Keeping in touch with clients and customers will usually boost your customer service reputation, but how much contact is too much?

Legal experts are warning attorneys that exchanging text messages with clients has a number of downsides. Among them: the expectation that the lawyer is “on-call” 24 hours a day and can be contacted during each and every one of them.

An woe be unto the lawyer who doesn’t respond or reply — post haste.

The other problem: saving a record of the text. Many phones will hold only so many messages for a finite amount of time. Then, poof, the message is gone. Or, should the mobile phone get lost, what will happen to the critical proof that you made contact and what transpired?

The same can be said of many other sorts of business contacts. The legal eagles have some exceptional constraints, but then so do accountants and insurance brokers, just to name a couple.

If you’re texting customers or clients, keep in mind the pitfalls. Do you really want to have to respond to a customer on a Sunday afternoon when your favorite team is in the playoffs? Do you have third-party software that will keep a record of your messages for compliance or internal record-keeping sake?

Texting can be a great convenience for users, but when it’s used for business purposes, it must be managed carefully and creatively.