Text Chat for Case Management: Faster, More Effective Participant Communication

Learn how workforce organizations are using secure, two-way text chat to stay connected with participants, reduce missed communications, and streamline case management without adding to staff workload. Transcript below.

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Max Schelkopf [00:03-00:09]: Welcome, everyone! Happy Thursday, Casey!

Casey Loewenthal [00:09-00:12]: Happy Thursday, Max. Ready for the weekend.

Max Schelkopf [00:12-01:00]: We’re ready for the weekend—we’re gearing up. We’ll give it a couple of minutes here while everybody joins, while we’re all hanging out and waiting for a minute or two and giving everybody the opportunity to join us. Why don’t you throw in the chat where you’re joining from, and maybe what organization you’re with? I’ll throw it in there—Max with Engage by Cell. I’m joining from Central Illinois, and Casey…the weather is finally starting to break. I’m out of the negatives, so it’s probably not quite as nice as the Bay Area. What are you sitting at right now—mid-50s? Mid-50s?

Casey Loewenthal [01:00-01:02]: Can’t complain.

Max Schelkopf [01:02-01:30]: Can’t complain. We’ve got Deanne from Goodwill Central Oklahoma. Welcome, Deanne. Welcome, everybody. We’ll give it another 30 seconds or so. And before we jump into Friday tomorrow, we’ve got some awesome stuff to talk about today. In the background, we’ve got Megan from our marketing team as well, so say hi to Megan in the chat if you want.

Casey Loewenthal [01:35-01:50]: Jerry, Patty, Charlotte—thank you all. Dave, Don—thank you all. I recognize Madera. Thanks for joining.

Max Schelkopf [01:44-01:46]: Madera Workforce—fantastic.

Max Schelkopf [01:51-04:30]: Alright, well, we’re two minutes past the hour, so we’ll go ahead and get started. As I mentioned, we’ve got some exciting stuff we’re going to cover today. I’m going to share my screen with some slides.

We’re covering a super hot topic. I feel like Casey and I are blue in the face from covering this topic, but it just seems more and more relevant every single day. People keep joining us and reaching out, wanting to learn more about how to most effectively use text messaging from a case management standpoint.

So we’re going to cover what Engage by Cell’s tools are to enable case managers—whether it’s for workforce development. Obviously, a lot of you on this call are in workforce or in that labor market, helping people get employed, or if they’re underemployed or underskilled, getting them the training they need, and all those kinds of things. But case management is broad. There are lots of different folks just trying to help people get through a process—employment, healthcare, training, and more.

We need to start incorporating text messaging into our outreach and communication abilities. We’ll cover what Engage by Cell does to help with that—the whys and the hows, and how it all works. Again, thank you for joining us.

We’ll start with a little introduction of Engage by Cell. We’re a 100% domestically based company. We’ve been in business for 20 years now. Casey, how long have you been with Engage by Cell? It’s been a minute.

Casey Loewenthal [03:30-03:41]: A little over eight years. Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of changes. Texting has changed a lot in eight years.

Max Schelkopf [03:41-04:30]: One thing we always like to show is a couple of our clients. We’re obviously very involved in the workforce development industry, but one thing I always like to shout from the rooftops—and this is definitely under Casey’s department—is that we’re huge on real human customer support. We don’t even have a 1-800 phone number as a company. If you need assistance, you call us. You have many points of contact you can reach out to. I’m sure some of you on the call are current clients, and you can probably attest that you can text me, call me, reach out to Casey and his team, Fred—whoever it might be. We’re huge on that.

Alright. Casey, do you want to touch on some of the challenges and opportunities here a little bit?

Casey Loewenthal [04:30-05:50]: Yeah, so we’re going to dive into the details now—give you a little overview, and then we’ll make this a little bit interactive. If you don’t have your cell phones handy, get them ready. In a few minutes, we’ll have you opt in and show you the system in real time.

That leads me into my first point: real-time messaging. Connecting with your caseload is the number one priority, and to have that happen in real time, the fastest method is text messaging. It’s always in people’s hands—you’re never really too far away from your phone—so the fastest way to get a message across is through Text Chat or a text messaging platform like the one we offer.

And the best part is: messages get read. It’s a very high open rate. Emails are about 20–30% if you’re doing a really, really good job. Text messages are 90%+ in the first few minutes after that message is there. So you know that message is read, you know it’s delivered, and people can act on it. That always has its own considerations—that’s part of the messaging you provide and how often you provide it, what sort of resources you give—but if you want a message to get to somebody, text messaging is the first method that should be used.

Max Schelkopf [05:50-06:41]: And Casey, I always want to pick on myself with this, and I always show this—and I’m sure if there are current clients on the call, they’ve seen me do this before—but I think it always hits home. As Casey mentioned, with the 90%+ engagement rate with texting, people hear that number and they’re like, “No way is it actually like that.”

But I always like to pick on myself, and I encourage everybody on the call to put in the chat if anybody beats me: how many unread text messages do I have versus how many unread emails in my personal Gmail account? I’ve got 44,594 emails—probably from Old Navy and from a life insurance request I put out 10 years ago—and they have never stopped.

Casey Loewenthal [06:41-07:54]: Absolutely, yeah. And that’s not unique to you, Max. We all have zero intention of reading most of those emails. And the thing with text messages is they will get read, and you’ll have the data that they were delivered, and all that good stuff.

Staffing and operational efficiency—this is really just around how much time you all spend doing your jobs. If you have to sit there and call 15 people, 30 people to let them know about an event, you’re probably connecting with one or two of them if you’re lucky. Otherwise, you’re spending an hour leaving voicemails. Our system kind of does all that for you. You schedule your message, the message gets across.

And similarly, listening to voicemails is another thing that doesn’t get done nearly as often—and definitely not efficiently. You might spend a couple days going back and listening to voicemails, but you already read the text message. So if you’re trying to get something across, it saves you time. That allows you to do mass messaging through our system, along with that personal one-on-one touch that we’re going to go through with you today.

Max Schelkopf [07:54-12:21]: And I think it’s important to really understand what the goal here is, right? It’s to make everyone’s life as easy and efficient as possible. Casey will share his screen here in a moment, but nobody loves being a phone-call warrior. If I have 10, 20, 30, 40, 50+ people in my caseload, I don’t want to spend every single day running through that list and calling them with maybe a 10% answer rate—leaving voicemails, emailing, and email isn’t working.

In our system, you can automate that workflow. You can take your caseload and schedule it so once a week, twice a week, once a month—whatever you want—it’s going to reach out to everybody via text, and it’s still personalized. It could say, “Hey Casey, I hope you’re doing super well. It’s Max over at the job center. Please don’t forget, you can always text me back if you need assistance.” And that’s happening automatically. Then Casey’s going to show you the cool way that transitions from mass communication into a one-on-one conversation.

In the meantime, you get to spend your day actually doing what you enjoy—sitting down with people and helping them through the problems they’re facing—instead of getting bogged down with multiple hours a week of outreach that isn’t super effective anyway.

That leads us into how it’s changed. When I first started my career, I was coached: “Never text anybody. It’s super unprofessional. You text your friends, not colleagues or people you’re trying to assist.” And now it’s the preferred way of communication. We’ve really come over that hump of “it’s not professional,” and now most of my customers say, “If you need to get a hold of me, text me. If you email me, I’m never going to see it. If you call me, I’m in meetings all day.” So text me, and I’ll respond. That’s changed a lot in the past five to ten years.

And the other thing I like to touch on is QR codes becoming universally adopted. One positive thing that came out of COVID was QR codes were everywhere. My 83-year-old grandma uses QR codes, so I don’t want to hear excuses. If we wanted to look at a menu or go into an office building, we had to scan a QR code to do something. That adoption is not limited by any demographic—it’s pretty universal at this point.

And it’s also important to understand these devices are incorporated into so much of our lives now. We do banking, communication, social media—everything is on our cell phone. People are accessing them 24/7. It’s not “when I get to it” or “when I sit down at my computer.” We all have it all the time. So it’s important to incorporate mobile devices any way you can, and texting is a huge, effective first step. Case, anything you want to add?

Casey Loewenthal [12:21-13:08]: Yeah, you covered most of it. Once you get the message through, what’s different is the device is now a personal computer. Like Max said, you’re doing all your other work on it. So you can send them a message, and they can immediately act on that message—sign up for your job fair, book an appointment with you, check resources, submit documentation. All of that can be done instantaneously. It’s not, “Oh, I have to do this from my desktop when I get back to my computer in eight hours.”

A lot of it becomes more instantaneous—not only does the message get across, but you can get results from that message even faster as well.

Max Schelkopf [13:08-14:19]: I love it. Alright—now for the fun part. Let’s make this as interactive as possible. Before I quit sharing my screen and Casey dives into the back end of the platform, I want everybody to take out your phone—I’ll do it with you.

If you scan that QR code, it will populate the text “Tacos” to the phone number 56512. If you hit send, you’ll get a text message back that says, “Thanks for opting in to text messaging updates.” This is going to be a little workforce-y as an example, but everybody can understand: “Are you in the process of looking for a job? Reply yes or no.” Feel free to reply if you’d like to.

I’m going to stop sharing and let Casey take it away.

Casey Loewenthal [14:19-17:28]: For today’s demo, we’re going through the initiation process if someone’s reaching out to you. We talked about mass messaging—just to cover that, you can absolutely build lists and push out messaging to large groups or small groups, from 10 people to 10,000 people at one time, to invite them to events, send reminders.

Right now, we’re really talking about back-and-forth communication. Think of it like this: I sent you a message, you replied back, and now we’re picking up right there. You can see these little red bubbles—those are inbound, one-on-one messages. As an administrator on your staff, you can field these inbound messages from your desktop. It has notifications and pop-ups. We also have Chrome extensions to help with alerts and management, so nothing goes unanswered or unread for too long.

We have a ton of different settings you can configure. Most of our workforce organizations will purchase multiple keywords—or one keyword for every employee or caseworker—so you have your own contacts narrowed in, your own lists, your own inbound messages, and you know they’re directed at you.

You get your own individual settings—days of the week you don’t want messages, alerts that come in certain hours of the day—and you can receive alerts via your phone as well as email. Even though we just mentioned emails aren’t read nearly as much, if you’re an email person, we have both options. We also have a mobile-friendly version, so if you’re out in the field or at meetings, you can get notifications and reply directly from our platform, using the phone number that’s set up on ours—not your personal cell phone. Your personal cell phone should remain your personal cell phone.

As you get these messages, you get alerts and you’re ready to respond. I can click into a message. If they’re already in the system and you have a name associated with them, it’ll show right here, so you know who you’re working with. If you’re unsure, you can click on the message and have that conversation. I happen to know this is Max, so I can click “Add Max” into the system, add them to a list, save it—now it’s in the process.

“I’m here to help. Where have you applied so far?”

Max Schelkopf [17:17-18:25]: And live in real time—there it is. That text just came through. Quick backup for a second, Casey: we’re all texting this 56512 phone number, right? I know it can get confusing when we start using our terminology with keywords and stuff like that.

Just to be super clear: each case manager can have their own little sub-account—exactly what Casey’s showing here. And rather than texting that 56512 phone number, oftentimes each case manager will have their own phone number attached to this, so they can put it on business cards and tell clients, “Hey, this is my number. If you need to text me and get ahold of me, I’m going to be shooting you texts, keeping you up to date with whatever program information I need.”

And also—what happens if they already have an existing office number they want to use?

Casey Loewenthal [18:25-19:28]: Yeah, we can port over business lines that you have and enable them for text messaging. We work with your IT staff a bit—they essentially just have to prove you own the phone number—and then your current landline phone number, where you receive calls at your desk, can be enabled for text messaging within our platform. So you cover both bases: if they call you, it goes to you; if they text you, it goes through us.

If you don’t want to do that fully through IT for whatever reason, we also have the ability to add your phone number as a forwarding line. So if someone tries to call the phone number associated to your account, it would actually call your personal cell phone or your desk line—whatever you put in that spot. We’re big on making sure all communication gets to you, whether through text messaging or through a call.

Max Schelkopf [19:28-20:06]: I want you to show me the little short link there. Let’s roleplay for a minute: I’m one of the case managers, I’m at a job fair, I’m out and about, working my event. I get a text alert saying, “Hey, someone’s in your queue—click here to respond.” Can you show me that short URL—what it looks like? If I click that, what does it look like if I’m out at my job fair?

Casey Loewenthal [20:00-20:49]: You’re just on your device here—able to click on that text and follow up on responses.

We were talking about how we’re big on human support, but we know the world is going to AI, so we’re not too far behind. We’ve incorporated a ChatGPT integration that will pre-draft a response to the most recent inbound message you have. You can edit it to whatever you want, but if you do want to use it, it will grab the message, give you a draft, and if you like it, you can insert it into the text and send it off.

Max Schelkopf [20:49-21:25]: Here we go—I got it. Perfect. I want everybody to text in. Start texting a couple things and let Casey jump around and reply to some of you—and I’ll do it too. Anybody on the call, I want to see some conversations come in. Just pretend—ask about something. And do be cautious: we will share what you text in there.

Casey Loewenthal [21:25-22:05]: We have a job fair this Friday. Are you interested? You can see we’re moving through these pretty quickly. As the alerts come in, you’re able to handle them. You can leave, come back—the alerts will update—and then you can respond back and forth. We have another one here: “What time does it start?” 8 AM. Bring five copies of your resume.

Max Schelkopf [22:00-22:05]: There we go. What happens if my caseload is 50 people and my active conversations get super full? I want to keep it clean, like my work email. How do I keep everything organized—who I’m actively conversing with versus people that are sidelined?

Casey Loewenthal [22:23-24:10]: You can manually archive any conversation you want. You can also set how quickly something goes into archive if the conversation is no longer active. If they text back in, it moves to active. But if a conversation goes idle for X hours—whatever that may be—you can move it out. Otherwise, you can click the folder, archive it, it lives in this area, and you can bring anything back that you want—activate it, put it back at the top.

Other cool things you can do: add a contact name, delete them, add them to a stop list. If you read a text and think, “I’m not going to respond right now,” you can mark it as unread, keep the alert on there, and pop it back into your inbox. You can update the subscriber, leave the conversation, and another feature is a report option—a hot link to all conversations for that specific user, dating back to when they first opted in.

One thing you don’t have easy access to if you’re using your personal cell phone is an exportable report you can quickly give your boss of all the conversations you’ve had with a specific user—someone you’re trying to place into a job, for example. You could pull a report of all conversations you’ve had in the last 30 days and have it on their desk in 20 minutes. Reporting is a big piece you’re not going to get using your own device, but you do through our system.

Max Schelkopf [24:10-24:40]: Now what happens, Casey—we’ve gone through once these text messages are initiated, but let’s say I’m new to Engage by Cell. I’ve got my list of 40 people in my caseload, and I want to upload them onto a list and send out that first text to start initiating these one-on-one conversations. Where do I manage my list? Where do I upload that stuff? How do I push one out?

Casey Loewenthal [24:40-27:02]: You have unlimited lists within our system. We recommend lots of different lists so you can segment users and target them based on real working information, rather than being overly generic. You can break it down by job fair attendees, by quarters they entered the program, whether they attended an orientation, where they are within the program—no limits on lists.

You can upload subscribers as well. If you have a list of contacts you’ve been working with, or you want to take all attendees from an Amazon job fair and upload them into the system and push out a message, you can do that. Scheduling your message is done from the “Send/Schedule Text” area.

You can create templates ahead of time—messages you send frequently—so you have quick access and can tweak each message as you want.

Another service we offer is a mobile web platform that allows you to upload resources, build pages, and make documents and files accessible. You can insert links to those pages, add emojis—links are a huge way organizations use our platform. This lets you take people directly to resources: a sign-up page for an event, a document on your website, an area to see job postings—things you keep active on your end.

Our system will shorten the URL to leave you more characters and adds a tracking element. So you can see: “I sent this to 50 people—30 clicked the link, 20 did not.” You can build sublists based on those interactions and follow up accordingly.

Max Schelkopf [27:02-28:42]: This is where I really see the value from a workforce development case management standpoint. If Casey changes that message to something like, “Hey, it’s Casey from American Job Center. Don’t forget, you can always text me back,” and then you’re working with different lists—people you’re helping with eligibility, people actively in job search, people wrapping up with employment or a certification.

But the magic is the automation and scheduling. You can pick how often you want it to go out—multiple times, weekly, monthly—and you can set it and forget it. That outreach is taken care of automatically. If someone responds to a mass message, that’s when it goes into the queue we showed earlier and you start the conversation. Casey’s going to show where your pre-scheduled messages live so you can change who’s receiving it.

You just sent it—I just got it.

Casey Loewenthal [28:42-29:06]: You’ve all received the text. As we mentioned, that went out to nine people—it comes back in as nine individual one-on-one messages. There are no group messages. If you’re like me, I can’t handle a group text with more than two people. The last thing you want is a bunch of people you don’t know all going back and forth. It’s essentially a BCC—like sending an email.

Max Schelkopf [29:06-32:56]: Absolutely. Everybody receives their individual text. The next part is super important too—this is where Casey and his department come in—how do we launch these things?

How do we launch these kinds of things? I always like to discuss what it looks like, and it becomes organically built into the process. We all scanned that QR code or texted “tacos” to 56512. Imagine at the front of your office—whether it’s a job center or something else—the first thing they see is a big QR code, or it’s part of check-in: “If you’re here for your appointment, scan this QR code and check in—text CHECKIN,” or whatever it is. Or if someone goes through an eligibility process, incorporate that text call to action into the process, and that list will organically grow quickly.

It’s Marketing 101—anywhere and everywhere there’s potential for someone to see that call to action to text in or scan the QR code: event flyers, program flyers, business cards. Casey, what are some creative ways you’ve seen clients market that?

Casey Loewenthal [30:46-31:19]: Digital screens they have up, tablets at the front desk, I’ve seen it printed on a cookie, printed on volunteer t-shirts, A-frame signs—there’s a variety of things. It’s really wherever your audience is.

Max Schelkopf [31:19-32:56]: Exactly. And Engage by Cell is more than willing and happy to help customers with that. We understand bandwidth, and graphic design is a skill not everybody has—including myself. I cannot make a PowerPoint to save my life.

During onboarding, we’re very hands-on. Casey and his team do what they call a “game plan” call. Want to talk about that, Casey?

Casey Loewenthal [31:46-32:06]: The game plan is getting our ducks in a row—making sure we’re accomplishing what you want to get out of the software, what pains you’re working with now, and how our system can alleviate those. While we’re working with you, it’s constantly progressing—we’re meeting and exceeding your goals.

Max Schelkopf [32:06-33:12]: Fantastic. We’re super hands-on with training and ongoing customer support. This isn’t a “turn it on and good luck” relationship. Casey and his team, including myself, get to know our customers. I’ve known many of mine for years. We text back and forth—if they need assistance, or general questions, ideas, or challenges they’re trying to solve. We’re always here to help and grow with you as a customer and make it as successful as possible. That’s always the goal.

Anybody have any questions? As always, feel free to reach out to Casey or myself. If you want to schedule a quick 15–20 minute demo, we’re happy to jump on other calls.

Here we go—got some questions. Patty from Rochester—current customer, we’ll reach out and get you helped out with getting a new number for your account.

Max Schelkopf [33:26-34:13]: I see a couple of people in the chat weren’t receiving the text messages. I can assure you it’s because you probably missed the opt-in portion where you had to scan the QR code—but that’s okay. That’s also important to understand with the compliance piece: it’s super important to get people to opt themselves in. That’s the easiest way to approach it. Once they do, then you can text them all day long.

Any questions, please feel free to throw them in the chat. We’ll be respectful of your time and give some back to you, but if anybody would like to schedule a call to learn more, reach out to Casey or myself. Any last-minute questions you’ve got there, Casey?

Casey Loewenthal [34:15-34:47]: Absolutely appreciate everybody’s time today. As Max mentioned, we’re here to help. We have references from current businesses that can vouch for this service outside of us—because we’re obviously appreciative of our platform, but always a little biased. We do think this is effective, and we have others that will vouch for that as well. Appreciate your time, and hopefully we get to work with some of you more.

Max Schelkopf [34:47-34:59]: Alright—have a fantastic weekend. Enjoy your Friday tomorrow, and thank you for taking the time to join us today, everybody. Thanks, Casey.

Casey Loewenthal [34:56-34:57]: Thanks, Max. Thanks, everybody.

Max Schelkopf [34:58-34:59]: Bye.

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