What to Do If You're Worried About Managing SMS Responses...

So SMS sounds like a great idea for your business…

But one question to address is, “Can you handle responses?”

For example, let’s say Sarah is an owner of a small business.

Her flash sale announcement via SMS ends up being a huge hit – perhaps too much of one. As responses pour in, Sarah finds herself and her support team struggling to keep up, worried they’ll miss crucial customer interactions or lose potential sales.

What about you? Do you have similar concerns as Sarah?

It may seem simplest to just disable responses altogether.

But is that possible? Are there better options?

Don’t worry; we’ve got you! There are solutions for you.

Let’s discover what those are together…

Option 1: “Replies Not Monitored”

One solution many companies opt for if they don’t have the bandwidth or manpower to handle SMS responses is to simply make SMS a 1-way channel.

In other words, they will send out messages but they do not monitor and respond to incoming replies.

Now, remember that you can’t prevent people from replying to your messages. However, you can make it clear that responses aren’t monitored, so that your audience knows they should contact you via other channels.

You can therefore create an auto-response within your SMS platform dashboard indicating that replies aren’t monitored.

That way, if people try to reply back to your message, they’ll automatically get a notice back letting them know that they should try to contact you via other means.

While this option isn’t the most ideal solution since it puts up a point of friction between you and your audience, it is attractive to many businesses as providing an easy way to still engage in SMS—even though you may not have the capacity to monitor responses.

Option 2: A “Ticket-Style” Approach

Your SMS dashboard does come with an inbox in which you’re able to monitor replies and assign them to different users who can manage the conversations.

That means you can take a “ticket-style” approach toward monitoring replies on your account, in which multiple users can monitor the inbox and conversations can be organized according to user.

One way to do this would be to just have whoever sees the response come in first can claim the “ticket” (conversation) and can be in charge of responding back to that audience member.

Option 3: Get Notified via SMS

Another option for monitoring the responses to your SMS would be to set up notifications for when new replies come in.

Within your SMS platform dashboard settings, you can designate that you’d like to receive a text message whenever your text messages get a new reply.

This notification can let you or whoever is managing your SMS know that a new response has come in, so that you can know what your recipient has said. Then you can also evaluate whether you need to log in and send a response back.

Option 4: Get Notified via Push Notifications

Yet one more option for monitoring responses to your SMS would be to enable push notifications, either via desktop or on smartphones via the Mobile Text Alerts mobile app.

This option can enable multiple people to get a notification without needing to get anyone’s personal phone number involved.

Push notifications can be enabled within your Inbox page or within your mobile app.

Start Managing Your SMS Responses Now

Now you’re armed with the info you need to handle responses to your SMS blasts.

Which option would work best for you? Perhaps you can get started with not monitoring responses at all per Option 1 and see how things go, before deciding whether you want to move forward with Options 2–4.

In any case, you’re ready to take the first step and try out an SMS platform now.

Go ahead and give it a go!