Text Notification System – Signing Up Via Text

We do get the question occasionally; “can our employees just text ‘Acme Widget Company’ to your short code and sign up for our system?” While we can do that with AMG Alerts, it has a few downsides – most of which are significant:

1)      Text notification is indeed very fast and convenient, but if I am allowed to back out of the premise completely for a second – not everyone has that capability for various reasons and there needs to be a way to accommodate other methods. (maybe this should be a footnote as opposed to a list item!)

2)      If someone just sends SMS to a short code, all you’ll know about them is their phone number. That isn’t a very good way of establishing a comprehensive communications system. Of course you could then get the rest of the information through a serious of SMS exchanges, but that would be cumbersome to the point of being silly.

3)   In normal applications of texting in an employee messaging scenario, phone interaction instructions take up valuable character real estate. Remember, the length of SMS messages is limited.

The bottom line is that texting keywords to short code for system signup, while often appropriate, especially in marketing or short-term campaigns, wouldn’t generally be part of a critical notification system solution.