Since COVID-19, more and more people are spending time at home. Fewer public activities are available, and many businesses have allowed their employees to work from their home offices. When you text your customers, there’s a good chance you’ll reach them when they’re relaxing on their living room couches. As you navigate how to text customers at home, your team will need to approach business text messaging in a slightly different way. Texting someone in their personal space is a little different from texting them during their daily coffee run. The rules have changed, however subtly.
Let’s explore some best practices for texting customers at home.
Text at Reasonable Hours
A work/life balance is difficult to achieve, especially for people working from home. They try to work hard during business hours, then relax at the end (and beginning) of the day. Receiving texts from your brand—no matter how much they love your products and content—may stop them from being able to relax fully.
Text your customers at reasonable times. In essence, this means 9am-5pm, Monday through Friday. You can expand these hours, especially for critical customer service texts like order notifications. However, be careful that you don’t stray too far from these basic time limits.
Your team can schedule texts through your business text messaging platform to ensure they arrive at appropriate times. This way, your team can reach customers around the nation and the world while sticking to their own business hours.
Use Casual (But Professional) Language
The workplace will never be the same. People are less inclined to dress up and act formally at work than ever before. After all, many of them are working from home in loungewear or, at the very least, jeans and tees. Formal texts simply aren’t appropriate anymore. Casual language is the way to go.
That isn’t to say that your language shouldn’t be polite or professional. Your team should write texts that are:
- Casual, as though they’re texting new friends (e.g., “Hi there! I hope you’re well.”)
- Grammatically correct, with accurate spelling (limit abbreviations!)
- Polite (using phrases like “please” and “thank you”)
- Enthusiastic (including exclamations and the occasional emoji)
You’re almost certainly reaching your customers while they’re at home. Your team should text as though they’re having a friendly SMS conversation right on your customers’ doorstep, not a formal conversation in a cold office building.
Personalize, Personalize, Personalize
When customers are home, they’re in their castles. Every item around them is personal, because they chose and purchased it, or were gifted it by loved ones. Any texts they receive should be highly personalized in turn. This way, they’re more likely to catch your customers’ attention and let them know that your brand wants to customize their experiences.
Luckily, it’s easy to personalize content on a mass scale with help from your business text messaging platform. All your team needs to do for each text is:
- Create a business SMS template, leaving room for custom fields from your CRM system
- Select a list of recipients to send the invitation to
- Schedule your text, or send it immediately
Your business text messaging platform will personalize each outgoing message, inserting recipients’ custom fields into the subsequent spaces. Each recipient will feel as though their text was sent individually—without extra work from your team.
Honor Boundaries Both Ways
There’s a good chance that your team is working from home, too. Just like your customers, your team probably struggles to stop working when business hours are over. (They’re hard workers, after all!) Help your own team out by incorporating boundaries for them, too.
With help from your business text messaging platform, your team can:
- Create an auto reply for messages that arrive after hours, letting customers know when they can expect a reply
- Assign incoming texts based on shifts or vacation days
- Include your business SMS hours on your Contact Us page and social media websites
- Monitor and triage your customer interactions for opportunities to, if necessary, block them from contacting your team via text
These are polite ways to reinforce your team’s boundaries—and ensure they get the rest they need to show up energized during your business hours.
Want more business text messaging tips? Check out our blog.
