Many businesses inadvertently lose the human touch. As they grow, they gradually shift from a more personalized approach to standardized mass communications. For example, a team that sends texts from a single phone number moves their communications to email blasts to reach everyone. Consequently, response times increase and messages lose their personal nature. It is not until too late that the company realizes how badly their customer relationships have suffered.

Why SMS is the Right Channel to Build on

Texting is more personal than email. It’s more immediate and impactful. Think about it, there’s a reason why you send a text when you need a response right away. Or why you might receive a social media notification in the morning, but ignore it until you’ve had your coffee, only to have an urgent text pull you in straight away. Texting communicates urgency and priority.

The Human-in-the-Loop Model

The ability to provide a fully automated system has its limits. The minute a client poses a certain question or shows that they require something outside of the ordinary interaction, a template may even work to your disadvantage.

A pragmatic solution is a handoff approach. Automations manage the easy lifts, outreach scheduling, order placements, follow-up inquiries. Whenever a message comes through that doesn’t coincide with a previously established pattern, it gets redirected to the live staff. Your staff member takes over with access to the full communication thread.

This method only works with a shared inbox though. If correspondence lives on someone’s personal phone or is trapped in an exclusive app, no one can keep track. Clients find themselves repeating topics. Staff can’t refer back for context. Identifying the best texting service for business to bring the heart of that system to life is the pivotal beginning. You need a common ground where any employee would be able to log in and catch up on the status of any thread and respond accurately.

The integration of a CRM takes things one step further from there. Once a text message trail links back to a paying customer, your staff will discover their previous purchases, past grievances, and communication preferences automatically passed on to them. That right there is the key to making your mass outreach sound as personal as possible.

Building Automation That Doesn’t Sound Automated

The scariest part of SMS scaling is when the humanity is automated away. Messages sound like a robot. Out-of-stock alerts hit at 3 am. Tracking notifications arrive weeks before a catalog does. Customers who replied digitally are still asked to call.

Behavioral triggers are a big step toward keeping things personal. If a message is triggered based on a customer’s action like a missed call, abandoned cart, or form submission, they likely won’t feel like they mass-blasted you, they’ll know they’re getting back to them. It’s the difference between an automated cold blast and a follow-up that’s contextually valid because it’s automated.

Personalization tokens pick it up from there, these are the merge fields dropping in a customer’s name, last order, or appointment time. With your tokens set up properly and used religiously, most customers won’t notice the same template is being fired off to thousands because it will read like something someone typed for them.

What your tone of voice guidelines for text messaging do is make customers truly unsure if it’s a bot or staff on the other end. They are the rules for your text messaging that dictate where you write out U and R, how many y’s are appropriate in heeeeey, and all the other small decisions that give your automations that human touch.

The Small Decisions That Matter at Scale

Two decisions are particularly important in determining whether SMS messages come across as human or corporate.

The first has to do with the type of number used. Short codes and toll-free numbers will be perceived as mass messaging by most recipients. On the other hand, local area codes will give the impression of a business that’s local (even if it’s not), and open rates bear this out. A message from an ostensibly local number isn’t going to inspire the same level of ‘here we go’ skepticism as one from a five-digit code.

The second is two-way messaging. When businesses send texts that customers can’t reply to, they’re erecting a wall. Two-way messaging turns the channel into a dialogue, and that dialogue, even when it’s partly automated, is what builds trust over time.

Training your staff in the etiquette of texting closes the loop. Conciseness, appropriate informality, and the judicious use of emojis aren’t unprofessional in any way when they correspond to the reality of how people actually speak. They’re how businesses stop sounding like corporations talking at customers and start sounding like people talking to them.

Scaling Without Losing the Thread

The companies that remain human as they grow are not the ones running away from automation. They are the ones who are purposeful about using it, to automate what can be automated, and ensure that their team can handle what needs a human. This requires all of the context and the history be available in one spot. This is not a tech challenge. It’s a systems challenge that the right tech can solve.