South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Marcia Heroux Pounds
3:35 PM EDT, April 21, 2010

I recently received a text from a phone number I didn’t recognize, so I ignored it. But more recently, it worked. The text got my immediate attention because it was someone I needed to reach for a project.

How essential is texting for business? Texting may be the new lifeline to clients, customers and colleagues you need to reach — now. More businesses owners and professionals are using texting to reach people who are too busy to check e-mail or disinclined to answer the phone.

“It’s the fastest, quickest way for my clients to reach me,” says Fort Lauderdale career coach Debbie Benami-Rahm. When clients spot a job posting and needs her to review it, they text her with a link and she tells them whether it’s a match.

She sends “confidence boosters” via text before clients go on job interviews and later messages them to find out how the interview went.

Jason Welch, managing partner of R.I.C. Search in South Florida, says his recruiting firm limits the use of instant messaging. He may send a text to let a job candidate know he needs to talk to them or request they read a time-sensitive e-mail.

But some businesses find that texting is becoming essential to reaching their workers in the field.

At Interim Healthcare in Sunrise, nurses receive text messages letting them know about staffing opportunities. “They can send a text message in real time to potential candidates as opposed to picking up the phone and calling one by one,” says Mike FitzGibbon, president of 3Cinteractive, a Boca Raton firm that provides the texting system.

Without the texts nurses working in home healthcare might not know when a patient is being discharged from the hospital, might miss policy changes, and could lose a chance to fill an open shift, says Linda Schaub, who heads marketing at Interim Healthcare.

Read the rest of this entry »

3Cinteractive helped Interim HealthCare, the nation’s largest healthcare staffing company, improve their communications company-wide. The organization employs more than 75,000 healthcare workers and cares for nearly 50,000 patients a day.

Problem

Interim HealthCare has 300 offices nationwide. Each office relied on person-to-person phone calls and emails to notify healthcare workers of new opportunities. They needed a faster, more efficient way to share these job opportunities with the right candidates.

Solution

We provided a modified version of our Switchblade® mobile enterprise solution that integrated directly with Interim’s current office management system. We then developed a messaging interface that was familiar to staff members, easy to implement, and easy to use.

Results

The solution enabled employers at 300 offices nationwide to instantly reach thousands of nurses for job openings easily and inexpensively. In addition, it established the foundation of a system that can be used to solve additional business communication challenges.