We've all had meetings that should have been emails.
Perhaps more importantly, we've all received—and made—phone calls that should have been text messages.
Businesses are catching onto this fast, especially considering that 58% of consumers say texting is the ideal (and fastest) way to reach them. (I'd take an SMS over listening to a voicemail and calling back any day.)
Texting is an even better option when it comes to support and sales.
Think about it: let's say a customer contacts your business about a package that never arrived. It will be faster and more convenient for them to start the conversation with you via SMS and let one of your support agents hop onto that same text thread to resolve the issue.
Textline, a secure business text messaging platform, is built for exactly this. Modern customer support and sales teams use it to provide high-quality customer service and be responsive when customers need support.
Textline origins: Texting trumps phone calls
In 2015, Alan Braverman and Mark Lilien had an idea for a startup founded on one premise: People prefer the convenience of texting over traditional phone calls—and the same rule could be applied to businesses. The only problem was that most company phone numbers didn't support texting.
The pair set out to change that, so more businesses could communicate efficiently with customers the way customers wanted them to.
So from a project started in the Giant Pixel Corporation (a studio that helps turn ideas into companies), Textline was born.
Did you know? Early beta testers of Textline (one of which was ticketing app Gametime) inspired the founders to turn Textline into a real startup in early 2016.
Textline today: Texting at scale across sales, support, and ops
Today, Textline is used by sales teams, customer support, and operations teams worldwide. Whether you want to provide customer service (with a personal touch) or resolve support issues at scale, Textline has features for either case.
You can use the message templates to create standard answers to common questions, trigger automatic replies based on keywords, and schedule specific text messages in advance (like announcements or product offers). You can also use emojis to add context and send links, images, and other file attachments to ramp up conversations.
Fave feature: Textline is built for teamwork, so you can talk privately with other team members in the same customer thread without them seeing. This lets you divvy up work and solve problems faster.
Acceleration through automation: Popular Textline workflows
Unlock even more value out of your customer support by connecting Textline with Zapier. That way, you'll be able to easily automate workflows with other apps you use. Here are a few popular workflows to get you started:
Create new Textline contacts from Google Forms submissions
Create or update Textline contacts when a new Google Sheets row is added or updated
Create Textline contacts from new Typeform submissions
Get Textline notifications for new Eventbrite attendees
New to Zapier? It's workflow automation software that lets you focus on what matters. Combine user interfaces, data tables, and logic with thousands of apps to build and automate anything you can imagine. Sign up for free to use this app, and thousands more, with Zapier.
