Using SMS and MMS

SMS is available for users on 3.1 and higher, excluding premise enterprise customers

What is SMS?

Short Message Service (SMS) is a communication tool that allows end users to collaborate over, route, queue, and escalate text messages from internal personnel and external stakeholders.

Did you know?

'64% of consumers prefer texting vs. a voice call for customer service needs...¹'
'77% of consumers have a positive perception of companies using text messaging.¹'
'The average response time for a legitimate email is about 90 minutes, compared to 90 seconds for a text message.²'
'79% of marketers agree that mobile marketing, inclusive of SMS, is core to their business.³'
'By 2020, 48.7 million consumers will opt-in to receive business SMS.⁴'
'No less than 80% of professionals say they text for business purposes.⁵'

Who can use SMS?

SMS is widely used for an extensive variety of reasons. These are just a few examples:

Customer texts into a main number, is provided a list of options, and makes the appropriate selection.
HR recruiter texts with potential candidates to schedule interviews.
A customer texts in a technical support request and can be connected to customer service.

How can SMS help me?

Build inbound text messaging workflows for automated messaging responses.
Handle queued, text-based customer engagement requests.
Escalate a session up to a team-based customer engagement opportunity account manager, support technicians, or other subject matter experts who can be conferenced in to take part in the communication.

Example SMS Use Case

A customer texts into a main number.
All members of the assigned SMS flow receive the interaction notification via the SMS tab.
An available employee pulls the interaction from the flow and seamlessly works with the customer via SMS.

Get Started

A Synkato Administrator/Installer enables each user for SMS. Administrators click here for enablement instructions.

Once enabled, users access SMS through the Chat+ pane. The Synkato desktop app and Chat+ app also allows users to send and receive automated messages or messages sent from SMS flows. Once enabled, the SMS icon appears next to the Chat icon. Users can easily toggle between Chat and SMS:

SMS Best Practices

Before using SMS, review these best practices for optimal communication:

Answer SMS messages in a timely fashion.
Messages are limited to 140 characters. Sending more than 140 results in multiple messages.
Keep messaging simple, yet personally engaging whenever possible. Introduce yourself and include the customer's first name in the SMS communication. Hello Bob, my name is Mary. I'll be helping you with your ticket today. I'll go look it up.
Keep all communications compliant. SMS is not Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliant. As a result, users never send or encourage the sharing of confidential or personally identifiable information within live or historical interactions, nor with internal and external SMS users.
Provide resources. If a customer is requesting additional information, send hyperlinks to appropriate resource pages. Use a link shortener to reduce the total number of characters in the response. If not immediately available, offer to send the resources via email after the SMS interaction ends.
Follow up with customer after an SMS communication whenever possible. Hi, it's Mark with Sales.com. I'm just checking in to make sure we addressed your issue yesterday. Did we resolve your issue accordingly?
Confirm ending an SMS interaction. Is there anything else I can help you with before you go?
When ending an interaction, type /end to end the interaction. Otherwise, it remains an active interaction and also negatively impacts reporting.
Supervisors should monitor inbound SMS interactions to account for fair and consistent utilization across available agents.

New SMS Channel

To create a new SMS Channel, click the + icon next to SMS Channels.

MMS

As of the 2021.02.1 Version of Synkato we now offer the ability to send and receive MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) messages.

Once you have an active SMS interaction started, you will be able to hit the paperclip attach icon in the right side of the message box in a Chat+ SMS Channel. The file types that can be sent via this are png, jpeg, and gif.