best practices. Our platform is AI-enabled, and includes a full team of human concierges for quality assurance.

Don’t wait to get started with SMS. Verse is here to help.

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Verse is an AI-powered text messaging platform that combines customizable AI with human quality control to ensure authentic conversations that convert. Our AI automatically engages, qualifies, and books appointments with your leads—and we take care of compliance for you.