More customer service teams are working remotely—especially after COVID-19. While it’s perfectly possible to resolve customer queries from home, remote team communication can be a challenge. That’s why so many customer service teams are turning to business SMS platforms for help.
Texting itself is a convenient, fast channel for customers. SMS customer service empowers teams to coordinate on customer queries, tailor each reply, and send messages faster than ever before. Plus, it’s easy to use. Platform adoption is straightforward, and remote team communication features are intuitive.
Read on to learn more about how business SMS streamlines remote customer service team communication.
Centralize Incoming Queries
With SMS for business, customer service teams can receive all incoming texts in a single shared inbox. The platforms accept messages from both native SMS apps and over-the-top apps, like Facebook Messenger, Apple Business Chat, and WhatsApp.
Once texts arrive, everyone who belongs to the shared inbox receives a notification. With auto assignment, chats are automatically assigned to the agent who answers the chat or is associated with that contact. Managers can also choose to have agents assign themselves or teammates relevant queries. Assigning chats to an individual limits the number of notifications that the group as a whole receives, shortening response times.
This centralized system updates in real-time, ensuring that no messages are answered twice—and no messages slip through the cracks. This helps agents streamline their replies without even spending time on remote team communication.
Collaborate Within Chats
Because texting is such a fast channel, team members have to be able to coordinate quickly if they need help on a query. In fact, according to modern texting etiquette, waiting more than 20 minutes to respond to a text can be seen as rude.
SMS customer service platforms allow agents to invite one or more team members into chats and communicate with them through private comments. Agents will also see an indicator in the chat when another team member is viewing the chat or typing a reply. This eliminates cross-talking, so two agents don’t answer a customer at the same time. Customers see none of these private comments or indicators. They only receive messages directed toward them.
Private comments enable team members, managers, or trainers to assist an agent with a customer conversation. This is a great way to streamline remote team communication.
Access a Full Customer Profile
An SMS CRM integration is critical to remote team communication. This integration connects your SMS customer service platform with your CRM, ensuring that they sync in real-time. In other words, when you add information into one platform, it updates in the other.
With SMS for business, customer service 
team members can record notes from current chats. They can also see notes from past conversations. All of this information is automatically updated in the SMS CRM platform. The SMS CRM integration will also update each customer profile in the business SMS platform, adding any other relevant custom fields, notes, and even the messages themselves.
Access to these notes helps team members quickly get information without waiting for other team members. This ensures that agents aren’t asking questions that have already been answered, streamlining remote team communication overall.
Integrate with Your Favorite Internal Chat App
Most customer service teams today use Slack or Microsoft Teams to communicate internally. Slack SMS is an integration that allows customer service teams to receive and respond to messages within Slack. With this integration, team members don’t have to toggle back and forth between their business SMS app and their internal messaging app. They can coordinate with one another and resolve customer queries from within a single platform.
If your business has multiple shared inboxes, they can be mapped to the channel of your choice. Anyone in these channels can read and reply to incoming customer messages. Additionally, administrators can set up notifications that alert channel members to incoming texts. Whoever chooses to reply can quickly create a thread to keep the central channel clutter-free. Managers can also manually assign any texts to team members within Slack.
Having customer texts land in your favorite team-friendly app ensures teams can collaborate quickly, getting responses to customers in record time.
Want to learn about remote team communication in the face of COVID-19? Read our guide.
