How to reach your customers faster and boost engagement using SMS and mobile numbers

Are your sales teams struggling to reach customers as unknown landline numbers are generally ignored? Maybe you provided your team with company-wide mobile phones but now are worried about the spiraling costs and lack of oversight? Zoom Phone, our market-leading, cloud-based phone system, is designed to work around your needs and gives you the flexibility to work from any location, on multiple devices – including tablets, mobile phones, and supported desk phones. And now, you can reach your contacts from both landline and mobile numbers to connect with your customers faster.

These days, communicating via mobile numbers can help employees feel more available to their contacts, as they are given a direct line to a representative. Our flexible solution enables you to send/receive SMS internally and externally as well as make/receive calls.  

Users can choose between having a mobile or landline phone number in regions where Zoom Phone supports mobile numbers (currently, the US, UK, Canada, and Australia), making it easier to develop a personal connection with customers on their preferred channels and make your business more approachable. 

Since Zoom Phone is built on VoIP, it utilizes any available data connection regardless of whether your users have a smartphone, a desktop computer, or a desk phone. However, it can make a difference in how (potential) customers interact with a company and its representatives.

Using SMS for communication may seem outdated with the plethora of chat options available, such as Zoom Team Chat. However, Zoom Phone supports SMS for several compelling reasons. First and foremost, SMS provides one of the lowest barriers to communication. If you have the recipient’s number, you can send them a text message without the need for registration, accounts, or logins. 

This opens up an easy-to-use way of communicating between businesses. Coupled with call queues or auto attendants from the optional Zoom Phone Power Pack add-on, businesses can use these features to provide a low-friction way for customers to connect with a customer service team.

Internal communications are no different. SMS can support teams by providing them with an additional, fast channel that is not dependent on good or stable bandwidth being available. It makes sense for companies to invest in having this channel within their virtual perimeter and to integrate it with Zoom Phone to reduce the risk that their users will use workarounds or private accounts, which could lead to data loss or compliance risks.

Naturally, Zoom Phone’s SMS support would be incomplete without the Zoom Phone Power Pack add-on. With Power Pack, Zoom AI Companion can summarize team SMS conversations to help you stay on top of things. What’s more, the available Power Pack analytics tool makes it easy for the business to gauge interest and usage of services — so it’s easy to see if, for example, a new campaign to interact with customers is really working.

Using mobile phone numbers and enabling SMS is currently available in the following regions:

• United States

• Canada

• Australia (more information)

• United Kingdom (more information)

We are actively working to enable mobile phone number support and SMS in more countries and will update this blog post accordingly as these services become available in more countries. Check back regularly for updates. You can also reach out to our Zoom Phone team to discuss how Zoom Phone can help your business.