Wondering what happens when you text a landline? When you text a landline, the message may be converted to a voice message that the recipient hears as a call. If the landline isn't equipped to handle texts, the message won’t be delivered. However, businesses with text-enabled landlines can receive and reply to texts directly, enhancing communication with customers.
This guide explores how landline texting works and why it matters for your business.
Difference between text-to-landlines and text-enabled landlines
Although text-to-landlines and landline texting sound similar, they differ in their working process. In text-to-landlines, when the sender sends the text, it gets converted to audio and then forwarded as voicemail to the receiver.
In landline texting using a third party provider, the texts are sent and received directly using the landline number.
How Texting to a Landline Works?
When you send a text message to a landline number, several things can happen depending on the setup of that landline:
Text-to-Voice Conversion: If the landline is not equipped with text-to-landline software, the text will be automatically converted into a voice message. The recipient will hear your message read aloud when they answer the call.
No Delivery: If the landline doesn’t support text messaging and isn’t linked to a text-to-voice service, the message may simply fail to be delivered, with no notification to either party.
Text-Enabled Landlines: For businesses with text-enabled landlines, text messages are received directly as texts. These messages can be stored, managed, and responded to using specialized software.
Key Benefits of Text-Enabled Landlines
Retain Your Existing Number: Businesses can continue using their current landline number for both voice calls and text messages, avoiding the confusion and cost of changing numbers.
Higher Engagement: Text messages have a higher open and response rate compared to emails, making them an effective tool for customer communication.
Enhanced Customer Experience: Customers prefer texting over calling due to its convenience and speed, leading to quicker problem resolution.
By enabling text messaging on your landline, you ensure that you never miss a message, improve customer satisfaction, and streamline communication.
What are the Benefits of Sending Text Messages to Landlines?
Retaining your current landline number for ongoing communication
You can continue your current existing landline number without any change. Since many businesses promote their products as well as their numbers.
Change in Landline number might create confusion and incur huge costs to promote a new number.
Text Messaging is more preferred rather than calling by customers
Customers prefer to text over call as a message that can convey the problem immediately. In a call it might take more time than the time required to message.
Research shows that 48% of customers prefer communication from businesses to come from text messages. 75% of consumers would rather text customer support than correspond with them via phone or social media.
Keeping the texts short and crisp will attract more customers.
Text messages tend to have a higher open rate compared to emails
The average open rate for an SMS campaign is 98%, 5x that of email (20%). Also, the average SMS response time is 3 minutes, 60x that of email (90 minutes).
Considering the above text marketing statistics, text enabling your number will have more reach and visibility among the customers.
Where is landline texting used?
At home, most of us changed to mobile phones, and landline phones are becoming a vintage treasure. Thus, landline texting finds little use here.
But in business and organizations, there is always a need to use landline phones due to their reliability and security. Moreover, the majority of customers prefer texting to calling due to its convenience.
Thus, landline texting finds an essential application in business organizations.
What are landline texting capabilities?
As technology advances, landlines are not just sending texts. But they can now send MMS, emojis, documents, and so on…
Further, they come with many exciting features! They have group chats, scheduled messages, reminders, automated replies, personalized replies, short codes, and mass texting.
Why should businesses start landline texting?
In a survey by Pew Research center in 2012, it is estimated that 80% of the phone users in the USA use phones to send and receive messages. Also, 92% of the adult population uses it for texting. This is a considerable increase from 58% in 2007. It shows a substantial increase in preference for texting to phone calls among people.
Also, there is a considerable increase of internet access to people from 25% in 2007 to 56% in 2012.
It is not surprising that Facebook acquired the WhatsApp due to the traction gained for texting among emerging countries.
So why does business not take advantage of it!
How can businesses use landline texting?
There are a plethora of uses that businesses can apply for landline texting!
1. Keeping customers aware of your service
Use landline texting to send information to your customer. Customers are more likely to read the message from a trusted source than untrusted spam mails.
Since 95% of texts are read within minutes, you can be at peace that the messages are received at the customer end. Moreover, as the TCPA guidelines protect customers, they trust the information more than the other sources.
2. Provide an uninterrupted service to your customer
Well, here comes the exciting feature! Landline texting shall have multiple users tied to a single number. It means the seamlessly endless service from the business side as more employees can be involved in delivering the service to the customers.
3. Make things faster
In this fast-changing world, the first-to-reach gets an incomparable advantage. While the regular phone calls take at least three minutes, make it faster using texting that takes just seconds to disseminate the information.
4. Getting a customer review
A Pew Research survey in 2018 shows that an overwhelming majority of 88% of users believe customer reviews enhance the consumer experience.
So how do you get reviews when they are the most tedious tasks for customers?
But the good news is that the consumers are more likely to reply to the texts than online feedbacks. The response rate is 45% for readers compared to 6% for emails. Landline texting can help businesses to get personalized feedback from consumers. Moreover, they are less intrusive and more convenient to the receivers.
5. Easy connect to the supplier
Getting a headache of calling your supplier every time to update your requirements and record it down? This is where you can simplify your task by landline texting.
Use scheduled messages and text automation features to send recurrent texts and break your boredom!
6. Enhance employee engagement
Landline texting is another chat box but, interestingly, a more reliable one!
Using the group conversation feature, keep your employees engaged with their departments. Announce the meetings and make reminders in the conversation tab and keep all employees connected.
7. Make it secure
With the several security features coming with text-enabled landlines, businesses can protect their information better from competitors compared to other online communication tools.
Conclusion
Thus, we find in this blog how landline texting, a new communication tool, revolutionizes traditional business communication! With this current era where enterprises are needed to adapt quickly to the rapidly changing environment, it is also becoming imminent that they need to start adopting landline texting in their IT system.
Informative content.