Here’s a not-so-fun fact: Appointment no-shows can cost small businesses over 21% of their potential revenue. While larger companies have the budget to offset the cost of no-shows, small businesses can’t afford these communication breakdowns. So how can business owners remedy this issue?
SMS is your secret weapon. Text messages have a whopping 98% open rate, with an average response time of around 90 seconds. (Eat your heart out, email!) In fact, our customer Triumph Motorcycles doubled their customer engagement rates by using RingCentral SMS.
From appointment reminders to promotions and order confirmations, SMS can help you effectively reach a significant chunk of your customers.
Here are five ways small businesses can use RingCentral Enhanced Business SMS to boost engagement with their customers, suppliers, and partners:
- Send a professional SMS from your computer
- Save time with group SMS
- Find messages in seconds with powerful search
- Pair text messaging with apps you already use
- Elevate customer care with SMS
5 powerful RingCentral SMS tips for any small business
1. Send text messages right from your computer
Drafting business SMS is much easier on a PC than a mobile device. That’s why in RingCentral, you can send and receive texts across all your devices, including smartphones, tablets, and PC.
For customer support teams, we suggest templating common responses in a shared Google document so your team can respond to customers faster and uniformly.
💥Pro-tip: Use RingCentral MVP to meet all your communication needs (calling, SMS, fax, team chat, video) all in one app.
2. Save time with group SMS
Group SMS is a quick way to reach multiple customers or partners at the same time. Let’s say you own a restaurant and need to constantly coordinate shipments from suppliers. Group SMS allows you to text a supplier’s entire team and inform them of your upcoming order details.
Group SMS is also critical for keeping your whole team in the know. For example, if there’s a sudden spike in traffic, your supplier can send group messages and give everyone a heads up.
💥Pro-tip: Reduce customer effort and boost convenience – It’s hard to beat the immediacy of a phone call. When customers are short on time, though, that’s where SMS comes in. Customers can use it to quickly get answers to their questions and resolve issues. And that’s all without being limited to your operating hours.
3. Find messages in seconds with powerful search
Sales agents handle many prospects and customers that require their attention at the same time. That means it’s hard to remember every single piece of information that’s exchanged in text messages, emails, and phone calls.
In RingCentral, you can easily search SMS in our app via keywords so you don’t have to worry about making notes on sales leads.
💥Pro-tip: Use a unified, trusted business number to reach your customers to maintain professional and secure communications and a unified SMS, calling and fax inbox to send, receive & manage all your SMS conversations with them in one place.
4. Pair text messaging with apps you already use
Plug RingCentral SMS into the apps your business uses daily with no additional setup or programming required.
For example, employees working in Microsoft Teams can leverage RingCentral Calling, SMS and Fax capabilities natively in Teams without switching apps. This reduces complexity for both IT and end users as they no longer need a separate service to send SMS, which isn’t offered natively by Microsoft.
💥Pro-tip: Extend your SMS capabilities even further with add-on solutions, available in RingCentral App Gallery, such as Akazio to Capture, store and search phone calls, SMS & Team Messaging in a secure cloud archive.
5. Elevate customer care with SMS
Having a holiday sale? Or perhaps you want to send appointment confirmations several days in advance? SMS integrations can help you with that.
Our prebuilt SMS integrations and APIs allow you to send thousands of personalized text messages to customers in mass marketing or customer engagement initiatives. For example, send automatic appointment reminders to customers before they come in, or notify them of promotions to get them into your store.
You’ll also want insights on your SMS campaigns too. Our SMS integration partners offer real-time data, such as the number of messages sent, timestamps, read receipts, and more that tells you how your texts perform. Use these to optimize your SMS strategy going forward.
💥Pro-tip: Integrate with BeeTexting to build out and manage SMS contact lists to send updates, notifications, alerts, or promotions. Easily add your recipients to multiple lists – and even set up advanced messaging rules to perfectly segment your customers.
Originally published Aug 18, 2022, updated Nov 03, 2023