Cybersecurity is a top concern for today’s businesses—particularly for IT departments. After all, experts predict that cybercriminals will steal over 33 billion records in 2023 alone, an increase of 175% over the 12 billion records that were predicted to be compromised in 2018. In other words, IT departments are very busy helping companies ensure that employees adhere to secure practices while conducting business and communicating with customers via new technologies like business text messaging.
But for business text messaging, IT departments may not know where to start when it comes to data security. But today’s enterprise-class texting platforms provide many features that help IT professionals protect each business text messaging conversation.
Read on to learn how your IT department can manage business text messaging conversations with customers.
Managing Administrative Controls
First and foremost, top business-class texting platforms offer extensive administrative control management. Administrative powers are critical for secure operations. By ensuring that only certain employees have full access to your business text messaging IT platform, you can protect customer information in the case of an employee leaving, and ensure that customer data is only available to relevant managers or employees.
The business text messaging IT platform you choose should offer a wide variety of roles for team members. These roles should ideally include the following four options:
- Owner—the subscription and team manager who can add and remove users, set permissions, add inboxes and integrations, manage contacts and custom fields, and view performance reports; this role should be given to an IT lead or a higher-level employee
- Team administrator—administrators who can do everything except adjust subscription information; this role should be given to team managers and high-level employees
- Contact administrator—an administrator who can create, modify, update, and delete contacts; this role can be given to any team members in charge of contact management
- Member—a team member who cannot access administrative features, but can access messages, templates, lists, and contacts; this role is for any team members who will be sending messages to customers
Additionally, administrators should be able to hide customers’ personally identifiable information (PII), such as phone numbers, from select employees.
With these administrative controls carefully distributed, IT departments can be sure that the right team members have access to the information they need.
Keeping Records of Customer Messages
When employees use personal phones for customer communications, their messages are outside of enterprise controls and policies. When employees choose to delete messages on their phones, or leave their current role for another job, customer messages and even their contact information can be lost to the business—or, in rare cases, misused. This is a huge concern for IT departments.
However, when teams rely on business SMS platforms for customer communications, all of the customer messages and contact information remain within the platform for team use, even when an employee leaves his or her job. And with administrative controls correctly set up, administrators can easily access their accounts and reroute any outstanding chats that the employee might have left behind.
Regardless of whether the employee used the business text messaging mobile app or web app, those messages will be saved and catalogued within the business SMS platform for later reference.
Gaining Insights into Messages
Another key factor for IT departments is ensuring that teams have an easy and secure way to access performance information from within their business text messaging IT platforms. Luckily, most business SMS platforms offer simple options for accessing and exporting reports.
Business text messaging platforms track key statistics such as first response time, average response time, resolution time, message volume, and unsubscription rates. Team administrators should be able to access and download these messages at will in easily digestible CSV files.
With this key information, teams can gain insights into how messaging is impacting department KPIs, measure business text messaging’s ROI (especially against other channels), and analyze data to train machine learning models.
The platform you choose should also offer chat exports, which allow administrators to quickly identify and export customer conversations into CSVs for easy review.
Identifying Potential Spam
Cutting-edge business text messaging platforms can also help teams identify offensive language. Removing spam or other unwanted messages is a key concern for customer service departments, but business SMS platforms simplify that process.
IT professionals can set up business text messaging platforms to automatically recognize offensive words or phrases, then triage those messages to a specific queue. The specialist (or the IT manager) can then review the offending messages and choose to block the contact or reroute a harmless message to a team member.
This practice ensures that all messages reaching the shared team inbox are business-related and unlikely to cause any professionals offense—or disrupt teams’ workdays.
Ready to secure customer texts with modern business text messaging administration? Try an advanced business SMS platform for free today.
