You’re ready to move to the next stage in a big collaborative project for your department, but you’re still waiting on a response to the email you sent your coworkers two days ago. Even worse, you’re all remote—and you don’t have a better way to reach out than to send another follow-up email.
You might have been there before. You might even be in a similar situation right now. How can you stop it from happening again?
Using enterprise SMS messaging solutions for internal communication can be a major productivity booster and team builder. Don’t believe us? Let’s explore some of the biggest benefits of using SMS for communicating with employees.
1. Better Employee Engagement
Although email is the gold standard for most internal and external business communications, employees often ignore them. Most employees’ inboxes are already inundated with emails, and there often isn’t enough time to sift through them all.
SMS text messages, however, have a 98% open rate. And personalized text messages boost engagement even more by making employees feel like you’re speaking to them directly.
This method is especially effective for younger employees, who tend to prefer texting to other channels of communication. Gen Z employees, for example, are far more likely to send a quick text than they are to call or leave a voicemail.
It’s also useful for reaching people who don’t work in an office, like remote and deskless workers. Sending a quick message to their phone keeps them in the loop without requiring them to be in their inboxes constantly, which allows them to focus completely on the task at hand.
2. Easier Collaboration
While constant communication is one of the most important components of group work, it can be a challenge to stay in touch with your team members when they only check their email once or twice daily.
Today, though, 97% of Americans own a cell phone. SMS is almost universally accessible, and unlike most cloud-based instant messaging tools, it doesn’t require anyone to download additional software to their phones.
Plus, you can include links to web-based documents and forms so your team members can vote on important decisions and stay up to date on what everyone is doing in your shared documents.
It’s especially useful for inter-departmental collaboration, as reaching team members you don’t normally work with can be more difficult when you’re relying on email or specialized business communication apps.
3. Cost Savings
An integrated SMS solution can help your company reduce operating expenses by simplifying communication and streamlining your tech stack.
Text messages only cost a few cents to send—and with their high open and response rates, you can make a fast return on investment (ROI). Additionally, you don’t need to subscribe to any costly business communication apps to get started.
More effective communication can boost your company’s profitability by eliminating bottlenecks that slow vital operations. And faster work completion means better revenue generation, which can help you grow your business and expand your offerings.
4. Enhanced Productivity and Efficiency
Without an efficient internal communication system, important messages can easily get trapped in employees’ inboxes—which can lead to missed deadlines and frustrated teams.
Enterprise SMS solutions can help you boost your company’s overall productivity by:
- Improving convenience: You can automate your internal texts to go out at specific times or create templates to send in response to employee questions, reducing the time you need to spend drafting emails.
- Streamlining responses: Unlike emails, SMS messages must be short and to the point. Employees can read and respond to a text faster, eliminating communication bottlenecks.
- Alerting recipients: Depending on the user’s specific settings, a text message might arrive with a vibration or a brief tone. This sound helps catch the recipient’s attention, improving their chances of opening it.
Sample Use Cases for Internal SMS Solutions
So, how can you incorporate an employee text messaging system into your company? Here are some examples:
- Scheduling changes: A text alert system for employees can help you quickly find coverage when people must miss work due to family emergencies, illness or other unexpected circumstances.
- Meeting reminders: Whether it’s a department meeting, a conference call, an upcoming project deadline or a process update, sending SMS reminders can help your employees remember important information, such as schedule changes or company events.
- Human resources: HR teams can use your internal SMS solution to efficiently manage schedule conflicts, send training and onboarding updates to new hires, and even inform your staff of new vacancies and promotion opportunities.
- Tech support: Your IT department can use SMS messaging to text employees when their tickets are resolved so they can keep downtime at a minimum.
- Employee surveys: Automated SMS messages make gathering feedback about the employee experience easy. Attach a link to a short, web-based questionnaire and watch the responses roll in.
Why Use a Business SMS Solution?
So why do you need a dedicated employee text alert system? Why not use a group messaging app with your personal phone number?
The answer is simple. Using a solution that assigns a dedicated business numbers to a user or group of users helps you:
- Protect your information: Using a business phone number makes it easier to secure personal and business information, if an employee leaves the business, the phone number stays, along with the messages sent and received on that number.
- Eliminate communication silos: A unified system that connects various devices and departments enables complete transparency and visibility across your organization, eliminating information gaps and making it easier to stay in touch when specific employees are unavailable.
- Maintain work-life balance: With a dedicated business number, employees can mentally clock out after work hours and return to their jobs the next day feeling refreshed and recharged.
An integrated solution like Red Oxygen enables you to text employees from multiple devices and applications, including Gmail, web browsers and Office 365. Plus, bulk SMS capabilities allow you to send personalized text blasts for easy information distribution across your entire department or organization.
Try Enterprise SMS Solutions From Red Oxygen
With so many benefits, you may wonder what to do next. Choosing the right SMS provider is the final step to getting started. Your company can improve collaboration, boost productivity and even cut costs with integrated SMS solutions from Red Oxygen.
We have decades of experience developing enterprise SMS service solutions, so you can count on us to help you implement an internal solution that meets your company’s unique needs.
Want to see the power of business SMS for yourself? Request your free trial of Red Oxygen today!
