Why Mix Business and Pleasure?

The Problem

If you’re a small business owner or professional that uses text messaging to communicate with customers, partners or business associates, you know how important text messaging is as a core communication channel. Whether it’s booking an appointment, scheduling an interview, or coordinating service delivery, text messaging is a great way to have bi-directional communication and simplify the process for all involved.  Most users, even those that work in large corporations, will end up relying on their phone's texting app and personal mobile number for sending and receiving those text messages. This can be a problematic for a number of reasons. 

First, it can blur the lines between your personal and professional lives with business messages intermixed with personal ones.  Scrolling between dozens or even hundreds of mixed personal/business messages is a pain and hard to keep track of. And even though you most likely want to keep your number private, you’re now required to share it with any number of strangers in order to do your work.

Second, that lack of tracking and clear visibility to important messages can easily lead to missed opportunities, missed deadlines or even lost revenue. A small business owner who fails to respond to a request for a quote in a timely fashion will quickly lose that business to someone else who does. 

Third, if you work with a team, all those business messages are stuck on your phone, blocking other team members from potentially responding or taking necessary actions with the users request. You become the bottleneck and your business suffers.

Finally, you are communicating with those contacts separately from any other pertinent information, like their customer number, recent notes, or related data that you might need to refer to. Say you’re a recruiter and you receive a new message from one of the many candidates you’ve been working with asking to confirm who they will be meeting with? You forget the specific info related to this candidate so you now need to take time to login to a separate app to find the relevant information. Much easier if the message you received already has all that info right at your fingertips. 

Why do people continue to use their personal phone for business text messaging? The reason is pretty simple. Outside of purchasing a dedicated solution like a CRM or similar app with text messaging built in, there really is no easy, lightweight way to accomplish this task.  But with GraceBlocks, that’s about to change! 

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The solution

GraceBlocks enables you to swiftly import your customer or business contact spreadsheet and get texting within minutes. During this process, GraceBlocks will automatically provision a new phone number for you (welcome to your new dedicated business number!). This number can then be utilized to send and receive text messages from both the GraceBlocks web and mobile applications.

Furthermore, GraceBlocks is designed to work with the data that is most important to you. You can personalize the table with additional fields, like notes, attachments, or other fields that you want to keep track of regarding the communication. The messages are sent and received centrally from GraceBlocks, enabling you to add team members to your zone who can respond or take necessary actions based on the messages. This eliminates the need to use your personal phone number and enhances efficiency, creating a more dynamic process. GraceBlocks provides even more functionality such as the ability to send a text to many users at once, scheduling when messages are sent and more.

Below is a quick walk through to showcase how easy it is to set up your own business texting solution. In this example, we use the Texting template which creates four fields (first name, last name, phone number and message thread) and auto provisions our new business number. In future blog posts, I will show different ways you can accomplish this task, depending on the format of your data and what you'd like to accomplish.

Let GraceBlocks simplify your texting life by eliminating the use of your personal number for business text messages!