Category: B2B

  • Archiving Text Messages – SMS Archiving Strengthens Your Organization

    Archiving Text Messages – SMS Archiving Strengthens Your Organization

    cms call recording requirements

    Organizations are already archiving emails, but what about text messages? SMS messages are becoming an increasingly important part of business communications as part of the digital transformation, and with good reasons. Text messaging is accessible, has a low barrier to entry (it’s something we’re all already doing), and promotes fast two-way exchanges that facilitate accelerated business results. Moreover, archiving of business text messages is now possible.


    Interesting? Here’s how

    The COVID-19 pandemic was also instrumental in transforming text messaging from a casual channel mostly reserved for low-stakes chatting to a powerful medium for discussing business-related topics. In a world thrown into remote work, colleagues and clients weren’t able to meet face-to-face, and SMS and other messaging platforms became the natural solution.

    However, many organizations are unprepared or resistant to this change due to concerns over regulatory compliance. In other words, companies need to have control over their business text messages to fully embrace business texting.

    Luckily, there’s a straightforward solution to this problem: archived text messages. With this in mind, let’s look at why forward-thinking companies should embrace SMS for business and the importance of archiving text messages today.

    Why Your Company Should Use Business Text Messaging

    Businesses use a variety of communication tools to promote seamless and effective conversations between employees and customers. Email has long been a popular communication medium, and while it’s still going strong today, it’s not without its drawbacks. According to a study by Radicati, the average American worker receives a whopping 126 emails a day[1]. Moreover, the number of emails sent and received globally every day has increased each year since 2017, with figures expected to reach 376.4 billion emails by 2025[2].

    For many people, the number of emails they receive in a day is overwhelming. Faced with an inbox bulging with many 100s of emails, it’s no surprise that people are often slow to respond to emails or miss them entirely.

    Text messaging has a unique advantage here. What is it? Well, take a look at your phone. How many missed calls or unread emails do you have? For calls, it might be just a few, but it’s likely in the 100s or even thousands for emails. But what number of unread text messages do you have? If you’re like most people, the answer is probably 0.

    We tend to view text messages as direct lines of communication that need a timely response. And studies support this theory. For example, research by SinglePoint found that texts have a 99% open rate. Further, texts aren’t just opened, but they’re also opened quickly. A study by Forbes found that a whopping 95% of texts are read within three minutes[3].

    For businesses, this means text messages can be incredibly powerful. For example, business texting among workers allows colleagues to ask critical questions on the fly and receive immediate responses. In other words, it allows workers to be more productive and do their job more effectively. The casual nature of texting also enables employees to develop stronger personal connections that boost team morale and promote better collaboration.

    Businesses enjoy similar benefits when it comes to texting clients or customers. According to one study, 85 percent of smartphone users prefer text messages to calls or email[4]. And in 2022, almost all your clients and customers will be smartphone users.

    Business text messaging can help strengthen business-client relationships in many ways:

    • In the digital age, the companies that offer personalized customer experiences are the ones that thrive. Today, people want closer emotional connections with the businesses they support, and text enables this. SMS is more personal than other channels.
    • It provides a direct line of communication. Depending on the industry, some clients need fast and direct access to their business partners to deal with critical situations.
    • Reduce operational costs by taking pressure off the inbound call team. Agents can handle many more text exchanges than phone calls.

    Why You Should Archive Your Business Text Messages (The Importance of Text Archiving)

    Business texting is going strong and is here to stay. Still, worldwide, many regulations demand that companies be able to record and produce text message exchanges when asked. For heavily regulated industries, like finance, healthcare, education, and government, the need to archive text messages is even more crucial. With this in mind, let’s dive deeper into why organizations should archive text messages today.

    Regulatory Compliance

    Compliance is one of the top reasons to implement a text message archiver solution. While some industries have more stringent regulatory rules, almost all industries need to observe some communication regulations. For example, the following regulatory bodies require companies to monitor and retain all electronic communications, including business text messages: HIPAA, HITECH, MIFID II, GDPR, GLBA, FINRA, FISMA, FRCP, Dodd-Frank Act, and SOX.

    With both internal and client-facing communications happening over such a wide range of channels, it’s easy for communication policies to fall out of use. Additionally, in a world where remote working is now the norm, it’s easy for employees to blur the lines of business and casual chat, potentially leading to some less-than-professional text exchanges.

    Whether on Android or iPhone, business texting needs to be captured to ensure organizations stay on the right side of the law. Failing to archive text messages can lead to hefty fines and reputational damages.

    Establish One Version of the Truth

    Leading on from the last section, not having a clear record of the truth can lead to conflicts and disputes between employees and clients. The reality is human beings aren’t perfect. Sometimes we misremember an exchange, forget about it entirely, or in some cases, intentionally delete communications we’re not proud of.

    The way companies use mobile messaging has changed significantly over the last decade. In the past, employees were almost always given a dedicated company smartphone if they were expected to communicate with clients on the move. However, today, it’s much more common for employers to adopt a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) approach, where employees can use their personal phones. In addition, some companies define additional protocols like requiring employees to use a dedicated business communication app that has its own company phone number.

    While the BYOD approach has many benefits for both employees and businesses, such as lowering costs and training burden, it comes with unique risks. For example, employees may fall into texting habits they have for their personal mobile, even when communicating with clients. And then what happens if an employee deletes a text exchange and pretends it never happened? The same could happen on the client-side too. Another critical issue when adopting BYOD is the need to separate personal from business-related texting – for privacy and regulatory compliance reasons.

    Archiving solves this problem, establishing one verifiable version of the truth. It also holds both clients and employees accountable for what they say, promoting more conscious texting. Archived text messages can play a key role in sales, support, compliance and operations. For example, if an employee over promises to a client over text, their managers can step in to provide more training or take disciplinary action.

    Businesses can still deploy a BYOD approach and easily archive text messages on Android or iPhone.   Only problem is separating business vs personal messaging – – as stated above.

    Streamline and Optimize Business Communications

    Archiving Android and iPhone business texting exchanges provides troves of data that companies can mine for valuable insights. For example, companies can use successful text message conversions (ones that strengthen relationships or boost sales) for employee training. Analyzing text message data can also uncover the strengths and weaknesses of your messaging strategy.

    Litigation Preparedness

    Beyond regulatory compliance, there’s another crucial reason to capture mobile text messages – legal protection and preparedness. While being hit with legal action is the last thing an organization wants; unfortunately, it’s not uncommon.

    If you do find yourself involved in a court case, you’ll wish you took the time to archive text messages. Mobile messages are a critical element of eDiscovery because they can prove the falseness of claims and build a picture of the truth.

    Create Better Marketing Campaigns

    Mobile marketing is far more effective than email marketing due to text messages’ high open rates and response rates. By archiving marketing SMS messages, companies have a comprehensive overview of their mobile marketing campaigns and can use this information to create more effective campaigns in the future.

    Stop Leaks in Their Tracks

    You can tailor business text message archiving solutions to send alerts when users type specific keywords. For example, let’s say a client asks an employee for details about an upcoming project they’ve heard rumors about. The employee might share these details, not realizing they are sharing sensitive information. This can also apply to sharing sensitive files, employee records, or details of vendors. With alerts, employees can be informed when they are potentially sharing sensitive information and advised to choose their words carefully. 

    Final Thoughts

    With text messaging becoming a ubiquitous part of business communications in the modern era, there’s never been a greater need to archive text messages. With archived text messages, you can strengthen your business relationships, protect your company from sensitive information leaks or litigation issues, and ensure you’re compliant with current communications regulations. Lastly, archived text messages are a rich source of valuable insights that organizations can leverage to become better communicators.

    [1] https://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Email-Statistics-Report-2015-2019-Executive-Summary.pdf

    [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/456500/daily-number-of-e-mails-worldwide/

    [3] https://intelligentcontacts.com/15-text-messaging-statistics-every-business-should-know/

    [4] https://uk.pcmag.com/why-axis/128434/businesses-take-note-your-customers-prefer-texts

  • How Call Recording of Employees’ Cell Phones Can Boost your Business

    How Call Recording of Employees’ Cell Phones Can Boost your Business

    Businesses far and wide rely on data to grow; this is not news. However, the ways and means that data is collected, analyzed, and put into action are what really matters in our data-flooded marketplace. Company call recording of employees’ mobile and landline exchanges with customers is one of the best ways to use data and information that is already at your fingertips and just waiting to be leveraged for better business decisions and results. Calls, landline and cellular, also can be transcribed for efficient search and analysis.

    Since the 1960s, when the first answering machines hit the market, telephone call recordings have made life more efficient and productive with a means to save and access our voice communication at later times. Fast forward, and we’ve been using call recordings in call centers for decades, and now, our mobile devices can continue to give us instant access to a wealth of knowledge. In today’s business world, we often use cell phones for work and business communications, which means that landlines and cell phones are equally important in ensuring customer satisfaction and improving products and services. Company call recordings – landlines and cellular – are a win-win on both sides of the business transaction in the modern mobile business world. 

    Let’s jump in and explore some tactics for recording information by telephones and smartphones and their benefits for businesses. 

    Monitor and Utilize Company Call Recordings to Ensure Quality, Improve Customer Satisfaction, and Boost Employee Performance

    Improving customer satisfaction is paramount for any business. We want our loyal users, customers, or clients to feel heard, seen, and appreciated. With company call recordings, businesses can easily identify lost customer information, miscommunications, or missed details. Such errors are easy to overlook and can result in decreased revenues; recordings give us the means to re-access and reassess. Complaints can be addressed, disputes can be resolved, and when issues arise, you don’t have to take someone’s word for it; you can listen in real-time to all previous exchanges and find roper solutions. 

    Easily Resolve Disputes 

    When disputes occur, it’s easier for your business to protect employees’ and customers’ interests. Instead of relying on word-of-mouth, directly access your saved company call recordings and have the facts of every situation at your fingertips. For example, if an employee claims a customer was offensive or abusive, you can find the evidence and confirm or dispute the claim. Similarly, if a customer claims an employee promised them a discount, you’re able to verify with proof. 

    Track and Record Important Customer Data

    According to Forbes, 86% of buyers will pay more for a great customer experience. Tracking and recording customer data in your CRM can help you sort through the valuable information you need to improve customer experience. With CRM integration, you can analyze calls based on specific information, such as call duration, search for exact topics discussed, or listen to particular agents in order to identify areas of improvement and raise the quality of your employee’s call performance. 

    Upgrade Sales Scripts

    If well-thought-out and methodical game plans are your number one goal, business call recordings can help you adjust your sales scripts and call strategies to be more specific while being more effective for customers. Tweaking how employees greet customers or say farewell can significantly benefit the business, and additional phrases for upselling can quickly boost your bottom line. Listening to your call recordings in order to continually adjust these scripts is an invaluable asset and a gift that keeps on giving to your sales or customer service departments. 

    Use Company Cell Phone Call Recording for Employees to Revamp Training, Marketing, and More

    Training

    Say goodbye to inefficient training methods. A cell phone recording system for businesses and companies can give you the right tools for training new team members thoroughly and efficiently. Recordings give you real-life examples to demonstrate, such as practices to avoid, how to handle customer complaints, how veteran employees effectively upsell, and much more. 

    Upper-Level Management 

    Get the best out of your call recordings by having managers and agents listen in on calls together. Go over the positives and negatives that occur during customer phone calls and find areas of improvement together. This tactic can help the entire team find solutions to common problems and can help each individual team member be more effective and efficient in their position. 

    Compliance

    Comply with legal issues by having full access to past calls. If your company is tied up in a lawsuit or other legal matter, a call recording system integrated with your CRM can log calls for extended periods of time and can help your company prove compliance with the law by offering recordings as evidence. Playing the he-said-she-said game is often ineffective, and it’s better to be safe than sorry when protecting businesses and employees.

    Marketing Departments

    Customer satisfaction is just the beginning of successfully leveraging company landline and mobile call recordings. Marketing departments can further explore some tactics for recording information received by telephone. For example, phone recordings can provide valuable insight into evaluating the progress of new product or service launches and shedding light on areas that need improvement. Recordings can also bring marketers awareness of market trends and the ability to pinpoint and address pains and needs. 

    Leveraging data can be easier than it sounds. A landline and cell phone recording system for businesses that integrates mobile business calls to CRM, and can transcribe them (in real time) is the ultimate way to cut through the noise-filled data and help you identify exactly what your business and customers want and need. Improve customers’ satisfaction, boost sales, employ better marketing strategies, and protect your business with company call recording of mobiles and landlines for employees – while guarding and maintaining the privacy of mobile personal calls and other personal means of communications (SMS, Whatsapp).

    FAQs

    What is company call recording?

    Company call recording refers to saving the audio of cellular and landline phone calls among employees and between employees and customers so that they can be recovered and assessed for a variety of business needs.

    How are call recordings saved?

    A: Call recordings are saved to software such as CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools, secured encrypted call logs and dedicated call recording platforms.

    How long can call recordings be saved for?

    Companies can store call recordings indefinitely.

    Is it possible to transcribe the call and add it into the CRM customer’s record?

    Yes, call transcription is available also in the CRM, so word search, analytics and reports can be deployed.

  • The key to Customer Retention and Increased Upselling – B2B and B2C

    The key to Customer Retention and Increased Upselling – B2B and B2C

    Relationship between customers and businesses starts and ends with Reachability. Once the sale is made, the next obvious challenge is to retain the customer and maximize the CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) – for the subscription length, the reputation, the potential likelihood of upselling, for the reviews, etc.

    Businesses need to take care of that customer (well, Duh…), and being a part of a relationship he or she has with the business means that first and foremost the business needs to be accessible and reachable. This makes excellent business sense for various reasons of course, yet it’s not the “business” that needs to be reachable and accessible, it’s the people – sales, support, customer care etc. – who need to be reachable and accessible.

    Accepting that retaining a customer is roughly 10%-20% of the acquisition cost of a new customer dictates that keeping customers happy is an integral part of protecting the customer base and the brand reputation of the business. It takes years to build a strong brand, but only minutes to destroy it. Especially at a time where the relationship between brand and customer is mainly virtual/online/over cell phones, having a good relationship with customers has become even more important, and more challenging.

    In addition, it is a lot easier to sell new products or services to existing customers. Upselling not only saves substantial time and effort in the sales cycle but also shows that you care about your customers. Just think about it – for example, sales/support/customer care reps know the pain points of your customers. They already bought a product or service from your business that solved a major problem they had. Once that product or service has a new cool feature or functionality that will make their life even easier, they will be quick to order it from you, their trusted provider/business.

    Overall, selling to an existing customer is also only around 10%-20 of the cost it takes to onboard a new one, since no lead generation and prospecting is needed. If you have a good relationship with your customer, it will take less effort to convince him or her (addressing objections) that the new feature or product is really cool and worthwhile investing in. In other words, since the customer already bought from you before, that customer trusts you, your company, and its products and services.

    However, there is one major caveat – you need your employees to be available to your customers, accessible and reachable. They are not going to waste time chasing them to find out more, ask for details, or request a free demo or trial. They easily get upset if they cannot reach their sales rep, since this is perceived at not caring. It only takes a few missed calls for them to lose trust in your company and turn to competitors never to return.  To put it in simple words – losing touch equals losing trust equals losing the customer. To illustrate, let’s have a look at the following two scenarios.

    Scenario 1

    You work for an insurance company and sell building insurance, car insurance, and health care insurance to a fast-growing startup. The purchasing manager tries to contact you to know if the current insurance policies also cover corona-related issues and what additional insurances or premium payments might be needed to cover all employees and contingencies. She calls you at work, but the switchboard tells her that you are now working from home. She sends you an email telling you that she will call you on your cellphone that you use privately and for work. You miss the call since you are on the phone with your healthcare provider to set up an appointment for your mother to get vaccinated against COVID-19. You hear that someone is trying to call you, but since you do not know if it’s private or not, you decide to call whoever it is back at a later time. Obviously the call isn’t registered in the CRM and eventually you do not remember to return the call. The purchasing manager gets upset since you could not be reached at work and did not answer after she called your mobile. She concludes that you obviously don’t care enough or simply unresponsive, and decides to check out other insurance companies where the insurance agent is far more approachable. You lost this customer, quite likely forever.

    Scenario 2

    A customer bought a top-notch treadmill of $3,000 to keep fit during the COVID19 lockdown. That customer discussed with the sales rep his plans to create a fitness room at home with more equipment. The sales rep advised him what kind of equipment to add, such as a press bench, weights, a stationary bike, and a rowing machine. Once the first purchase, the treadmill, was delivered and set up, it did not work properly after only one week. Understandably upset, the customer tries to contact his sales rep to ask what to do about it. However, the sales rep is on a long personal call so he’s unavailable, and here as well – does not recognize the number and to add to the confusion the call isn’t logged in the CRM so there’s no record of it anywhere. The customer cannot get hold for the sales rep even after contacting the helpdesk, and sadly  decides that the sports company is unreliable, returns the treadmill, and cancels the planned orders for the other fitness equipment. The frustrated customer also voices his opinion on several online fitness forums.

    In both scenarios, we see that it does not take much to lose a customer and kill any chance of upselling. Especially in a contactless environment, a sales rep must act like the customer’s best buddy – being available and reachable to show he cares. This requires that cell phones are used for both private and business calls. This can be problematic. The best way to solve this, is using a solution such as the one of Mobile2CRM, which enables having multiple cellular profiles on one cellphone – a profile and number for business purposes and a private one. That eliminates the need for separate devices or SIM cards to separate private from business calls; just one elegant solution to keep your customers close to you – and always available to them, without compromising on privacy of your personal number. Your business profile ensures that all your business communications (calls, text massages, chats, etc.) are strictly separated from your private communications, respecting your privacy.

    Best of all, your business communications on your mobile device will be captured automatically and logged into your company’s CRM. That logged information is always up to date since the logging is done in real-time when you are making or receiving a business call or sending or receiving a business-related text message. Having such a cellular-grade solution on their cell phones, it would have enabled the insurance agent in scenario 1 to immediately respond to the purchasing manager and the sales rep in scenario 2 to do the same regarding his fitness equipment customer. The solution even allows for adding notes and comments to the already existing call log and recording, which makes follow-up (like sending a technician to the treadmill customer) easy. It’s the ultimate way to keep being close to your customers and give them the support and care they need and deserve.

    Just to emphasize, your business and private profiles use the SIM number on the same device, but only calls and text messages performed to/from the business profiles are logged in the CRM. This means that your company will be able to review and analyze the content of your business calls, but not that of your private conversations. So you can keep on using your private device, being sure that there is a complete separation between your personal and business activities. This makes switching between sending a private text message to your mother and answering a business call from a distraught customer a breeze.