Quit Texting From Your Personal Phone
There was a time when a business leader had a car phone tucked into a briefcase to stay connected to work. We have been conditioned to respond fast and be available to our customers and employees. Long delays or gaps may risk relationships or sales.
The evolution of cell phones, texting, and technology capabilities has changed the way in which we communicate, but not the desire to be quick and efficient. Some might say that Blackberry was once the business phone and then as some people started to buy iPhones for personal use, it was common to see people with two phones — one for work and one for business.
Some industries still provide work phones, but it has become more common to consolidate to just one phone for both business and personal use. Carrying two phones may sound like a burden and step backwards, but there is a better solution to separate your work and personal communications easily: a texting app.
A texting app provides safety measures while easily allowing you to stay connected to customers and employees. It’s time to quit texting from your personal phone. Here are a few questions to ask yourself:
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Do you want strangers to have your personal number?
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Do you really want every person you come in contact with through work to have access to your personal number? Especially if you are working with customers or people you may never work with directly or long-term. Sharing your number with your boss or coworkers who become friends is different than having it displayed on your business card.
Speaking of business cards, many people include a work phone or personal phone and then select with whom they share their personal information. This tactic of protecting your personal information and providing added security can happen with a texting app.
You can send as many messages as you want from a real number that can be branded to your company. 10DLC (10 digit long code) has solidified this process by providing regular, long digit numbers that resemble your personal number but are attached to a business. This builds trust with your customers to know the number is safe and keeps spam low in the texting community.
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What happens when you leave a job?
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Longevity at the same job is on the decline. We are no longer living in a world where you have a briefcase car phone and stay at the same company for 30+ years. Younger generations who grew up with cell phones as kids are leaving jobs rather quickly due to better opportunities, pay, benefits, or work life balance. If employees want to stay at a job, companies are faced with tough decisions such as furloughs and layoffs.
If you’re using your personal number and phone to reach out to people for work and you leave that job, you may still be receiving messages from people that you no longer need to be connected. Think about if you switch jobs multiple times, how many times you will need to clean up your contacts. If your name or number is on a company website, think of all the times sales has found you and reached out.
Using a texting app allows you to integrate your work contacts with a CRM/ATS so that you can have a real-time conversation and have better collaboration with your colleagues. Keep track of the conversations you need when you need them, but when it comes time to move on, you don’t have to worry about them anymore!
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Do you want to separate your work and personal life?
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Burnout has increased across industries. As we discussed above, it’s one reason people may leave their job. With many companies either willingly embracing or being forced to implement work from home settings, people have learned to balance or separate their work and personal life.
When people were working in an office, they may have had long nights and limited time at home with personal activities with their family and friends. When there was a shift to working from home, some may have experienced a struggle to balance where work ended and began because it was all in the same spot.
Texting apps allow you to stay connected if you’re at home but also to turn it off if your job allows. TextUs functionality includes a mobile app, web app, and Chrome extension so that you can text however you and your audience prefer. No need to sift through your personal messages to find work requests. Keep them separate so that no work messages go unnoticed and your personal life can remain stress-free.
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Do you want to track messages and measure your success?
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Understanding which messages are read, replied to, and cause action is important in business texting. Think about personal texting and how many times you may have wondered if your message is received and if/when they will respond?
Don’t get left on read. People can change their settings on their personal phones so that you don’t know if they’ve read your message or not. Texting apps let you measure your progress with your users to discover which messages and campaigns are working well.
Analytics and dashboards that come with advanced technology such as texting apps can show you response rates. Texting has an average response rate that is 10x that of email and deliverability rate upwards of 98% across multiple industries. Our data shows that people are likely to respond within 90 seconds of receiving a text message.
Make the shift to stop texting from your personal number. You will find less spam, a cleaner contact list, easier use for business texting, separation of your personal and work information to keep everything in order, and better metrics to know how to strategize in the future.
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