What You Need to Know About Salesforce CRM Text Messaging

If your team is using Salesforce CRM, you should be taking every step possible to maximize its effectiveness. One of the most powerful ways to do this is with a 100% native SMS integration, as your team members can message directly from the Salesforce CRM application, send bulk or two-way SMS from Lead, Contact, and Opportunity records, with all message activity accurately recorded in Salesforce CRM.

This article will review many of the crucial advantages that come from integration, as well as some of the gotchas to keep in mind.

Using SMS Messages To Deliver Quality To Your Customers

SMS is an essential part of a customized communication strategy, as most modern customers prefer texting to email and other forms of communication. In fact, text messages have an average open rate of 98%, while emails have a 20% open rate. And the average response time for a text is 90 seconds.

With Salesforce CRM SMS integration, your team members will have the flexibility to reach each customer with their preferred method and communicate with them without needing to toggle between multiple windows, improving your organization’s communication efforts and customer satisfaction. To fully capture these benefits, and to avoid jeopardizing your security and reliability, the SMS integration must be truly native and built on the Salesforce CRM.

Connect Your Teams With Centralized Messaging

Salesforce is an excellent CRM solution, connecting multiple departments so they can be more efficient, collaborative, and successful. All these benefits are enhanced with SMS integration, as unnecessary friction is eliminated so your people are better able to focus on winning and retaining customers.

But just as Salesforce CRM SMS integration is collectively better for all customers because it allows you to connect better with them on the individual level, the interdepartmental benefits are made possible because of what it can do for each department’s specialized strategies.

Let’s look closer at how your teams can improve performance with 100% native SMS integration.

Marketing

Many marketing teams are limited in their ability to engage in two-way text communications, so mass one-way texting becomes the standard tactic. While this approach might be relatively efficient, the results are usually poor. Truly native Salesforce CRM text messaging enables bulk and two-way messaging, which improves efficiency while simultaneously boosting the quality.

True native features to consider include:

• Automation and workflows with Salesforce Flows
• Higher-performing APIs with limited bandwidth drain
• Automatic phone number validation
• Subscription management and tracking of Opt-In/Out
• Support for short codes

The only way to maximize these benefits and save money is to use a Salesforce CRM SMS integration that works directly with carriers, rather than requiring an additional messaging plan with a connectivity partner. When you’re operating at scale, you need that direct connection or else a middleman will consume a large portion of your budget and create many inefficiencies.

Integrated Sales

As you integrate your communications with Salesforce, your marketing team’s efforts feed right into your sales team. Assessing the customer’s journey is a breeze because every messaging detail is tracked within the activity timeline, so you can easily see who sent a message, as well as the date and time.

With 100% native Salesforce CRM SMS integration, your team is well positioned to:

• Seamlessly transition from mass texting to 1:1 dialogue.
• Conduct multi channel messaging (calls, emails, and SMS)
• Text via long and short codes

Customer Support

If you care about retention rates, you should care about the performance of your customer service team. Consider the fact that just one positive service interaction is enough to convert 86% of customers into brand champions. But when customers are forced to wait in an automated phone tree and repeat themselves to multiple agents, 62% of them report that the experience is so miserable they’d prefer to be “handing out parking tickets” instead.

Indeed, a smooth and personalized experience with your customer service team is essential to success. They are the most frequent point of contact between your organization and customer base, meaning they can often shape your reputation and influence decisions more than marketing and sales.

Did you know that 58% of customers are happy to pay more money for better customer service? This means that a streamlined customer service team is imperative when building customer-brand momentum. Added benefits include higher retention rates and more enthusiastic brand recommendations.

Of course, we all desire results like these. But remember the power of a single interaction: a positive experience can create an evangelist, while a negative one can lead customers straight to the competition.

Here’s how a native integration with your CRM sets everyone up for customer service success:

• Uptime rates of 99.999%
• Faster delivery with direct carrier connection
• Automated records with instant retrieval
• Team-based two-way texting, via integrated long and short code support
• Team-to-one with threaded conversations for interdepartmental collaboration

Salesforce CRM SMS Integration Gets Everyone On The Same Page

The benefits that a true native SMS integration offers to your marketing, sales, customer service, and other internal teams are undeniable. And the organization-wide benefits are just as important. You’ll be able to share information more fluidly and flex-in to help other teams when necessary. And your efforts will all be covered with an extra layer of compliance protection with a ISO 9001 cloud-based duplicate opt-out database.

Best of all, you’ll be able to see the benefits unfold in real-time, thanks to the KPI and metrics tracking that occurs when your SMS and call data synchronizes with Salesforce.

Potential SMS Integration Issues To Avoid

There are companies that claim to provide Salesforce CRM SMS integration but are actually just third-party vendors. If they don’t have direct carrier connections, you will experience slower delivery, less reliability, and additional costs. And because they’re not set up to support enterprise-level operations, your business growth will be hindered.

You should be wary of any integration product that doesn’t live inside Salesforce. You’ll miss out on all the primary benefits of a 100% native integration, as these generic options are merely bolted on from the outside. You’ll be forced to toggle between windows, share your proprietary data with an outside company, and pay whatever rates they feel like charging for your SMS messages to pass through their system.

Achieving Prime Results Through Native Integration

Your best route is to remove middlemen and maximize your Salesforce investment with a 100% native integration. This way you can avoid messaging delays, security risks, and other issues that arise with third-party products.

TrueDialog is a leader in advanced text-based integrations with Salesforce and other CRM platforms. We can help you achieve more and pay less. And we back you up every step of the way with our US-based customer service team. Reach out with any question and we’ll respond within one business day.

Start your free trial today to experience the benefits of a true native Salesforce CRM SMS integration.