Cloud PBX Features: SMS and MMS Text Messaging

If your company is in the market for a new phone system, finding a cloud PBX with an SMS & MMS feature might need to be a hard requirement.

In this video, Mike Smith explains some of the problems with employees sending and receiving business-related text messages from their cell phones, and how to solve it with a cloud PBX platform.

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About Mike
Mike Smith is the Founder and President of AeroCom and has been helping companies with telecom and cloud services since 1999. He has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards and in 2011, he was honored as one of the top 40 business people in Orange County, CA., under 40 years old. You can also hear him as the host of the popular Information Technology podcast, ITsmiths with Mike Smith. Follow Mike on LinkedIn, Twitter or SpiceWorks.

Transcript

So your company’s phone system is end of life, and you’re looking at new phone systems… and of course Cloud PBX’s are one of those choices you’re looking at. Well, one feature that you should keep in mind is SMS or MMS. And I wanted to just quickly explain what that is. So what that is, it’s the ability to send and receive text messages from your company phone number. So via your company softphone or your mobile app, you can both send text messages and receive text messages. And the benefit of that is that your employees no longer have to use their personal cell phones to send or receive text messages from customers.

As we’ve all gotten used to, text messaging is a very efficient way to communicate for some things, and so that started to spill over to the workplace. But the problem is, is a lot of employees are having to do it with their personal cell phones. Now, number one, that creates a problem, because now customers have multiple phone numbers for employees. Well, if I’m going to send them a text, I have to use this number. If I’m going to call them and try to talk to them live, I should use this other number. And sometimes they’re calling both, and employees are ending up with voicemails on both their cell phones and also their office phones. It’s just a total mess. So it’s much easier if you just have one phone number that your customers or vendors can use to text message you, to call you, to do anything with. So that’s the main benefit.

Obviously also in addition to that, there’s some compliance issues. So say your company needs to be HIPAA compliant, or you really want to make sure you’re in control of what employees are texting to customers, you can’t do that if everybody’s doing it on their personal cell phone. So if you want to make sure you’re checking that stuff, make sure you’re going to use a company with a cloud PBX solution that allows SMS on the softphone.

Taking it a step further, you also might want to look at a company that can allow MMS. So what that is, is send and receive text messages with pictures from your cell phone, sorry, from your company’s softphone or mobile app. So that’s just taking it to the next level. So say you have a customer that calls in that wants to show you a picture of what they’re seeing, or maybe you have a technician that’s out on site at a customer and wants to call back into the office and send a picture of what they’re seeing. So if that’s something that you might find useful to your business, you want to find a cloud PBX provider that not only allows SMS on their softphone, but also allows MMS.

So I hope that’s helpful. Definitely look for those features, if that’s going to be useful to your business. But more than anything else, if you want to know which service providers do these things the best, don’t just start searching Google, please. There’s no reason for you to do that. Just contact me (call 714.593.0011 or email me). My company can give you recommendations. I’m happy to help you. I’ll ask you a few questions about your company, and I’ll give you the recommendations of the service providers that I think are going to be the best fit for your business, based on your company’s requirements. And the nice thing is, is the service providers end up paying our company our broker fee. So your company doesn’t have to pay us a dime.

So there’s absolutely no excuse for you not to call me and ask me for my recommendations. Otherwise, you’re going to be on Google forever. There’s hundreds of cloud PBX service providers out there, and you really have no idea which ones have a bad reputation, a good reputation, and you’re just going to waste a lot of time and probably end up in the wrong spot. So instead, just call me. I hope that helps. Have a great day. I’ll see you on the next video.