Waiting to respond can damage your best marketing campaigns and sales efforts. That’s why it’s crucial to find a better way to spark that first conversation and continue it in a way that’s sustainable and meaningful.

Your prompt response might also help your prospective customers in unexpected ways. One of our clients is an attorney who helps accident victims recover damages for injuries they received through no fault of their own. Those clients often reach out via the internet in the middle of the night. They are awake and searching for help because of pain or worry … or both. And their late-night internet searches supply both information and an introduction to law firms that can help them.

Designing Your Automated Campaign

Our attorney client wants to interact with prospective customers on their timetables, which might mean in the middle of the night. He doesn’t want his intake staff to work around the clock, so he has created an automated sequence that launches when a prospective client asks for more information.

When that happens, the law firm sends a pre-determined automated message directly to the client’s mobile phone. The message welcomes the client with the firm name, mentions that it’s an automated message, and outlines who on staff will contact the client and when. When it’s time for the follow-up contact, a member of the firm’s intake staff contacts the client with a personal message. That single personal message often leads to more involved message exchanges and, ultimately, to welcoming a new client.

After implementing this system, the firm has seen their client acquisition numbers soar in a highly competitive market. They said that clients often contact several firms at once, and the firm that responds first gets the business. This firm is dedicated to being the first to respond with the skill and expertise their clients need.

That’s why automated messaging is so important to your customer outreach. By automating messages, you can begin a conversation with a prospective customer, client or patient – no matter when they contact you. Messaging automation is ready to respond 24/7, 365.

Because you craft the automated messages, they can reflect your concern for your clients’ wellbeing, introduce your company or share important information. You can write the messages with that first contact in mind and tailor it to your clients’ needs.

How to Trigger Automated Messages

Generally, companies use one of two methods to trigger an automated message sequence. The first is to send the message when the prospective customer interacts with the website in a certain way. It’s common for a request for more information about the company or product to start an automated sequence. Asking for a demo or a free trial might also start an automated sequence. By checking analytics, you can determine where your customers spend most of their time on your website. That location is a great place to install an automated message trigger.

The second way to trigger an automated message is time- and calendar-based. You might send automated messages after an hour to remind a customer that they’ve left items in a shopping cart. You might send a follow-up message a certain number of days after an initial inquiry. You might nurture a customer by sending pertinent information during an installation cycle or while they are making buying decisions. The trigger in these cases is a date or the length of time since the last contact.

Enlist the Aid of Chat Bots

If you’ve enabled chat bots on your website, you can tie your automated messages into the interactions your customers have with the chat bots. Your bots might be able to provide additional information about your products or services, and then they might trigger an automated message sequence that leads to a person-to-person encounter.

Companies have been clever with their chat bot personalities. By admitting up front that they are automated, these bots help customers overcome any resistance to them. Charming chat bots or engaging messaging sequences go a long way to helping a prospective client feel appreciated and understood. How you write the responses can help you nurture your customers and win new business.

Our customer support team would love to help you automate messages with SMS-Magic. Ask for a demo or a free trial!

More than 5 billion people communicate with each other by sending text messages globally. With an open rate of 98%, compared to email at 15%, messages are clearly preferred over cold calling and emails. When your customers are actually reading what you say to them, everything changes.

Messaging customers gets their attention by using their preferred communication channel. It helps you reach a wider customer base, and it also helps you send more personalized content. With the right approach, your customer outreach through conversational messaging can have both depth and breadth. How can you get the best of both worlds? We’ve got a few proven tips to share!

1. Don’t Violate Trust

Every good relationship is based on trust, and this applies to customer relationships too! Make sure to get explicit permission to message your customers. This is a legal requirement in the US, and it also helps protect your company’s reputation. Remove any customers from your messaging list who have not confirmed their permission status. When customers purposely opt in to receive your messages, they’re less likely to feel harassed or spammed. Invite customers to opt in using powerful call-to-action buttons on your website, and display easily visible messaging in your storefront, too. Incentivizing opt-ins with giveaways or discounts is a great way to sweeten the deal!

2. Show Them You Care

Messaging is useful for marketing, but it’s also a powerful customer care tool. Customers feel appreciated when their feedback has a direct impact on the business. Getting a personalized message asking for feedback after a procedure, service or purchase makes your customers feel that they matter. You can send out messages inviting customers to take feedback surveys, and send a personalized thank-you text whenever they make a purchase. You can even offer a special discount for your most loyal customers, targeted to their favorite shopping category.

3. Timing Is Key

Text messaging allows you to text your customers at any time of the day. Yet, this doesn’t mean that you should do so. Nobody wants to receive text messages at 2 a.m., right? Customers will opt out quickly if they’re getting messages at inconvenient times. Sending texts outside of work hours may imply a false sense of urgency, and your customers’ trust will be violated.

In addition to the time of day, it’s important to justify sending a message on a specific day. Do you have something relevant and time-sensitive to say, or is your message just there to make noise? Appointment reminders are a great way to use messaging for timely, relevant content. Your customers will appreciate your help when you keep them from missing a doctor’s appointment or special event. Reminders help to establish your organization’s messaging as helpful and useful in your customers’ eyes. You can even automate them on your end!

4. Keep It Short and Sweet

There’s a world of difference between a promotional message and an email newsletter. Customers typically read messages on their mobile phones, so less is usually more. Getting your point across in 2-5 sentences is ideal, since that’s the maximum length of an average text message. Make sure to use powerful words and get your point across in clear sentences. This approach is part of personalizing your messaging outreach–it shows that you understand your customers’ busy lifestyle and respect their time.

5. Make It Personal

Let’s be honest. You wouldn’t respect a business much if you felt like you were just a name on their marketing list. Your customers feel the same way. Personalizing your marketing messages will engage your audience more. When your customers understand that your business cares about them, your conversion rates will soar, along with your sales and customer loyalty.

Sending personal messages doesn’t mean you can’t use powerful automation features that make your life easier. You can customize parts of a message while using templates for other parts. You can also send a variety of targeted messages, each one addressed to only a select group of users in your database. This can be far more effective than a single, generic outreach, and it doesn’t take much more effort.

When you use messaging to grow your business, you don’t have to choose between quantity of customers and quality of customer relationships. Our team would love to show you how SMS-Magic can make connecting with your customers easier and more effective with a demo or a free trial!

HeyTutor is a company dedicated to the supplemental education of children and adults from pre-K to college and beyond in more than 250 subject areas. The company has developed a dynamic e-learning platform to help students fulfill their school goals as well as their career aspirations. The core of their business is one-on-one, online tutoring sessions, but the company is expanding its business with in-person tutoring, early childhood prep activities, and social and emotional learning, just to name a few of their recent initiatives.

As they prospected for new business, HeyTutor found that their best potential clients were working parents and students who were busy with other commitments most of the day. Parents would fill out lead forms in response to marketing efforts, and a HeyTutor staff member would initiate contact with a phone call or email.  Unfortunately, many calls and emails went unanswered. HeyTutor believed increasing their response rate was vital to their continued success.

In short, HeyTutor needed to get their prospects involved in conversations early in the sales journey. They knew that the average response rate for emails was less than 10 percent and responses to phone calls weren’t meeting their expectations. Messaging seemed like a great solution to their problem.

Research shows that over 97 percent of Americans use text messaging every day. It’s native to most mobile phones, and over 90 percent of buyers would prefer to hear from companies via message than any other form of communication. In addition, 80 percent of people use texting for business, and 35 percent of these same people say they can’t go 10 minutes without responding to a text.

Messaging also fit into the busy lives of HeyTutor’s preferred clients – students and their parents. Patrick McClure, Hey Tutor’s director of operations, said in a recent interview, “Everyone’s working. If I get a [phone] call right now, I’m not going to answer it. Will I remember to call back in an hour? Probably not.”

But, he said, if a text message comes through, the prospect can easily multi-task and respond. Their response might read, “I’m not available right now. Call me back after work. I’m free at 6.”

Some people, he said, just want to talk via text. Others want to check the price. “It makes it much easier for us to get right in,” McClure said.

HeyTutor had already developed a robust CRM with Salesforce and wanted to integrate the database with its messaging solution. They looked for companies that were experts at Salesforce integrations.

They initially chose a messaging provider that promised to build out the Salesforce customizations that HeyTutor required. The promises, however, weren’t fulfilled. It wasn’t a complete disaster, McClure said, but the badly implemented customizations delayed the entire project. HeyTutor ended the relationship so they could repair the damage their messaging provider had caused. Burned by a bad experience, HeyTutor turned to SMS-Magic for help.

SMS-Magic is an expert with Salesforce integrations. The company is a Salesforce Partner and the top rated messaging application on the Salesforce AppExchange.

SMS-Magic’s Tanmay Ghag started working with McClure to ensure that the Salesforce integration went smoothly and encompassed all the customizations HeyTutor needed. “Tanmay has been fantastic,” McClure said. “Everything that we ever wanted to integrate, has been integrated – flawlessly.”

McClure reported that after the SMS-Magic integration went live, the company saw an increase in lead responses between 35 and 40 percent. McClure said the increase in responses has directly benefited the bottom line.

As the relationship between the two companies has developed, SMS-Magic has continued to work on tailoring the product to meet HeyTutor’s needs. “These guys made it effortless and got everything set up right away,” McClure said. “Also, it was very affordable.”

“It’s been a pleasure to work with SMS-Magic,” McClure said. “They have a customer service team to emulate. It’s remarkable.”

As SMS-Magic develops new capabilities, HeyTutor is looking forward to expanding their messaging program. With shared success behind them, the two companies look forward to growing their partnership into the future.

One caveat: Before you send surveys via text messaging, your respondents must have opted into receiving messages from you. Like other types of solicitations, you must have their permission before the first message is sent. If you’re already working to grow your opt-in list, this requirement will just be another part of your overall marketing strategy.

Designing Your Survey

Conversational messaging lends itself to two different kinds of surveys. The first is a survey conducted entirely through messaging; the other is a text invitation that links to a web-based survey.

Using messaging for the first type of survey is growing in popularity so it’s possible that you might have taken a “quick” survey that only has one or two questions. Responses are generally limited to yes or no and numerical ratings.

For example, the text might read, “Reply and rate your experience today between 1 and 10.” If you reply “8,” your message goes through. If you answer anything other than a numeral between 1 and 10, however, you might receive a message to try again.

When you use this type of survey in your business, it will be powered by an automated messaging sequence that you’ve designed and written specifically for this task. The first message is generally triggered by something your customer does online or with their mobile phone. You determine the trigger, the sequence of messages and the wording of the messages.

You’ll have to consider what message to send if the input you’ve asked for isn’t what you get. For example, if your customer answers the question above with “Loved it!” you’ll have to write a message that asks them to try again.

The second type of survey invitation contains a link to a web-based survey that lives on your website. You can use any survey design software you prefer to create the survey. Customers will use the link in the texted invitation to access the survey, but they will complete the survey on your website. The survey questions can be yes-no, multiple choice or fill in the blank. You can even provide space for longer qualitative answers, if you want those responses.

How Effective is Conversational Messaging in Surveys?

Researchers at the Pew Research Center wanted to know how effective text messaging is when it’s used as an invitation to take a survey. They didn’t have to worry about getting permission to text during the experiments because they already had a study group whose members had opted into text messaging.

The Pew researchers sent invitations by both text and email to one group and just by email to another. Within 30 minutes of sending the invitations, 15 percent of the text-and-email group had competed the survey, and only 6 percent of the email-only group had. Although the research showed that text recipients initially responded faster to the survey than those invited with an email, by the end of the experiment the responses were equal between the two groups.

Text invitations may be especially effective if your campaign values quick responses. Some contests, for example, could benefit from leveraging fast response times.

Researchers also found that, when invited by texts, more respondents completed surveys using smart phones. A little more than half the respondents invited by text completed the survey using their phones. Only 33 percent of those in the email group completed the survey with their phones.

That result may impact your survey design. If you use text to invite respondents to take your survey, you’ll also want to be sure the survey is easy to read and complete on a smart phone.

Finally, researchers found that using short codes to deliver survey invitations allowed cellphone carriers, device manufacturers and/or individuals to block delivery. Short codes are five- or six-digit codes that allow transmission of messages faster than a traditional 10-digit phone number.

Pew researchers chose to use short codes because of the volume of messages they intended to send. Short codes allowed messages to be transmitted faster, even though some of the messages were blocked.

If you are sending a high volume of messages, you’ll need to determine if short codes will perform better than long codes overall. Using long codes would allow access to those respondents who have blocked short codes but would take longer to send.

How Can SMS-Magic Help You?

Staying in touch with your existing customers and getting to know your potential customers has become a requirement in today’s business world. SMS-Magic, through conversational and automated text messaging, can help you reach out to customers with surveys about their experience with your company.

SMS-Magic offers a free trial so that you can get a feel for our product. If you’re as pleased as we think you will be, you can choose the level of service that’s best for your company.

Contact us to set up a demo or to start your free trial. Let us show you how you can engage your customers in new ways!

Most of our customers say it’s virtually impossible to get a customer to return an email. And we hear comments like, “No one answers the phone anymore” or “They won’t answer if they see a strange number on caller ID.”

So the question is: If you can’t reach customers and prospects, how can you provide a service or sell a product?

As a software-as-a-service company developing SMS and MMS texting solutions, we think we know how to reach your customers, but we thought it might be better to let our customers show you how text messaging works in their businesses.

Why Use Text Messaging?

Before we get to the great ideas, let’s take a minute to talk about the reality of communication in 2022. Emails were great when everyone read them sitting in front of their desktop computers and the alternative was sending mail through the postal service. Voice mails, too, served their purpose.

These days, however, emails are easy to ignore. In fact, we only open 22% of the emails we receive. And the more mobile we’ve become; the more unwieldy emails have become. It’s just not convenient to reply on the run.

And most of us don’t even listen to the voice messages we receive. It’s likely we will wait for a text.

Texts are quick, easy and always with you. We send more than 5 billion texts every day, and we read 98% of the ones we receive. Clearly, text messaging is the channel we prefer.

Here are some great ideas from two of our customers. You can apply these ideas directly to your own business or modify them to fit your unique situation.

When You Have Seconds to Respond

In the high-stakes legal world, the key to winning new business is responding quickly. When legal prospects have a need, they normally shop for an attorney online. One of our customers estimates that he has seconds to reach out to a prospect before they move on to a competitor.

To engage a prospect quickly, our customer has developed a series of automated text messages that are triggered by where the prospect is on the firm’s website. Different practice areas are housed in different sections of the website, so it’s possible to tell where the prospect’s interest lies and tailor messages specifically for that need.

No matter what the prospect needs, the initial messages introduce the law firm and ask how the firm can help. As the prospects reply, the conversations continue with pre-programmed messages. And when it’s appropriate, a member of the intake team takes over with live messaging and continues the conversation.

The system is designed to be active 24/7. The automated messages launch even if the prospect is searching at 3 a.m. National practices can benefit from a time-neutral system because prospects may shop for an attorney at any hour of the day.

Once a prospect becomes a client, SMS-Magic makes staying in touch easier than ever. Our customer uses Litify to manage his firm, and SMS-Magic is designed to work seamlessly with Litify. Messages are tracked by SMS-Magic in the Litify environment. That means everyone in the firm opens one application, rather than two. They can see all the client’s information, including all text communications, in one place.

If an attorney is away from the office, anyone at the office can respond to queries and a different attorney can continue working on the case. The case doesn’t stop because the lead attorney is unavailable. It saves the firm time and better serves the client.

When You Must Respond on the Fly

Another of our customers manages large rental properties. They wanted to handle maintenance issues as quickly as possible, and they asked their residents to email maintenance requests to a dedicated address. Staff members responded as soon as they were in front of their computers.

It was a great plan, but it didn’t work. Residents complained that their requests weren’t handled quickly enough and started texting requests instead using email. Residents liked the immediacy and the convenience of texting.

The workflow, however, wasn’t designed to accept requests via text. Trying to make sure texts were transferred promptly and accurately created extra work for the management staff. The staff was missing requests and couldn’t always be sure issues had been addressed. And staff members could only respond to requests when they were in the office.

Our customer’s CRM was Salesforce. SMS-Magic is designed to work with Salesforce, as well as other CRMs, and the integration made using a text-based system for maintenance requests easy. Once our customer installed SMS-Magic to handle all their text messages, maintenance requests began to flow smoothly.

SMS-Magic tracked all customer contacts, no matter what the source of the contact. Our customer was able to track all maintenance requests – by email, phone or text. And anyone on the staff could access the record. That meant anyone could give a resident an update on their request.

It also made sense to equip each staff member with the mobile version of SMS-Magic. With the app, they could answer texts from either their own phones or from company phones. The system would track the contacts in Salesforce no matter what phone was used. No longer were staff members tied to their desks. They could visit company properties and respond to maintenance requests at the same time. Our customer said it was a game changer for their business.

How Can You Test Drive SMS-Magic?

Would your business benefit from an integration between your CRM and your texting platform? We’d love to help you start texting or help scale your texting to a higher level.

We have experts ready to help you take SMS-Magic for a spin for FREE! Schedule a demo or start a free trial today! We think you’ll love what you see!

But when tenants reported emergencies by texting, staff members weren’t always at their desks to receive the texts. During the day, they were often out checking on properties, and after hours they were spending time with their families. They had asked tenants to phone in their emergencies, but tenants wanted to text. Missing the texts meant that their tenants were not getting the help they needed. Frustration was mounting for our customer and the tenants.

Our customer wanted to know if we could help. Fortunately, we had anticipated this type of need and had created the SMS-Magic mobile app.

We know that globally we send 5 billion texts a day, and we open 98 percent of them. Conversely, we only open emails 22 percent of the time, according to Gigaom. Research from Asurion shows that we look at our phones 96 times a day or once every 10 minutes.

With the SMS-Magic mobile app, your team can respond to your customers wherever they are. And they can use their own phones. This gives your staff the ability to offer personalized customer experiences while they are away from their desks.

It’s a competitive world and if you’re able to respond to your customers faster than your competition, you have earned an amazing competitive advantage. Your customers may not expect much from customer service, but you can earn new customers, while keeping your existing customers, by delighting them every time they contact you. Quick responses to their emergencies or inquiries can help you develop the positive customer relationships that drive your business.

And we know that if you use a CRM like Salesforce or Zoho, you want to keep track of all your customer interactions. We can connect the mobile app to your CRM. All of your incoming texts and your responses will be archived in your CRM just like you were responding from your desktop. You can:

• Start and tag conversations with campaign leads, opportunities, candidates, cases, etc.
• Route conversations to the right team members and increase customer satisfaction.
• View conversation history across mobile, CRM, and other systems.

We also can help you set up automated responses to incoming texts. With an automated system in place, your customers will have an immediate response. You’ll have the option to switch to live responses when you need to.

The mobile app allows your team to share images, files, videos and live photos with your customers (or tenants!). An on-point YouTube video could turn an emergency into a quick DIY project. Or it can assist you in responding quickly when your customer can’t fix the problem.

We’ve also thought about the customers who use more than the native SMS capability in their phones. You can receive, track and respond to multichannel queries such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, text and MMS.

Security is always top of mind for us. As with our desktop service, we ensure data privacy and regulatory compliance while you’re using text messaging to manage your customers’ issues.

We’ve been getting rave reviews from customers who have tried our mobile app. Dugan Aylen, owner of The Franchising Centre, said, “We recently started using the SMS-Magic Mobile App and it has been a game changer. It allows us to respond and react. It syncs with our CRM system perfectly.”

We’d like to help you engage customers anytime, anywhere with the SMS-Magic Mobile App. Download the app now from the App Store or Google Play. If you have questions about set-up, be sure to contact us!

We’re offering new customers a 7-day, free trial with SMS-Magic. If you’ve been thinking about starting conversational messaging in your customer outreach, now is the time to discover what SMS-Magic can offer. With the free trial, you’ll have a hands-on experience with SMS-Magic and its capabilities, and we’ll be there if you have any questions.

Messaging is the most effective channel to reach your customers exactly where they are. Around the world, 3.8 billion of us have smartphones, and we carry them with us most of the time. Some of us even sleep with them. We open texts and other messages 98 percent of the time, and 60 percent of us do it within five minutes of receiving them. Email can’t even start to compare. We only open 20 percent of our emails.

As Michael Goldenberg, president of Debtcare Canada, wrote to us, “This product is AMAZING and is changing my business. It reaches clients 100 times better than email.”

SMS-Magic can transform your sales, marketing and service responses. With personalized conversations, sales teams can drive leads, respond faster and increase revenue. With rep guidance, reps can handle large volumes of prospect conversations to close deals faster. Our clients report 40 percent more conversions and a 25 percent faster sales cycle, allowing them to move more opportunities through the pipeline.

Marketing results are equally as good with 70 percent response rates, 90 percent read rates and 50 percent higher ROI with SMS-Magic. Using dashboards and reporting capabilities, you can easily detect, diagnose and resolve any lagging performance areas.

Today’s buying decisions are wrapped around a customer’s experience and nowhere is that more evident than in customer service. We’ve found that 66 percent of customers will pay more for a product with a mobile messaging channel and 68 percent prefer messaging over phone or email. With SMS-Magic, your customer service teams can respond quickly, resolve issues faster, and communicate more effectively, increasing productivity and NPS ratings. Your reps can handle six times more messaging responses for every phone call.

In the U.S., almost half of users prefer using the native SMS feature on their smartphones, like iMessage and Android. Around the world, however, users favor messaging apps like WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. SMS-Magic can handle messages from all these platforms and will allow you to run campaigns in them while helping you comply with various regulations. There’s no need to use several services to achieve what SMS-Magic already can do.

We are a Salesforce Partner and are rated the #1 messaging app on the Salesforce AppExchange. SMS-Magic is a customizable platform with clickable configuration, intelligent routing, delivery and plug-n-play integrations.

Our global team of 200+ is ready to assist you as you discover how conversational messaging can dramatically increase your interaction with your customers. So what are you waiting for?

Sign up for a free trial. It’s easy, and you’ll get full access to SMS-Magic capabilities and free support.

Still have questions? We’re happy to chat. Just click to sign up, then click chat and we’ll be there!

Why should you invest the money?

Our customers have found that when they begin running effective campaigns, they quickly need more flexibility, more analytics and more information about their customers. Upgrading your service plan from Start to Grow or from Grow to Custom provides you the level of technology you need.

In the United States, for example, 47 percent of users prefer using the native SMS feature in their smartphone to send texts. The Start service plan handles those texts with ease. Other channels like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or SnapChat, however, are the most popular messaging apps outside the U.S. Upgrading to a premium plan will allow you to handle conversations from native texts, as well as from the other messaging apps. Managing all messages in one place makes your process smoother.

We can help you grow your conversations with other similar benefits that allow you greater flexibility in all your customer conversations.

Here are the top ten benefits you gain with an upgrade:

1. Message Customers on Multiple Channels

Augment your texting with other popular messaging channels. Meet customers where they are using multichannel messaging. Send campaigns through channels like Facebook and WhatsApp.

2. Track CampaignURLs 

Using URL shortening and tracking helps you to promote, track and measure your business. The customized, shortened URLs enable you to track incoming traffic and marketing campaigns while maintaining a cohesive brand identity and increasing customer engagement.

3. Access Custom Analytics

Measure delivery, rep and team results with custom analytics. Know exactly what’s happening with your messaging and your customers. Analytics help you manage your team and its results.

4. Handle More Conversations

The new Rep Desk/Inbox gives you room for 10 times your previous conversation volumes. As your business grows, the number of conversations you engage in will grow, as well. The Rep Desk/Inbox allows you to substantially increase the number of conversations you can handle. This upgrade is especially for customers on or below SMS-Magic version 1.48.

5. Ensure Compliance with Reports and Dashboards

Gain access to our consent matrix to help you understand compliance guidelines around the world and to ensure deliverability of your messaging campaigns. With new laws and regulations coming online every year, you need the assurance the consent matrix provides. You’ll know you’re in compliance.

6. Customize Your Conversation Views Using Filters

Filter conversations based on Salesforce list views, owners, campaigns, etc. to better understand and profile your audience. The ability to segment your audience allows you to target your messages in just the right way. This upgrade is especially for customers on or below SMS-Magic version 1.48.

7. Use Multiple Phone Numbers

Your organization may have several conversations going with customers for a variety of reasons, including support, sales, service, etc. Having only one phone number may cause those conversations to blend together in a way that is confusing. Multiple phone numbers can help keep conversations organized and clear. The upgrade allows you to access the phone numbers you need.

8. Simplify User Subscriptions

Grow your subscribers with the flexibility to manage different types of opt-ins from multiple places. You must track opt-in and opt-out requests for a number of reasons, not the least of which is to avoid annoying your customers. This feature gives you the flexibility to manage subscription requests from different sources.

9. Assign Conversations to Colleagues 

Quickly assign each conversation to the right team member while simultaneously giving them access to all the conversational history involved so they are immediately up to speed. This feature allows your team to help customers without making the customer repeat the problem with every new person they encounter. You can quickly route the conversation to the correct staff member who has all the details readily available.

10. UseDedicated Mobile Messaging App

The Grow service plan provides a dedicated mobile messaging app for your convenience.

Now is a great time to take advantage of our discount and upgrade to an SMS-Magic premium account. Our upgraded plans start at just $100 a month. You can upgrade automatically from our website, but if you have questions or want more information, please don’t hesitate to contact us. 

Although you hear “HIPAA won’t allow this” or “I can’t do that because of HIPAA rules,” the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) does not apply in many of the cases where it is cited. For example, HIPAA only applies to “covered entities.” That means healthcare providers like hospitals, doctors, pharmacies, health insurers, and healthcare clearinghouses. It also applies to the business associates of those entities, such as companies that handle medical records as a vendor. These entities are required to keep your protected or personal health information (PHI) secure and private.

If you aren’t a “covered entity,” i.e., a healthcare provider, you aren’t affected by HIPAA rules. Instead, your disclosure of PHI may be governed by sensitivity to your customers, or other applicable state or federal privacy laws.

Sara Morrison wrote a useful guide to HIPAA – what it covers, what it doesn’t – for Vox. In it, she makes it clear that the single “P” in HIPAA does not stand for privacy. It stands for portability.

Morrison points out that the law was created in 1996 to address the massive digitization of health data that was coming, and it didn’t go into effect until 2002. HIPAA, she writes, contains “provisions to prevent healthcare fraud, simplify and standardize medical records, rules for pre-tax employee medical savings accounts, and to ensure continuous health insurance coverage for employees who lost or changed their jobs.” Privacy is addressed in the “administrative simplification” section.

Privacy concerns are the reason that healthcare providers and insurance companies might insist that you use HIPAA-compliant channels or patient portals to communicate with them.

SMS-Magic is considered a “business associate” of healthcare organizations and insurers and must take extra measures to ensure HIPAA’s protections. We also agree to sign a Business Associate Agreement and to implement controls to maintain reasonable appropriate measures for protecting ePHI. We are also considered a “Conduit from Source to Destination,” which doesn’t require a signed agreement. Our core objective is to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of all ePHI.

We do that in three areas: technical safeguards, physical safeguards, and administrative safeguards.

Technical Safeguards

Our technical safeguards include use of access controls, integrity controls, audit controls, identity authentication, and transmission security to avoid unauthorized PHI access.

• Access Control: Security measures have been implemented by SMS-Magic to prevent unauthorized access to PHI. Access Control policies have been defined and are periodically revisited for further updates.

• Audit Controls: SMS-Magic systems have been designed to ensure compliance with HIPAA regulations for text messages. Systems are able to produce audit logs so administrators can monitor usage.

• Integrated: SMS-Magic Platform systems are integrated to delete text messages from the SMS-Magic Platform once they have been processed and sent.

• Transmission Security: SMS-Magic uses the industry standard transmission security for PHI. SMS-Magic systems are designed to use rsa 20148 in encryption in transit.

Physical Safeguards

We take extra precautions to ensure the physical security of our servers and systems in the following ways:

• Security Procedures: We initiated security procedures to ensure that ePHI cannot be improperly altered, or saved to an external hard drive, desktop computer or mobile device.

• Authorized Users: SMS-Magic systems take care of all PHI encryption and have access on a secure network, with authorized users.
  
• Risk Assessments: SMS-Magic performs regular risk assessment of unauthorized physical access to the servers.

Administrative Safeguards

Screen Magic administrative measures include administrative actions, as well as policies and procedures, to manage the selection, development, implementation, and maintenance of security measures to protect ePHI. 

• Security Management Process: We perform a risk analysis, information system activity review and practice risk management.

• Information Access Management: Access authorization.

• Security Awareness and Training: We conduct periodic training and awareness sessions, send security reminders and notifications, protect systems from malicious software, manage passwords, and monitor log-ins.

• Security Incident Procedures: We have a data backup plan, a disaster recovery plan, an emergency mode operation plan and ongoing response and reporting requirements.

Conduit from Source to Destination

Because of the nature of our service, SMS-Magic is considered a “Conduit from Source to Destination.” That means we designed our software to transmit ePHI without retaining or accessing the information except on a random or infrequent basis. We are a conduit for your information, not a warehouse.

HIPAA regulations are in place to prevent sensitive information from falling into the wrong hands. Abiding by these rules and regulations helps protect data privacy and keeps everyone clear of fines and litigation. Although HIPAA compliance appears to be a challenge to using communication technologies in the healthcare industry, we offer a well organized, experience and compliant business as your partner.

Contact us today to help your business engage customers, capture leads, build a pipeline, and increase revenue.