There are some situations in which you may want to send an automatic SMS to your customers via either the unanswered or answered branch of your Call Flow Designer (from here on referred to as CFD). For example, if your customer is unable to reach an agent (e.g full queue or no available agent) and therefore will be sent down the unanswered branch of your call flow, you may wish to send them an SMS with some advice regarding their call.
The following article will detail how to set up your CFD for the example scenario above, we will automate the sending of an SMS to any caller that was not connected to an agent.
Before we get started, make sure you have the following setup in order to use this functionality:
An Essential package or higher
An SMS enabled number
Not sure if you have the right setup to use automatic SMS? Contact our Support Team!
The preferred context for this setup would be as a solution to a scenario whereby only the particular information present in your CFD is necessary to determine if a follow-up SMS should or should not be sent to the customer.
This setup also specifically applies to inbound calls only, with this being the most common use. In the case that no CFD specific data is necessary to determine the sending of an SMS, it is possible to implement a similar setup with more flexibility within Workflow Automation. For this, please refer to our guides on Workflow Automations, linked at the bottom of this page.
Adjusting your CFD
In your CloudTalk Dashboard navigate to the Numbers tab and click Edit on the number you would like to set up your follow up SMS for
Click Configure call flow in Basic Settings section
Make sure your call flow prior to the SMS send out is set up as desired
At the point where you would like to execute the automatic sending of your SMS, click on the + icon and choose the action HTTP Request
Configure your HTTP Request action according to our Send SMS Cloudtalk API documentation:
Insert URL https://my.cloudtalk.io/api/sms/send.json
Select POST method
Configure Request headers (see screenshot below)
Configure Authorization headerKey: “Authorization”
Value: Basic Auth Hash (created from a combination of the ACCESS KEY ID and ACCESS KEY SECRET in CloudTalk).
Configure Request body
recipient
Key: recipient
Value: in most cases, we would use variable* (= dynamic value) such as {{call.external_number}}
message to be sent
Key: message
Value: the content of message we want to send: “We are excited to meet you!“ etc
sender number
Key: sender
Value: phone number we want to use to send the SMS from
can be a different number than the one related to CFD which is being set up
needs to be an SMS capable number and a registered CloudTalk number; with “+“ present) e.g +1 973 536 2330
Keep in mind
Ensure the Authorization header begins with a capitalized "A."
SMS sendouts are handled by sending requests to the CloudTalk API, which adheres to standard rate limits (60 requests per minute)
Make sure that all phone numbers included in the HTTP request are in international format.
Make sure that the selected sender number is SMS-capable.
If you have any further questions regarding this topic, or need assistance with anything else, please reach out to our Support team. We are always happy to help!