The 5 best apps that let you do business text messaging

Salesforce is one of the largest CRM platforms in the market, with a wide range of products supporting marketing, sales, customer service, and other teams with software that helps to connect with leads and customers more effectively.

Salesforce offers business text messaging through Service Cloud’s Digital Engagement, which lets users message you from multiple channels, including SMS, social media, and webchat. Digital Engagement allows you to reply directly to these inbound messages from the unified dashboard in addition to sending 1:1 outbound messages and bulk texts. You can also set up auto-replies to messages, implement a chatbot to screen support requests, route requests to the appropriate agent, and send bulk notification messages.

How Texting From Salesforce Service Cloud Digital Engagement Works

Digital Engagement allows for 2-way conversational messaging with users through the Lightning Service Console, their unified dashboard. The platform fields incoming messages from SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and many other messaging channels and organizes them into one accessible location. Agents can access up to 10 conversations at a time that can easily be switched between without changing screens for faster support.

Digital Engagement also includes applicable profiles and other information for each conversation so that you can personalize support to the specific user. Routing allows you to always assign support requests to the right agent for faster resolutions and improved customer satisfaction.

Einstein Bots, Digital Engagement’s AI auto-reply tool, can be implemented to field incoming support requests in any channel. It can answer FAQs or collect relevant information to pass on to the support agent who fields the request to save time.

Digital Engagement also has outbound messaging that makes it easy to reach out to opted-in users for things like collecting reviews. There are some bulk messaging capabilities included for sending notifications or other updates, but there aren’t any segmentation or personalization capabilities, so they wouldn’t be effective marketing content.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a marketing platform and CRM that provides businesses with the tools, data, and insights necessary to create marketing campaigns through a variety of methods, including business text messaging. It aims to make the process of finding and capturing leads easier while collecting and organizing data that helps to refine your lead communications for the best results.

MobileConnect, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud app that handles SMS functionality for the platform, allows you to create SMS and MMS text messages, send them to leads, receive responses, and track the activity of your messages. You can send automatic responses like notifications and respond with templates based on a variety of triggers you establish, but can’t use MobileConnect for two-way conversations.

How Texting from Salesforce Marketing Cloud MobileConnect Works

MobileConnect lets you create text templates for marketing and as part of customer journeys. You’re able to send opted-in subscribers promotional messages, order confirmations, account updates, and surveys. You can also send automated responses based on certain keywords or actions taken by the lead, and information-gathering progressive profiling messages to help build more complete customer profiles.

Using data collected during opt-in capturing or through other means like app usage, Salesforce Marketing Cloud informs messaging that’s based on data like customer behavior and preferences for maximum personalization that more effectively engages leads. You can target a lead with a promotional text based around a variety of information, including location, age, interests, products they’ve shown interest in, actions they’ve taken with previous messages, and a wide variety of other personal information. All of this is included in their customer profile and accessible to help you tailor the experience for improved lead and customer relationships.

Overall, Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s text messaging is built for easily sending personalized 1-way promotional messages and automated texts for lead generation, qualification, and nurturing.

Shopify is an ecommerce platform that provides online businesses with an online store, resources, and tools so that you can begin selling products and services quickly. It’s an all-in-one solution that hosts your site, displays products, collects payment information, and allows for communication with customers through automated messaging.

Shopify offers the ability to send order notifications through text messages by setting up SMS checkout options in your Shopify store. But, you can’t use Shopify to send mass texts or send or receive text messages through your Shopify store without an additional app.

How Texting from Shopify Works

Your Shopify store’s checkout page collects customer information when they purchase your products, which may include a phone number. After setting up SMS checkout options, your customers will have the option to provide their number at checkout to receive order updates. This can be captured as part of a guest checkout or as part of account creation, which allows you to secure an opt-in to your messaging services at checkout.

Once customers opt in to your messaging, Shopify will send them their order confirmation via text, which can be customized in your Shopify settings. Shopify will also send them subsequent text updates, but not shipping updates, which are handled by another company that requires another opt-in.

Shopify does not include other native business text messaging capabilities included for marketing or customer support.

Zendesk is customer service and relationship management software that is used by over 200,000 businesses to facilitate customer service. It focuses on providing seamless communication and fast resolution times for inbound support requests through live chat, text, email, and social media platforms.

Zendesk Text allows you to receive inbound support requests through text messages in the same way that you receive emails. You can also respond directly to them within the Zendesk interface or set up an automatic reply based on a number of customizable triggers. However, you can only reply to text messages; you cannot send them without first receiving a support request.

How Zendesk Text Works

Each text message you receive creates a ticket within Zendesk that, similar to emails, can be tagged, organized, reassigned, or automatically responded to. The same is true for messages on social media platforms like Facebook Messenger or Instagram, helping your team meet users where they already are.

For text messages, you can configure Zendesk Text with transferred phone numbers or newly-purchased numbers from Zendesk. You’ll be able to use that number to directly reply to text messages that you receive at your support number, similar to a normal texting conversation so that you can build a personalized relationship with your customers for better satisfaction.

With Zendesk Text, you can send responses manually from the Zendesk interface or set up automatic replies that respond to messages similar to Zendesk’s email support tools. Automations can have a number of different triggers, including the message coming from a text channel, that quickly respond to the inbound message with your chosen text template so that you can tailor your response to the situation. These responses may include acknowledging receipt of the user’s text, responding to a specific keyword within the inbound text, or providing additional information in an out-of-office notice.

Overall, Zendesk Text can help you organize your inbound text messages for efficient handling, faster response times, and better solutions, but it doesn’t allow you to send outbound texts to multiple customers at once.

Clio is a CRM built for law offices and legal service providers. It can be used to manage cases, store important documentation, bill clients, accept payments, and communicate with clients. Clio supports 2-way conversations after you first initiate the conversation with an existing contact in your through Clio Manage and automatic notification messages can be scheduled through the calendar. Both desktop and mobile apps are available.

How Texting from Clio Manage Works

Clio Manage provides you with a toll-free phone number that your business can use to receive SMS and MMS from clients in your contact list. You’ll need to create a contact for each client that you plan to communicate with before you’re able to receive or send texts, but once you’ve reached out to establish a conversation, you’re able to send and receive messages freely (note that you cannot send your clients MMS, including images or text documents).

From the Clio Manage dashboard, you can access contact information for your clients and send a message directly to their provided phone number. You can also navigate to the “communications” channel and review text history for each contact, update information, or send a new message. All incoming messages are marked with an alert to inform you that there are new messages, and followers of the conversation may receive notifications for new messages for faster response times. Plus, the whole team can access the full history to inform your support and personalize communications.

Clio Manage also allows you to automatically send clients updates about events on your calendar with text templates. You can schedule the time of their delivery based on the event or push updates when the status changes so that everyone stays informed.