Staying Connected With Your Field Team Using Mobile Messaging

If you're still calling your field team to check in and deliver the daily update, you might as well be utilizing smoke signals or sending out the company carrier pigeon. Some two-thirds of American adults have a smartphone, and businesses are learning more and more how to utilize these devices – and considering most of us have our smartphones nearby a whopping 22 hours per day, messaging may well be the quickest way to reach a moving target. Here are 5 ways you can stay connected with your field team using messaging:

Send Updates Quickly and Efficiently

If you have a last minute price change or need a sales rep to cover an appointment with minimal notice, messaging is the way to go. Email has an estimated open rate of as little as 20 percent, but that number soars to an impressive 99 percent open rate for text messages, and most are read within 3 minutes of being received. That's some very efficient communication.

Use Bulk Messaging

Answering the phone mid-appointment can make your sales consultants look distracted, or even worse seem rude or disinterested, but a text is available for reading at the recipient's convenience and with far more ease and discretion than dialing in to retrieve a voicemail. You can alert the whole team to a change in location for the lunch meeting or ask everyone who is closest to an emergency repair call, and everyone will be in the loop in a matter of minutes.

Document and Share Important Information

Having a "paper trail" can be a valuable way to track the progress of a project, but when you're in the field, writing in a shared log or updating a networked computer file isn't always easy. Messaging serves as a sort of digital log of information that can be used immediately and accessed later or uploaded back at the office. Don't forget about non-alphanumeric uses for text, as your smartphone's camera can prove useful, too. Employees in the field who take a picture of a possible repair or room being considered for renovation can send that image back to the main office and get an on-the-spot estimate from HQ, or simply log the photos to use for before-and-after comparisons in the company portfolio.

Incorporate Automated  Messaging

As a business owner, you're likely hustling around the clock in your pursuit of both success and customer satisfaction, and you're not always going to be available to send messages when they ideally should be sent. That's where mobile marketing automation (MMA) comes in. MMA allows you to program certain functions or customer-initiated actions to trigger a corresponding text message that sends automatically without the need for real-time approval by you. For instance, a customer confirming an appointment time might trigger a scheduling text to the assigned sales consultant, or a meeting at headquarters that gets added to the corporate calendar might cause a text to be sent to the bulk text list included all the team members whose presence is required at that meeting. MMA is like having an extra pair of hands in the office that work just as hard – if not harder – than you do.

Develop Mobile Apps

Approximately 85 percent of the time consumers spend on their smartphones is spent using apps. That makes developing a proprietary app for your customers to use a pretty attractive proposition, but there are also advantages to having an app just for in-house use. A mobile CRM app is like a mini office that travels with your sales team wherever they go. Employees can conceivably schedule appointments, share files, check or add to the communal calendar, verify contact information, map addresses, fill out purchase orders, and perhaps even link sales information to your production facility or vendors. An app holds the potential to streamline your entire sales process from start to finish, all from the convenience of a smartphone or tablet.

There are a lot of ways to stay in touch with your field team, but if efficiency, ease, and increased sales potential matter to you, messaging is the smart way to go. Incorporate the 5 ideas above, and help propel your team to company-wide success!