Mobile App – SMS Text Messages

In the mortgage industry, you need to be able to communicate with potential and current clients, listing agents, realtors, and many other people. Almost everybody has a mobile phone, so SMS messaging is one of the easiest and most reliable ways to stay in touch with everyone. In the BNTouch Mobile App, you can send and receive text messages without having to swap between programs, review conversation history with your contacts, and use templates to make your job easier.

When you log into the BNTouch app, you can manage all aspects of SMS messaging by swiping from left to right to open the menu. When you tap “SMS”, you will see an inbox of your current text message conversations. This history is shared between your mobile CRM and the web client version, so you can easily review conversations and track updates in each record’s Event Tracker.

Your SMS inbox is separated into two tabs: “All” message history and “Unread” messages. You can swap between these sections by tapping the tabs at the top of the screen. In both lists, new messages that haven’t been opened yet will appear with a green indicator to the left.

By default, individual messages will display one-by-one in the lists. Each will show the contact’s name, their phone number, the date and time of the message, and a preview of the message itself. When you tap on any individual message, you will see it in the context of the conversation you have had with that contact. You can scroll through your message history by dragging up and down, and you can send messages directly from here using the text box at the bottom of the screen or the “New SMS” button above. You can even choose from template messages you have create previously—but we will cover that in a moment.

Tapping the “Back” arrow in the upper-left will return you to the main SMS Inbox. You can quickly mark multiple messages as “Read” by tapping the circles to the left, then tapping the “Mark All as Read” button above. You can also use “Select All” to mark each message in that inbox as “Read”.

You can start new conversations from the SMS Inbox by tapping the “Notepad” icon in the upper-right corner of the screen. Here, you can tap in the “To” section to search for recipients from your CRM databases. When you start entering either names or phone numbers here, a list will display with contact records with matching information. Tapping these names will populate the “To” field with SMS contact information from that record.

The next field, “Attach”, lets you send documents and images along with an SMS text message. When you tap the “Plus” button to the right, you can access your BNTouch “Documents” Library or look for files on your mobile device’s “Gallery”. In the Documents Library, you can tap the tabs above to navigate the organizational sections from your CRM, search for matching files using the box below, and even attach multiple files using the circles to the left and the “Attach File(s)” button.

Back in the SMS screen, you can enter your message in the “Text” section below. Be aware that sending too many characters here may result in multiple smaller messages being sent. If you would like a copy of the message you enter here to be sent to the contact’s email address, you can tap the “Send Copy via Email” button.

Before you tap “Send SMS”, you can also tap “Add as Template” above to save the text you have entered below as a template to use in the future. You can add tags to organize your templates and choose whether to share them with other users in your CRM, then tap “Save Template” to add it to your list. In the future, you can just tap “Templates” above the SMS screen to select from these pre-made messages. When you tap the circle to the left and then “Select” above, the template text will copy to the current message. You can still edit anything in the message, but these templates can still save considerable time when replying to frequent, similar messages.

The “SMS” section of the app is the primary way to handle your text messages, but you can also send SMS messages whenever you are navigating records in your BNTouch app. When looking at records in a list, like the “Last Records” or “Pipeline” sections, you can tap the “Actions” icon to the right of a contact’s name to display contact options. Here, you can either choose “Send Text/SMS” to use the BNTouch SMS process described before or tap the “Default App” option to start an SMS message in whatever app you usually use to handle text messaging on your mobile device.