Texting & Mobile Portals for Training on the Go

Learn how training teams are using text messaging and mobile web apps to deliver just-in-time updates, centralize training resources, and keep learners informed - without requiring downloads, logins, or complicated systems. Transcript below.

Max Schelkopf [00:03-35:37]: Welcome, everyone. Happy Wednesday. I’m going to give it another minute or so to allow everybody to join, and then we’ll get started. Thank you again for joining me today. We’re going to be talking about a pretty relevant topic: how to best engage with a distributed workforce.

While we wait, if you want to drop into the chat who you are and where you’re joining from, feel free. I’m joining everyone from wonderful central Illinois today. We had about 4 to 5 inches of snow this week, and I think it’s all going to melt off—crossing my fingers.

I’ll give it another 30 seconds here to give everybody the opportunity to join. Today I’m going to be covering texting, mobile portals, and really just mobile-device-based engagement for training organizations. It should be pretty insightful, and it’s going to be very demo-centered. I’m going to show the back end of Engage by Cell’s platforms, and I encourage all of you to participate. I hope you have your cell phones near you, because you’ll be scanning some QR codes, receiving some text messages, and looking at some mobile web apps.

All right, we’re two minutes past, so I’m going to go ahead and get started by sharing my screen.

Today’s topic is “Texting and Mobile Portals for Training on the Go.” Obviously, all of us are facing the challenge of how to best incorporate the device that everybody has in their hands nowadays. We really specialize in working with companies and organizations that have what we call a distributed workforce, which is just a fancy way of describing people who aren’t sitting at a desk all day—medical employees, nurses, doctors, technicians, maintenance staff, people in power supply, construction, and similar fields. These are employees who are out and about, not desk-bound.

So how do we start engaging with them, utilizing their mobile devices as a primary means of communication and training? These folks are going to be on their phones. Sometimes we hear, “I don’t necessarily want them on their phones,” but whether you want them to or not, they’re going to be on them. So we might as well start adapting and using cell phones as part of the training program.

A little bit about Engage by Cell before we get started: we’ve been in business 20 years. We were founded in San Francisco and are currently headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. Millions of text messages are sent through our platforms for training, jobs, recruiting, HR, and all kinds of use cases. Millions of users have also logged into the mobile web apps. We’re very proud of the fact that our customer service is 100% domestically based. It’s all real human support—no phone tree, no getting stuck. When you need help, you get a real person, and we always like to emphasize that because it’s becoming more and more important.

Again, today’s topic is how to best engage an on-the-go workforce. We provide two main tools to help overcome two big challenges. The first challenge is that employees who aren’t sitting at desks aren’t necessarily checking email all day. They get to it when they can. There are too many people to call every single individual. So how do we bridge that communication gap? We’ve built a pretty robust text messaging platform that acts as that communication channel to most effectively reach that audience.

Some super common use cases with texting that I’m going to go over today include mass inbound call-to-actions. For example, during onboarding, someone can scan a QR code—which we’re all about to do—and it will automatically text that individual back and start a text messaging drip. So on day one they get a text, on day five they get a follow-up text, and so on, keeping them engaged.

A common issue I hear all the time from trainers is, “We’ve spent so much money on this LMS system, and we’re struggling to get people to engage with it or stay in the training program.” Setting up little drips that drive them to the LMS or to microlearning lessons is super applicable with our tools. You can create digestible 2-, 3-, or 5-minute microlearning lessons and easily text them out once a week, once a month, whatever cadence makes sense. It also has a two-way communication component, which is super important during onboarding because we’re trying to cram a lot of training into a short window of time. You can automate some of that follow-up, but if the individual responds, you have the opportunity to have a one-on-one conversation with that person and help them through the training process.

So the first big challenge is the engagement piece and overcoming the communication gap, because email and phone calls are not scalable or effective enough anymore. A text messaging platform helps overcome that and automate it as much as possible.

The second big challenge I hear trainers talk about all the time is that training resources are spread all over the place. We all have an LMS, some are better than others, and we all have original in-house training content like training videos, handbooks, and all the materials developed internally. Then there are all these other tiny pieces of training content scattered everywhere. What we’ve done is build a mobile web app platform that becomes a centralized hub for all of those different resources.

If you aren’t familiar with a mobile web app platform, let me define it. We’re all familiar with the term “app.” We all have 20, 30, 40 of them downloaded on our phones. The technical term for that is a native application. We used to build native applications, but we stopped doing that years ago because the data and customer feedback showed that it’s getting extremely difficult to get individuals to hard-download an app. I just spoke with a company today that has about 1,500 employees and they can’t even get 20% of their staff to download their training app. That’s the download barrier. It creates too much friction.

You have to figure out whether someone has an Apple or Android device, and if it’s not a company phone, people are often hesitant to download anything. A mobile web app is a web-based experience that gets as close to a hard-downloaded app as possible. It has the look and feel of a downloaded app, but it’s entirely web-based, so no hard download is required. That means much less friction. Employees can scan a QR code and it pops up. They can save the web browser to their home screen so it appears like an app. It also pairs really well with texting.

That’s what I’m going to demonstrate today. You can have your list of employees and send out a text saying, “Hey, don’t forget this OSHA safety training module needs to be completed by the end of the month. Click here to start.” They click the link, and it directs them straight to the mobile web app, where you can build original content like polls, quizzes, videos, and more. You can also easily link out to your existing training resources. That’s what we’re covering today.

Quick recap before I jump into the platform: the two big challenges are engagement—keeping people engaged and retained in training by pushing out text messages, whether through automated drips, one-on-one conversations, or inbound call-to-actions—and accessibility, which means using the mobile web app platform as a centralized hub for all of your training resources.

I’ll also have time at the end for questions. I’m going to make this as interactive and fun as possible.

What you’re looking at here is the back end of Engage by Cell’s platform. It’s entirely web-based. You just go to EngageByCell.com, click the login button, and all of your staff can have their own credentials. Whether you have 1 person or 10 people on the training team who need to access it, send texts, or create app content, they can do so.

Once logged in, this is the back end you would see. There are a bunch of tabs across the top, but the ones I’m focusing on today are text messaging, mobile web app, and reporting. On the left side under text messaging, there are different tabs for the main use cases I mentioned: mass inbound, mass outbound, automated workflows—what we call sequences—and one-on-one messaging.

I encourage all of you to scan this QR code. What it’s going to do is populate a text into your texting app that says MAX to the phone number 925-431-6822. If you hit send, you’ll get a text back saying, “Thank you for texting Company ABC. We will keep you up to date on all important training information and announcements.”

What this does is give your staff a very simple call-to-action to participate in texting. Imagine during onboarding or in-person training, you say, “Hey, scan this QR code because we’re going to use texting for important training information as we get going here, and for continued support as you start your job.”

What we all just texted into is considered the primary keyword. Its purpose is threefold: first, it gives you that easy call-to-action to encourage participation. Second, it automatically texts the recipient back, identifying the organization and the purpose of why they’re texting in. Third, and most importantly, if we click “subscribers,” there are all of our phone numbers. So it captures phone numbers and helps you build that employee database you can start engaging with.

Below the primary keyword, we have secondary keywords. These give you an easy way to create additional call-to-actions, perhaps for specific training modules or frequently asked questions. A super common use case is ongoing safety training. So we can create a keyword like SAFETY.

In the response box, we can write something like, “To start the workplace safety training module, please click here.” Then we can insert a link—whether that’s to the mobile web app, the LMS, or any other web-based training resource. We also have a shortened URL tool, which is helpful because long URLs aren’t very text-message-friendly. Once we hit save, we can attach a list to it, for example “Webinar Safety Training.”

Now, if you scan this QR code or text the word SAFETY to 925-431-6822, you’ll get that text message back. Imagine each training module having its own call-to-action. Staff know that if they text a specific word, they automatically receive the relevant training link. If you’ve established a precedent that specific training needs to happen monthly, employees can just text in the word and get the training module or LMS link they need.

Because we attached a list to it, we’ve also created a new list of everyone who texted in the word SAFETY. That means we can build automations so that when someone joins that list, they automatically enter a drip. If I text in SAFETY, I’m now in the safety training drip. Three days later I get a reminder. A week later I get another reminder. It keeps them engaged in that specific training module.

That’s the inbound texting piece. The next piece is outbound messaging, because we need to communicate with staff more effectively. Email isn’t as effective as it once was, especially for workers who aren’t at desks all day. And phone calls are not scalable. If you’re a busy trainer with more than 20 people, it’s hard to imagine trying to call everyone, get them to participate, and track it all. Texting really fills that gap.

Under outbound simple text, we can create a quick text message and then schedule automations to keep people engaged and retained in the program. One example is driving traffic to the LMS. Since many of us have invested heavily in an LMS, the challenge is keeping people engaged with it. So we can create a weekly reminder push that says, “Hi [First Name], please don’t forget to complete the training modules for March in the LMS. To start, please click here.”

We have personalization tokens that automatically populate each employee’s first name. We highly recommend using those, especially for internal use cases, because people are more likely to engage when the message addresses them personally. Then we can include a clickable link to the LMS or to the mobile web app or any other resource.

Once the message is created, step two is choosing where you want it to go. In the system, you can have as many different lists as you want. Since departments, job roles, locations, time zones, and job functions often require different training, you can break staff into all kinds of groups—admin, maintenance, technicians, and so on. You select the list you want, and then you can schedule the text to go out weekly, every Thursday at 10:00 a.m. for example. Once saved, every Thursday at 10:00 a.m., your staff will get those nudges encouraging them to keep using the LMS or keep participating in the training program.

This is also extremely applicable to microlearning. For example, I can create a microlearning push that says, “Please take 5 minutes to complete this training on leadership by the end of the week. Watch the short video and complete the assessment here.” Again, you include a link to the mobile web app or another platform, choose the list, and hit send. Everyone receives it instantly. That’s the outbound piece.

The “add/manage sequence” area is where you build workflows based on timeframes. For example, during onboarding, on day one, a new employee might receive a text saying, “Welcome to training. Please click here to view the training overview.” That link might take them to a syllabus or a schedule of what the next week or two will look like. On day two, after they’ve gone through a lot of material, you might send a refresher. At the end of the week, you might send, “Congratulations on completing your first week. Please click here to complete a survey and tell us how it’s going.” This gives you valuable feedback to improve your program.

You can create as many different workflows as you want. Many clients use these for microlearning programs as well. You can set it up so that over the next six months, each employee receives a specific drip of learning content on their own schedule. If I started a month ago, I’m already a month into the drip. If you onboard a new employee today, they start at the beginning of the sequence independently of where I am.

You can also send photo messages, so if you want to send an image related to a training program or upcoming in-person training, it works just like sending a photo to a friend.

The final piece of texting is the conversation tab, which enables one-on-one conversations. Let’s say I receive the leadership training microlearning text and respond, “I didn’t think I needed to do the leadership training.” You’d see that text come into the conversation tab, and the trainer could respond, “Hi Max, this training is mandatory for all staff.” That means you can have longer-format conversations with individuals if needed.

The first question I usually get about this is, “How is that scalable?” If you have a very large employee base, you can set it up departmentally, or you can configure automatic default replies. For example, if someone texts in, they can automatically get a message saying, “If you need immediate assistance, please call this number.” You can also set alerts so that when someone enters the queue, the training manager or another designated person gets an email or text notification and can jump in to respond.

The last text-related features are managing lists and subscribers. Again, you can have as many lists as you want, broken down by department, job role, and so on. You can rename them, see how many workflows or scheduled texts are attached, and view how many people are inside them. You can also easily upload lists of employees. If you already have your employee contact information, you simply click “upload subscribers,” upload an Excel file with columns like first name, last name, and phone number, and optionally include additional identifiers like job role, department, or employee ID. Hit OK, and the contacts migrate into the system.

So again, the big use cases with texting are: engaging staff more effectively, closing the communication gap, automating onboarding and training workflows, creating inbound call-to-actions that let people self-serve training resources, and keeping employees engaged in training programs.

Now let’s move on to the mobile web app platform.

The big challenge here is that training content is all over the place. You’ve got your LMS, your training videos, forms, assessments, paper documents, multiple websites, and often no great way to make all of it easily accessible and mobile-friendly. This is the solution.

It’s a mobile web app platform with no hard download required, so it’s frictionless to access. It’s entirely web-based, so you can easily include a clickable URL and text it out. No IT is required to build these out. And they’re fast. If you want to build a quick microlearning lesson with a short video and a five-question assessment and send it to a thousand people, you can do that in five minutes or less.

This navigation tab controls the home screen of your mobile web app. If you scan this QR code, you can get a feel for the demo version. It’s simple, but it shows the idea. Imagine these home screen icons. One could link to your LMS, another to your training syllabus, another to assessments, another to videos, and so on. You can include original content like polls, surveys, quizzes, video, audio files, text, and any file type—PDFs, PowerPoints, Word docs, Excel files, and more. You can build comment boards and fillable PDFs. So it becomes a highly flexible place to create and maintain resources.

You do this under the “Build Your Pages” tab. Let’s say we want to build a microlearning lesson for OSHA training. We can go into a page, drag in a text block, and type “Monthly OSHA Safety Training.” We can center it just like in Microsoft Word and hit save. Live, in real time, the title appears.

If we want to add a video, we can grab a YouTube OSHA training video and embed it. Or we can embed any video you already have. Now we’ve got a quick five-minute video. Then we can add a short assessment underneath it. We can create a question like, “Describe how to safely climb a ladder,” using an open-ended paragraph field. Then add another: “Should you always have a fire extinguisher?” with yes/no options. Then another multiple-choice question like, “What is the best way to report a safety accident?” with answer choices A, B, and C. Hit save, and live in real time, our monthly OSHA safety microlearning lesson is ready with the video and assessment.

Then we grab the URL to that page, jump back over to the texting platform, and send it out to all our employees. In five minutes or less, you’ve created the lesson and distributed it to your audience. That’s what makes it so fast and practical.

The last piece is reporting, because accountability is incredibly important in training. We need to measure how effectively we’re training people. We need to know if Max actually completed that piece of training or clicked that link. There are reports specifically related to texting—how many messages were sent, how many were received, whether someone clicked a link, and whether they engaged with it. For the mobile web app, there are also detailed reports on how many people are visiting, when they’re visiting, dwell time, whether they watched the video, and any form or assessment data you’re collecting. You can pull reports for individuals or for the organization as a whole, and filter by time range.

Of course, you own all of that data. We just house it and protect it. You can export it via Excel or PDF and print it if needed.

So, quick recap: the two big challenges are engagement and accessibility. We need to engage people where they are, which means texting. Phone calls and emails are not as effective or scalable anymore. Texting helps bridge that gap. Then we need to make training resources as accessible as possible, which is where the mobile web app comes in. It centralizes all of your training content, and you can also build original content inside it.

Now, some questions. A common one is whether organizations typically start with both texting and the mobile web app. Most do, but they can be purchased independently. They are two different tools. So if your biggest challenge is information accessibility, you can go with just the mobile web app. We also get asked whether we integrate with LMSs or HR systems. We have an open API, so we’re always open to new integrations. That said, one of the advantages of the mobile web app is that a hard integration isn’t always necessary. If your resource is web-based, you can simply link it inside the app.

Typical launch times are around two weeks to get everything put together. Of course, we provide as much training and support as required, and we can help build the mobile web app and develop a launch plan. Again, it’s all human customer support, so we’re here to help however we can. Launch timelines really depend on how quickly content can be provided or uploaded into the app.

If anybody has any other questions, feel free to throw them in the chat window.

All right. Well, thank you again for joining me today. My name is Max, and if you do have any questions, or are interested in doing a pilot program, or want to learn about pricing, or see a variety of examples of clients and live use cases, please feel free to reach out. It’s Max at Engage by Cell, and that is my direct line as well, so feel free to call or text me if that’s easiest for you.

Again, thank you for joining me today, and if you have any questions or want to learn more, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

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