SMS in Salesforce is more challenging than it needs to be. Let’s fix that.
Text messaging has emerged as a critical channel for engaging with stakeholders. Utilizing SMS directly within Salesforce, the heart of many organizations’ operations, offers incredible opportunities for efficiency and personalized outreach.
However, if you’ve tried it, then you know that texting directly from Salesforce comes with its challenges. At Mogli, we’ve helped organizations navigate these challenges for over a decade. Let’s briefly touch on five of the most common challenges and our approach to solving them.
Hurdle #1: Struggles with Carrier Registration
Getting your SMS messages to reliably reach your audience is foundational, yet many organizations stumble at the very first step: carrier registration. Without proper registration, your efforts to communicate with stakeholders via SMS can be severely hampered, leading to messages being blocked, delayed, or simply never delivered.
Imagine you’re in the nonprofit space, approaching a crucial financial deadline, and urgently need to reach your stakeholders with a donation request. Attempting to text with an unregistered messaging campaign would likely result in many, if not all, of your messages failing to reach their intended recipients.
The struggle with carrier registration is a major pain point for organizations. It’s complex, involves submitting detailed information about your business and texting use cases to carriers, and often requires specific documentation and a little patience. The key here is taking the process one step at a time, or if possible, working with a Salesforce texting solution provider that can actively manage this process on your behalf.
Hurdle #2: Disconnected Data
The beauty of texting in Salesforce is the ability to connect your conversations directly with your customer data. However, simply being ‘Salesforce-compatible’ isn’t enough. If your texting solution doesn’t actively leverage this connected data, it creates significant gaps or disconnects.
Disconnected data leads to an incomplete view of the customer, missed opportunities for personalization, and a fragmented experience for both the organization and the stakeholder. Imagine a sales rep not knowing a customer just texted support about an issue, or a support agent forced to jump through hoops to read the previous conversation history their client had with another teammate.
A truly integrated Salesforce texting solution ensures every incoming and outgoing message is logged directly on the corresponding record. This provides your team with a 360-degree view of your stakeholder interactions. Furthermore, the best solutions allow you to trigger automations and create reports based on SMS activity, truly leveraging your data to its greatest potential.
Hurdle #3: An Undefined Communication Strategy
You have the technical capability to text, but what are you actually going to say, and when? If your organization is struggling with defining your use case to carriers or deciding on what Salesforce data to utilize in your texting, communication strategy may be your real issue.
Many organizations jump into Salesforce SMS (or texting generally) without a clear communication strategy. This leads to inconsistent messaging, stakeholder fatigue from irrelevant texts, and ultimately, a missed opportunity to truly leverage the power of direct communication. Imagine receiving a generic “flash sale” text from a company you just called with a complex support issue. Wouldn’t that feel completely out of touch and irrelevant?
This is where your unique understanding of your organization’s Salesforce data and stakeholder journey becomes important. An effective strategy involves defining your target audience segments within Salesforce, identifying key touchpoints where SMS can add value, and crafting concise, actionable messages. The better you understand your messaging strategy from the start, the easier it’ll be to find the right Salesforce bulk texting app for your org.
Hurdle #4: The Knowledge Gap
Even with the most intuitive of solutions, questions will inevitably arise around feature limitations, unique integrations, compliance, etc. A significant hurdle for organizations is the knowledge gap that emerges when support is not available or helpful, and written resources are inadequate.
When evaluating a Salesforce texting service, look for providers with a dedicated support team that understands both the complexities of SMS and Salesforce deeply. Demand, at minimum, comprehensive documentation and a responsive support ticketing system. And don’t be afraid to ask vendors plainly, “How much support can we realistically anticipate receiving from you post go-live?”
Hurdle #5: Throughput Limitations
As organizations grow and their communication needs expand, they often hit a wall with throughput limitations. This refers to the number of message segments you can send per second or day.
For mass texting efforts like event notifications or emergency alerts, hitting these limits can severely impact your ability to reach your recipients within a critical time window. Imagine a university that’s unable to reach all 10,000 of its students with an urgent notification ahead of a major weather event, leading to widespread confusion and potential safety risks.
These hard limitations are often a constraint of the texting solution’s infrastructure. A reliable Salesforce texting app should leverage multiple message routing options and have the capacity to scale with your needs. When evaluating providers for Salesforce bulk texting, inquire about their average throughput rates and their ability to handle large-scale campaigns without delays or message queueing.
Summary
Being able to text your stakeholders directly from within Salesforce is incredibly powerful. While adoption comes with its challenges, in our experience, it’s entirely worth the effort.
If you’re ready to take the leap and work with a partner that’s deeply familiar with overcoming these Salesforce texting hurdles, Mogli would love to hear from you. At Mogli, we’ve navigated these challenges with hundreds of our clients. It’s our mission to make texting on Salesforce easy, period.
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