It's impossible to imagine life without a smartphone. In today's fast-paced world of 30-minute delivery and queue-less customer service, it is no surprise that businesses are looking at SMS communication to interact with their customers. Text messaging or texting is fast, cost-effective, reliable, has a high read rate of 98%, transcends all geographical boundaries, and is delivered instantly.
SMS texting empowers businesses to communicate with their customers instantly. Not just that. SMS texting allows you to tailor your messages for each and every customer. Translating to an enhanced customer experience.
At Girikon, we recognize that in today’s fiercely competitive landscape, when customers have so many options for products and services, customer satisfaction is a key differentiator. GirikSMS, our Bulk SMS messaging platform, is backed by our decade-long partnership with Salesforce. With GirikSMS, you can re-imagine your customer service strategy and engage customers in a way you have never done before.
What Are the Benefits of the GirikSMS Customer Service Platform?
Customers hate long hold times, delayed responses, and multiple email threads. With GirikSMS, you get a high degree of efficiency and convenience in your customer service.
Easy Opt-in and Opt-out: Before you launch any Bulk SMS campaign, you need to acquire consent from your recipients. With GirikSMS, customers can choose what type of messages they want to receive from your business so that they have complete control over their engagement with your brand. All via texting.
Wide Reach: With GirikSMS Bulk SMS, you can reach thousands of customers instantly. Send relevant messages at the right time to ensure maximum outreach.
Happy Customers: Research says that two-thirds of people prefer texting over calls and email. With GirikSMS, you can communicate with your customers in the way they want to.
Fast Responses: With a high read rate of 98% within 15 minutes, and a 40% response rate, with GirikSMS you can ensure that your messages are seen and acted upon quickly.
Build Relationships: SMS allows you to connect with customers on a personal level. With GirikSMS, your communication can resonate with your brand’s personality.
Automate: With Salesforce SMS integration, GirikSMS can leverage your CRM data and workflows to automate outbound Salesforce text messaging and record responses in your CRM.
Cost-Effective: Bulk SMS from GirikSMS is far more cost-effective compared to traditional marketing methods. With competitive pricing and the ability to reach a large audience instantly, GirikSMS significantly improves the return on investment for businesses.
Personalization: GirikSMS can be integrated with your Salesforce CRM, which means you can personalize every message based on customer data and their needs and preferences. Personalization helps you to build stronger relationships with your customers.
Code-less implementation: GirikSMS comes with an intuitive point-and-click interface, so you can launch your first SMS campaign in minutes.
Here are some of the ways in which GirikSMS can optimize customer service for your business:
Run Customer Feedback Campaigns
Customer feedback is vital to know their interest and confidence in your brand. It helps businesses to re-imagine their strategies to strengthen customer relationships. With GirikSMS you can easily launch campaigns to solicit their feedback, log their satisfaction levels, and learn about their interests and preferences. With GirikSMS, you can also create multi-optional polls to collect their feedback on a particular product or service they purchased from you.
Make Your Customers Feel That You Value Them
With GirikSMS, you can leverage your CRM data to send timely updates, like order confirmations, shipment tracking notifications, appointment reminders, instructional messages, and links to videos and articles to use your product and more. With GirikSMS, you can keep your customers informed and engaged throughout the product or service lifecycle. With personalized messaging and seeking their feedback, you demonstrate that you value their input and are committed to continuously improving your offerings.
Offers and Promotions
With GirikSMS, businesses can send tailored offers, discounts, or promotional codes to thousands of customers instantly. And all of this can be automated and personalized within your CRM. With GirikSMS you can always keep your customers engaged, drive sales, and build loyalty and confidence in your brand.
Automate Customer Support
Industry data indicates that almost 80% of customer support queries are routine cases. With GirikSMS AI-powered Chatbots, you can automate responses to these queries to deliver instant resolution to common concerns and free up agent time to focus on more complex customer issues. If the Chatbot cannot resolve the customer's concern after the exchange of a few messages, it can automatically route the conversation to the right agent. Not only does this allow you to scale your customer service operations quickly, but also builds customer confidence with quick resolution to their concerns.
Send Digital Receipts
In today’s paperless era, with GirikSMS, businesses can send digital receipts for every transaction via SMS. Digital receipts are fast, secure, and cost-effective. And these transaction receipts can always be coupled with discount codes so that customers keep coming back for more.
Best Practices for Bulk SMS Services:
Before launching a Bulk SMS campaign, it is important to look at a few pointers to ensure you are doing the right things the right way.
Obtain consent: Acquire the recipient's consent before sending bulk SMS messages. Consent-based customer service ensures compliance and maintains a positive brand image.
Targeted Messaging: If you are a Salesforce customer, you have likely segmented your customers based on demographics, interests, preferences, and purchase history. GirikSMS can leverage this customer segmentation data to send relevant and tailored messages. This improves the efficacy of communication and improves customer engagement.
Clear and Concise Content: SMS messages have a character limit. It is therefore important for your message to be clear and to the point. With GirikSMS, you can easily create templates based on business cases and send concise, tailored messages to deliver the intended information effectively.
Timing: Send your Bulk SMS messages at a time when they are most likely to be read within minutes. With GirikSMS you can schedule outbound Bulk SMS messages based on your audience location and time zone to maximize the likelihood of them being read quickly.
Test and Analyze: While Bulk SMS can be a very effective customer service and marketing tool, it is equally important to continuously track and analyze the performance of your campaigns. GirikSMS makes that possible. With GirikSMS you can easily track open rates, click-through rates, and conversions to refine your communication strategy and improve results.
Businesses of all sizes recognize that exceptional customer service holds the key to stability and growth. Customer service directly impacts brand value, customer loyalty, and sales. And with integration with Salesforce, GirikSMS-powered SMS from Salesforce gives you an invaluable tool to quickly scale up customer service and deliver enhanced customer service experiences.
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Those who have been using Salesforce are likely to understand its intrinsic value of helping organizations manage their customer relationships. One of the most essential components of this process is managing customer communication. However, an important aspect of this process is managing customer communication. While Salesforce empowers you to connect with their customers, recognizing the best SMS App is crucial as text messaging is one of the most effective ways of communicating with existing and prospective customers.
A communication strategy is required when using Salesforce as it helps inform how organizations can connect with their customers. SMS messaging can play a significant role in that communication strategy as it’s a communication tactic that can help organizations in numerous ways, including:
Follow-Up with Leads: Text messaging (SMS) can go a long way in developing a long-term relationship with prospects by initiating a conversation with prospects, and customers, and promising leads who have yet to make a purchase while resolving their queries.
A Touchpoint for Feedback: It’s important to solicit customer feedback once you have served your customers. Positive customer feedback will enable you to display those traits to potential customers by using them as testimonials. SMS is a perfect way to reach out to your contacts and gather customer feedback. You can ask open-ended questions to probe your customers about their experience and the next steps to be undertaken.
Appointment Reminders for Re-scheduling and Cancellation: When you’re in a service business, it’s likely that you’ll require setting up appointments with your customer. It’s important to remind them about these appointments as they might forget about these appointments due to their busy schedule time and again. This can be problematic as missed meetings might leave your employees in the lurch. With SMS, it’s possible to keep customers with appointments on track. This increases the likelihood of customers making an appointment, making your business more effective. To make it simple for recipients, you can use a link in your text message so that they can reschedule or cancel the appointment as per their requirements.
Reminders for Deals and Discounts: SMS is a quick and convenient way of creating awareness among your target audiences when you are offering deals and discounts. These messages should be helpful to individuals if proper research has been done.
Features of an Ideal SMS App for Salesforce
Integration of Marketing Software: A robust App is required to align your text message campaign with your marketing campaigns if you are using different marketing software.
Ability to Send Bulk or Individual Messages: An ideal Salesforce SMS App has the ability to send messages in bulk to multiple recipients, as well as messages to an individual recipient with a personalized approach.
Storing Conversations: Storing conversations will allow everyone within a company to pick up right from the point conversation was left off. This makes it clear where a customer is w.r.t their interaction with your business. This allows organizations to serve their customers in a better way.
Quick and Easy to Set up: The SMS platform in question should be intuitive, easy to set up, and customizable. In case the platform is difficult to set up, it might cost your business time and money.
Quick Wrap-up:
A modern approach is required to connect with customers in this era. SMS allows you to effectively interact with your clients in a personalized way. By integrating SMS APP with Salesforce, it’s possible to reach the right audience while your marketing, sales, and support teams can interact from within a single platform.
Before we dive into how SMS from Salesforce can drive hiring, let us understand how SMS works and what can do it to engage prospects and customers.
What is SMS marketing?
In general, SMS marketing or text marketing, implies an opt-in stage for customers to choose how they wish to be contacted. This is where users either leave their phone number on a web form to choose how they wish to be contacted or send an SMS message or short text to an automated system to receive future updates, discount coupons, or any other information they have chosen to receive directly on their mobile device. When the customer leaves a phone number or sends the initial message, an automated marketing software solution saves the customer’s phone number in a database. Marketers use an automated SMS marketing system to send relevant marketing information to these users as and when they choose. Users of course retain the right to opt out of these marketing messages at any time.
What benefits does SMS marketing offer?
One of the biggest benefits of SMS marketing is that people are more willing to trust text over any other type of marketing channel. SMS or text messages are non-intrusive and do not pose any security threat. SMS marketing messages have a very high open rate when compared to email marketing making it one of the most effective marketing methods available.
Another key advantage of SMS marketing is that it enables you to engage with prospects or customers quickly. Response times to SMS messages can be less than a few minutes, compared to several hours or even days that it takes in the case of email. Industry research suggests that people have their phones with them most of the day, which means it is very likely they will see a text message within a few minutes of receiving it.
How can businesses utilize SMS marketing?
SMS marketing is not just about sending text messages. It can be interactive in nature and if you want to tap into new prospects or upsell to existing customers, there are some best practices that you can follow.
Deliver value
Text messaging is non-intrusive and personal. Generally speaking, most people exchange text messages with friends, colleagues and relatives. So, if they have chosen you to be a part of that circle, then you need to make your interaction with them worthy of that invitation. Segment your audience based on relevant parameters such as prospects or customers, geography and age groups, build your messaging content and send only relevant messages. When your audience sees a text from you, they will be inclined to open it.
Similarly, deliver exclusive messaging content for the deals and information you provide. If your audience gets the same messaging content in your emails, ads, or your website, the text messages lose their value. Ensure that opting in makes sense to your audience.
Pay attention to timing
When is the best time to reach out to your prospects and customers? Probably not during regular working hours, especially if your business isn’t even operational during those times. And you are not operational on weekends, then the same rule applies for those off days. Track the periods when your users are most active on your mobile app or site to establish the ideal times to send messages for pushing promotions and other information. Moreover, ensure that when users opt in for your text alerts and notifications, your system sends an immediate acknowledgement. If customers opt in and but don’t hear from you for long periods, they are more likely to lose interest.
Track results and act upon them
If you want your SMS marketing campaigns to be effective, you need to keep track of how it’s doing. Track how many customers opt-out with every incoming message and use that to ascertain what type of content generates the best results.
Applying SMS Marketing in Salesforce to hiring
On many occasions, manpower requirements in organizations are sporadic and immediate. Hiring of a qualified workforce in a brief period of time is one of the most challenging tasks that HR managers have to deal with. To fulfil these imminent requirements, organizations and recruitment firms need to have a quick and effective recruitment process in place to close job openings within a fixed period. This is where SMS Salesforce for recruitment can be a game-changer and transform the entire recruitment process. Here’s how businesses and recruitment firms can incorporate SMS messaging in their recruitment process and fast track it.
SMS Salesforce for recruitment
Check Job Status of Prospective Candidates with SMS Salesforce for recruitment
Before reaching out to any prospective candidate, it’s important to be aware of their job status. This would help prevent unnecessary expenses incurred in reaching out to irrelevant candidates. With bulk SMS messaging, organizations can send text messages to millions in one go and check if a prospective candidate is looking for a job or job change. This is just one of the ways to use SMS Salesforce for recruitments at scale.
Run Surveys to Deliver Relevant Job Postings to Prospects
The more you know about your prospective candidates, the more effective your outbound campaigns would be to hire the relevant candidates. It allows you to send relevant job openings to your prospects. With SMS Salesforce you can run an automated campaign of a series of text messages to run surveys and automate the process of candidate profiling. Moreover, you can segment prospective candidates based on parameters such as years of experience, annual remuneration, work profile and location and create targeted lists. And you can send the most relevant job openings to the candidates on these lists.
Schedule Interviews with URLs
Once candidates evince interest in the job openings, you can request for their resumes for screening. Following that, using automated SMS messaging from Salesforce, you can send regular status updates about their job application. And to add to this outbound messaging, you can send a web URL to schedule interviews.
Send Confirmation Texts
By sending URLs in your SMS messages for scheduling calls or interviews, you give the necessary convenience to your candidates to apply at their convenience and trim the time and effort associated with repetitive manual calling. Once a prospect provides a convenient date and time, you can automatically send a confirmation message and avoid any confusion later.
Send Reminders and cut down on No-Shows
No-shows for scheduled interviews lead to wastage of time and effort of HR managers, recruitment firms and interviewers. Salesforce SMS APP for recruitment can help in reducing candidate no-shows. Automated reminder text messages can be sent to remind candidates of their upcoming interviews.
Share Results of Interviews
Once an interview is over, candidates are eager to know the result. Recruiters and managers are inundated with calls and messages from candidates to share results. SMS from Salesforce allows recruiters to trigger SMS texts to send out the results automatically as the status of candidates changes from interviewed to selected. This saves a significant amount of manual work and time for recruiters.
Collect Documentation for Onboarding
Not only SMS, but now even WhatsApp has also become an important channel for effective communication. Now recruiters can collect all relevant documents through WhatsApp. This allows them to simplify the process of document collection and complete the onboarding.
Accelerate your hiring process and close job openings with SMS from Saslesforce
Recruitment is a time bound activity. And needs a fast and efficient process for being effective. SMS Salesforce for recruitment empowers recruiters to connect with candidates faster at every stage of the hiring process. They also cut back on calls and emails normally associated with the recruitment process. Moreover, it allows recruitment firms to close the open job openings within specified timelines.
To know more about how Girikon can utilise the power of SMS Salesforce to accelerate your recruitments, talk to one of our experts today.
In today’s competitive business landscape, it isn’t easy for customer-facing teams to manage their customer relationship without the help of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software. Besides managing customer relationships, a powerful CRM can help in achieving operational and business process efficiency. This explains why many organizations, irrespective of their size, use a robust CRM.
However, to maximize their ability to reach and engage with leads, organizations should leverage a CRM integrated texting App that can provide them with features that cannot be provided by individual text marketing software. One such CRM integrated messaging App is the Smart SMS App built natively on the Salesforce platform.
The robust App offers a wide array of advantages over regular SMS services. By leveraging such a Salesforce texting App, organizations tend to add automated text messaging to their ongoing marketing strategies and tactics, which will pave the way for better customer engagement and more closed sales deals.
By integrating text messaging in their CRM, brands can benefit in several ways:
It allows brands to use cross-channel marketing differently.
It paves the way for multi-channel marketing, allowing brands to attract and convert new customers while retaining existing ones.
It ensures that the right message is sent to the right user at the right time.
Brands can segment their client base and send tailored and targeted messages to every client, depending on their purchase history.
A CRM integrated SMS App will ensure improved customer relationships as the SMS functionality assures better chances of connecting and selling.
A CRM integrated SMS App will help organizations improve their brand awareness. It will become easy for customers to forward promotional messages to people in their group who might become customers.
By leveraging a CRM SMS App, organizations can send reminders for meetings, appointments, and deadlines to customers and sales reps. This will saves time and money while improve the overall efficiency of the organization.
Quick Wrap-up:
There are several other benefits of CRM SMS integration other than those mentioned here. Such an App is a crucial addition to your brand and business in general. So, if you wish to place your business at the forefront, it’s essential to include one of the Best SMS App for Salesforce as a part of your marketing campaign, which can take your business communication to a new level.
In this internet-driven era, customers prefer quicker and personalized communication, which can be made possible with a mobile app solution. From providing timely assistance to answering queries and sending personalized offers, a mobile app can help organizations be there for their customers when they need the most. Though text messaging is one of the most effective modes of communication, it becomes more effective when integrated with a robust CRM like Salesforce.
One such Salesforce SMS App is the Smart SMS App that empowers users to enjoy multi-channel conversations with bulk messaging, two-way messaging, personalized communication, messaging templates, and more. Listed below are some of the benefits of the Salesforce Text Messaging App and why businesses should consider installing them:
Engage Customers Globally: A Salesforce integrated SMS App can empower users to improve customer engagement and reach global reach through personalized SMS. Since people are usually on their phones most of the time, reading the message is very high. Moreover, service reps are also empowered to provide better customer experiences irrespective of where customers are.
Improved Read rate: Since text messaging offers a read rate of 98%, it is a great way to ensure that customers read your message as it leaves behind email marketing.
Know your customers better: Users can get feedback from their customers through surveys. Research conducted reveals that about 31% of customers respond to surveys through text.
Empower Businesses: The robust App empowers the marketing, sales, and customer service team to deliver an outstanding customer experience. Being a Salesforce integrated App, users no longer need a third-party application to run their SMS efforts as they even manage their messages directly from channels here.
How does SMS Apps work with Salesforce?
Salesforce integrated SMS messages can be used to ensure agent-to-customer conversations through automated methods such as bots and campaigns. Users can now set up long code channels to send a message to their company, and their agents can reply from the Service Console. In case they wish to one-time alerts and recurring messages, they require setting-up short-code channel.
Essential Features:
Salesforce integrated Apps are helpful for all types of businesses as it enables a more effective communication channel. It allows users to automate triggered SMS while customizing the responses.
Multi-channel Integration: This App helps users manage all the messages coming from different platforms in a single platform. It can connect seamlessly to other communication apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, MMS, and more.
Global Reach: The App allows users to SMS to customers across the globe, which is a cost-effective way of communicating with users.
Two-way Sending: The App allows the sending and receiving of messages within your Salesforce platform.
Message Scheduler: The App allows the scheduling of messages, which gets disbursed to intended recipients at the scheduled date and time.
SMS Messaging Templates: The App has in-built message templates that any team member can customize without much hassle.
Final Words:
In a nutshell, it can be inferred that it makes sense to Send SMS from Salesforce to the targeted audience to take customer communication to a new level. When customers are engaged, sales deals are closed more easily.
Effective business communication is the cornerstone of every business undertaking. Today, there is no dearth of internet-driven communication tools that can ensure effective communication compared to yesteryears. However, SMS (Short Messaging Services) is a preferred mode of communication due to its excellent penetration effect, more open rates, and cost-effectiveness. When integrated with a robust CRM platform like Salesforce, the messaging platform offers advanced features to take business communication to a new level. In fact, the integration of the SMS App with Salesforce paves the way for automated texting, which helps businesses with faster and time-saving business processes.
Smart SMS app is a Salesforce messaging App built natively on the Salesforce platform and leveraged by organizations to communicate effectively with their customers through single/Bulk SMS/MMS. The powerful App has gained much respect due to its versatility, easy access, and handling. Listed below are some ways in which automated texting can help transform business communication:
Simultaneous Conversations: A mundane routine for communication isn’t sufficient to fill the lead pipeline quickly. This is because employees can access a limited number of prospects in the absence of automated testing. However, with automated texting, agents can get into multiple conversations. This will help them to attract several leads from different directions using various conversational routines.
Meaningful interactions: One way of automating texts is through message rescheduling. This helps in sending the messages at a preferred date and time. When messages are sent at the right time, more meaning is added to any conversation. To reduce manual intervention, users can schedule time-sensitive messages beforehand while determining whether they wish to send them weekly, monthly, or annually. To follow up with unresponsive leads, marketing, and onboarding of students, users can organize SMS drip campaigns.
Support Services: Chatbots are an essential aspect of automated testing. Users require configuring a few commonly asked questions, following which they can allocate an appropriate response to an incoming response with the desired keyword. In this way, users can design chatbots for different cases while providing round-the-clock support to their prospects and customers.
Reduce Manual Involvement: Automated texting opens doors of opportunities to pave the way for self-driven interactions. This frees up time for employees as they can prioritize other essential business activities such as prospecting. Besides this, organizations can accelerate the process of interaction, assist their customers, and improve their overall experience through meaningful conversations.
Quick Wrap Up:
These are how a Salesforce texting App can benefit organizations significantly by taking their business communication to the next level. So, if you wish to better connect with your customers, you must consider automated testing as part of your business strategy.
Businesses across all industries have realized the significance of integrating a robust CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform within their business ecosystem. With a powerful CRM in place, organizations can efficiently manage their customer relationships while enjoying operational efficiency by streamlining processes. Though, cloud-based CRM like Salesforce enjoys a great adoption rate by businesses of all sizes, most of them aren’t aware of the different beneficial integrations they could make use of.
One such integration that can boost organizational performance significantly includes the integration of messaging apps with CRM systems and the Smart SMS app is the perfect example of Salesforce SMS integration.
What is meant by SMS CRM integration?
CRM SMS integration happens when your business messaging platform and CRM system are unified via their APIs. With this integration, the two platforms can interact with one another, allowing them to share and sync data. This integration can enable organizations to:
Text Customers directly from the CRM System: For doing this, users need to click on the phone number listed by the customer’s name following which a widget or a chat window will pop up. The customer’s name and the number will get populated automatically in the window allowing users to send messages immediately.
Sync Contacts: With SMS CRM integration, CRM systems no longer have to function in a silo. For instance, if any sort of modification is done in the contacts and custom fields of a CRM system, the changes will automatically get updated in the messaging platform and vice-versa. Some major messaging platforms can enter SMS into a CRM for maintaining additional records and can be useful if dashboards, reports, or machine learning capabilities are built-in within a CRM.
Add SMS to your CRM workflows: Premium CRM systems like Salesforce have robust workflow features like SFA (Sales force automation), email drip campaigns, and more. With such integration, text messaging can be included in the workflows as a trigger.
What Makes Smart SMS App Preferred Choice of Customers?
The Smart SMS app is a robust Salesforce messaging app that is 100% built natively on the Salesforce platform. The app empowers organizations to personalize their communication, streamline workflows, and eventually improve customer service by reaching out to them quickly and with advanced features. Here are some of the unique features that this robust and easily implementable app offers. Let’s take a quick look:
SMS Automation through Workflow: The sending of SMS can be automated by using a simple workflow configuration. By sending automated messages, the workflow can be simplified, which reduces the burden on the users/ sales reps resulting in an improved bottom line.
Send SMS/MMS in Bulk: Users can leverage this feature to send individual or bulk SMS/MMS in a batch of 200 from ListView on button click or using SMS/MMS interface.
SMS scheduler: Sales reps can schedule the sending of messages (promotional, welcome, etc.) to customers based across different geographies and time zone. To schedule the sending of messages at a desired time and date, Sales reps would have to enter the name and the number of the intended recipient along with the date and time. At the scheduled date and time, the SMS automatically gets disbursed without the need for any manual intervention.
SMS Template: This feature can be used to create, modify, and use SMS templates easily by using any of the objects and associated fields.
Final Words:
An SMS CRM integrated platform can be a powerful addition to any business. By enabling teams to leverage the contacts and reach out to them in an automated fashion but with a personalized touch will help organizations to improve their customer service, as well as their bottom line significantly.