A well-set-up Salesforce SMS automation offers businesses a lot of benefits. From instant customer reach, automated follow‑ups to keeping compliance without adding manual effort, it does it all. At smaller volumes, these automations often feel seamless, but when the volume increases, so do the challenges service and support teams face. A workflow that runs fine at smaller volume starts producing errors, delays, and compliance flags at larger volumes. However, these issues aren’t stemming from the platform itself but from avoidable Salesforce messaging app mistakes that are ignored before automation is introduced.
In this blog, we’ll discuss some of the 7 common Salesforce SMS mistakes at scale, and how to address each one before it becomes a bigger problem.
What is the Salesforce SMS App?
The Salesforce texting app is a messaging application that assists companies to send personalized and automated text messages from the CRM. From personalized messages to multi-channel communication, it offers a lot of benefits to organizations in increasing their engagement, optimizing campaigns, and enhancing customer journeys, all from a single platform.
Key Benefits of Salesforce SMS Automation
- It provides CRM Integration that lets teams work with SMS in Salesforce processes without changing tools.
- Utilizes customer information to create meaningful messages and engaging interactions with customers to become more personal.
- Teams can automate campaigns from journeys, events, or lead actions.
- Delivery, responses, and performance in the campaign can be tracked in real-time.
Scaling Success: 7 SMS Automation Errors You Must Correct
1. Treating Compliance as a Separate Process
Opt-out handling is often set up as a manual step or a separate workflow that runs along side the main automation. That works until it does not work. At scale, the timing gap between when a customer opts out and when that information reaches the active campaign is wide enough to send several more messages. Under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and GDPR, that is not a minor inconvenience; it is a liability.
How to Fix It:
- Ensure opt-out logic needs to live inside the workflow itself, not beside it.
- The Salesforce messaging app should update the contact record the moment an opt-out comes in, and that record status should be the first condition checked before any message goes out.
- Audit suppression lists monthly and make sure they are syncing in real time across every active campaign, not just the ones you launched recently.
2. Ignoring Throughput Limits Until Something Breaks
Carrier throughput caps and API rate limits are easy to ignore in testing. At low volume, messages go out, and everything looks fine, but when you scale the same workflow to tens of thousands of contacts, the system starts breaking.
Messages arrive late, some don’t, and the failure codes are vague enough that the root cause takes time to find. This is one of the more frustrating Salesforce SMS automation pitfalls because the workflow itself is not broken; it just was not built for the load.
How to Fix It:
- Know the throughput ceiling of your Salesforce texting app and the underlying carrier before scaling any campaign.
- Also spread large sends across defined time windows rather than releasing them all at once.
- Build delivery rate monitoring into your process from the start and set alerts for failure spikes rather than discovering them in a weekly report.
3. Relying on Shared Short Codes Past Early Stage
Shared short codes are common early on because they are cost-effective and faster to set up. The issue arrives when your agents are sharing sending infrastructure with other businesses. If one of them triggers a carrier block which often happens, your messages get caught in the same filter.
This causes Salesforce SMS deliverability issues with no clear explanation, because the fault is not in your configuration at all. But it’s in the code you share with the third party.
How to Fix It:
- Dedicated short codes or properly registered “10DLC numbers” are the right move before you scale.
- The setup takes longer; the sending reputation is yours alone, which means carrier decisions about your traffic are based on your behavior, not other parties.
- In addition, choose the right texting app provider as they can offer complete registration before volume increases, not after deliverability problems start.
4. Assuming Merge Fields Will Just Work
Template personalization looks clean in a demo where every contact record is complete, but the real lies in CRM data which often doesn’t look like that. Issues like missing contacts, missing a first name, or formatting inconsistencies in their fields are frequent issues.
When a merge field pulls out a null value or an unexpected string, the message that goes out to a customer reads as broken or unprofessional. At scale, this cannot be treated as a one-off incident as it affects a percentage of every send.
How to Fix It:
- Every merge field needs a fallback plan. For instance, if the first name field is empty, the message should default to something neutral rather than displaying nothing or an error.
- Test templates against real records that have incomplete data before activating any workflow.
- Salesforce texting app platforms allow you to preview rendered messages against actual contacts, so use the feature before every launch, not just for the first one.
5. Sending Without Time Zone Logic
A workflow set to trigger at a particular time gets sent based on the company's time zone by default, but if the customer is in a different time zone, it becomes an issue. Initially, few complaints are manageable but at scale, the opt-out rate climbs, and the regulatory exposure grows. It’s one of the more consistent Salesforce SMS automation mistakes because it’s almost never intentional and doesn’t get accounted for.
How to Fix It:
- Store time zone data at the contact level in Salesforce and reference it as a condition in every time-sensitive workflow.
- The Salesforce sms app should support delivery windows by local time and configure them for 8 AM to 8 PM in the recipient's time zone as a standard rule.
- Review time zone field completeness as part of any data hygiene process, because missing data defaults to the wrong behavior.
6. Setting Up Automation and Walking Away
Salesforce SMS deliverability issues don’t appear on their own, for instance, bounce rates climb gradually. carrier filtering starts affecting a subset of sends, or failure codes accumulate in logs that go unchecked. By the time it’s detected, the open rate has dropped, or customers mention not receiving messages.
Later, it was revealed that the problem has been running for weeks. This pattern shows up constantly, especially when teams configure a workflow, confirm it’s working on launch day but without building ongoing monitoring into their process.
How to Fix It:
- Build a reporting dashboard that tracks delivery rates, failure codes, and unsubscribe trends for every active SMS workflow.
- Set baseline benchmarks on launch and configure alerts for anything that falls outside the normal range.
- It also helps to conduct weekly reviews of deliverability data and helps you catch problems early enough to fix them without significant send volume going to waste.
- Review also helps you understand the reason behind the Salesforce SMS deliverability issues because even vague failure codes have specific causes on the carrier side.
7. Building Workflows That Are Too Complex to Maintain
Workflows that have too many conditional branches, dependencies on other workflows, and real-time data lookups at each step might perform correctly in staging. But in production, at scale, one unexpected data state causes the entire chain to behave incorrectly.
And when something breaks, nobody can debug it quickly because the logic is too complicated to trace. This is a structural Salesforce SMS mistake that gets harder to fix the longer it runs.
How to Fix It:
- Break complex logic into smaller, independently functioning components that can be tested and updated without touching everything else.
- Use your Salesforce texting app's execution logging to create a clear record of what each workflow does at each step.
- Revisit automation architecture at least twice a year since overly complicated flows that worked at one stage of growth often do not hold up at the next.
Conclusion
Successful Salesforce SMS automation isn’t due to careless setup. The Salesforce SMS mistakes are due to building SMS automation for the volume you have now rather than the volume you are heading toward. That gap is where things break but with a reliable Salesforce messaging app gives you the tools to correct the issues. The work is making sure you use them before scaling forces the issue. So, ensure you go through your current setup against each of these seven areas and the ones that don't have a clear answer are the ones worth addressing first.
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