Remote Teams and Offline Staff: How to Keep in 2-Way Contact – Reliably
Keeping in touch with your remote teams – and having them stay in touch with you can be a real headache.
Reliability and accessibility in communication is key. Yet phone calls and email are often slow and unreliable; and in many rural areas, there’s no access to either service. Communication gets even harder when employees are offline, since you can’t use your UC platform to connect with them.
On top of this, you have to keep communication compliant, support BYOD, and stop using personal mobile numbers for work.
So what do you do?
Is it even possible for you to maintain dependable 2-way communication with your distributed workforce, irrespective of location or device? And at the same time, can you maintain compliance while preserving professional communication boundaries?
Well, there is a way. And it might just suprise you: SMS.

SMS Text Messaging
I know what you’re thinking, ‘text is so yesterday! As a business, I can only text one way. Moreover, I can only message one-on-one, and I have to use my personal phone number to do it. Right?’
Wrong! And here’s why:
You can now send and receive text messages directly from your Microsoft Teams or Skype for Business desktop. And you can use a mobile app to keep your conversations going when you’re on the move.

Thanks to YakChat’s central messaging service, each Microsoft Teams/Skype for Business user can have their own virtual SMS number.
Then they can send and receive texts to any mobile device from the convenience of their familiar UC desktop. They can also text from their IOS/Android mobile device – without having to disclose their private mobile number.
How Does Texting from Microsoft Teams Help My Business?
Communicating with your remote teams and mobile workers suddenly gets a whole lot easier. Now you can:
1. Keep in 2-way contact with your offline staff, using instant messaging: Now you can do this in just the same way you can with your online employees.
2. Alert your entire mobile workforce of changing situations or emergencies in real-time: Get your alert message out to your entire team fast by highlighting the contacts you want your text to go to and hitting send.
3. Have always-on communication: Even if the network is congested or there’s no internet service, your texts will still get through, making SMS indispensable in a crisis.
4. Never miss a message again: With message notifications, users always know when new texts arrive. Messages can be viewed easily on a desktop or on the mobile app when staff are out of the office.
5. Maintain professional communication boundaries easily: Users can now perform mobile work on their personal devices without impacting their personal phone plans or data usage.
It all sounds so simple, doesn’t it? And the really good news? It is!
Ready to find out more?
Remote Teams and Offline Staff
Give your remote teams and offline staff a helping hand with Microsoft Teams SMS.