Adopting a new technology—like business SMS—can be exciting. Business SMS is particularly appealing considering the world’s new need for virtual customer service. It provides teams with an efficient yet personalized means of connecting with customers from afar. But with any new tool, you need to properly train your team members so they feel comfortable enough to use it in their everyday communications with customers or internal teams.
The good news is that a text service for business is highly intuitive in the first place. Business SMS platforms are generally sleek and user-friendly, and the smartphone apps are accessible and easy to use. Plus, since your team members already text in their personal lives, making a few professional adjustments won’t be too hard.
So how can you train your employees when rolling out business SMS? Read on to find out.
Nail Down Your Business SMS Strategy
Before even letting your teams into your business SMS platform for training, you’ll need managers and team leaders to strategize about some key points. Decide on:
Permissions
Roles and permissions will determine how much access your team members have. The decisions you make here will have an impact on critical items like security and customer privacy. For a business SMS platform, the four levels of roles and permissions are:
- Owner: This person manages the subscription, the team, inboxes, contacts, custom fields, and integrations. They can also view all reports.
- Team Administrator: Employees with this role can adjust everything within the platform except subscription information. He or she can also view reports.
- Contact Administrator: Employees with this role can create, modify, update, and delete contacts or custom fields.
- Member: The “member” is the default role. Members can access messages, templates, lists, and contacts. The other three roles can choose to hide customer PII (Personal Identifiable Information) from the members. Some members can even be limited to only sending template messages.
Message Type
You’ll also need to decide what type of messaging your organization will be doing. Will you only be sending messages, like notifications, alerts, and updates? Or will you receive and answer customer messages, too? This decision will determine whether you train your teams on sending or receiving texts (or both). As a best practice, most teams use business SMS to reply to customers, especially if they already send outgoing messages.
Assignments
If your team decides to accept incoming messages from customers, you’ll need to consider assignments. Having an organized assignments method streamlines the team’s responses, allowing them to answer texts as quickly as possible. You can have:
- A manager assign each incoming chat to a team member
- Team members assign one another chats
- All incoming texts automatically assigned to each team member based on specific keywords
Practice Responses and Templates
Before allowing your team to chat with real customers, you’ll want to allow some time for practicing and hands-on training. Business SMS platform practice can be divided into two separate categories:
Outgoing Messages
Your team should be trained in your 
business’s culture and branding so that each outgoing message is uniform. Teams that send notifications, alerts, and updates to customers will also need to practice using certain business SMS features. Teams need to practice:
- Sending and creating templates
- Setting up their signatures
- Adding customers to lists
- Scheduling messages
- Setting up SMS drip campaigns
Inbound Messages
Team members who are going to be answering incoming customer messages should have several templates at the ready for appropriate responses. But not all responses can be scripted. To prepare for unscripted conversations, managers should:
- Set up different customer personas and appropriate response ideas, tones, and tactics
- Teach team members how to transition from personal to professional texting
- Review ways to avoid miscommunications
- Consider whether emojis or GIFs are ever appropriate
- Role play customer conversations between team members and managers
Release Your Business SMS Program
Once your employee training program is complete, it’s time to release your business SMS program to your customers. However, your business text messaging services should also be carefully rolled out to prevent any problems with overwhelming demand.
For a smooth roll-out, you’ll need to:
- Create milestones for team usage
- Set a date when you want all team members to be using the business SMS platform
- Consider a soft launch of your business SMS program to loyal customers and with key employees
- Start publicizing your business SMS service so customers will begin to use it
- Identify KPIs to track the effectiveness of business text messaging vs phone calls
After completing all of your strategizing, practice sessions, and milestones of your planned release schedule, your team will be well-trained and ready to offer customers a streamlined business SMS experience.
Need unique training tips for your brand? Get in touch with our team.
