Rock U - Communications - Sending SMS (Simple Mode) v13

Transcribed Video Content

Sending an SMS message is a lot sending an email, but there are fewer fields, so it's actually a little bit easier. You just need to make sure that your system is set up to be able to send and receive SMS messages, which we cover thoroughly in the communicating with Rock user manual, and we'll touch on a little bit, here in this presentation. So let's take a look at how to send a simple SMS message. So the first thing that we need is a list of people that we're going to send our message to. And you can get that list from any grid of people in Rock, but we'll go ahead and use the search up here to search for Decker. And this will give us a list of people, and we can click the speech bubble icon here at the top or at the bottom to initiate a communication. Now, the first thing that we'll see is the start of the communication wizard. You can come down here and click next and continue along with the wizard process. But today, we're going to go to the top of the block and use the simple email or the simple editor, which if you click on use the simple editor, it defaults to email. So we're gonna need to switch it over to SMS. And if you watch the video on simple email, then a lot of this will be familiar to you. , down here we have the recipients from the grid. Their names are in red because none of them in this case have a phone number with SMS enabled. That's okay. It's just here for example purposes. So, first thing you'll need to do is pick the from field. And right now, we don't have, this demo system configured for SMS messaging, so there's nothing there. But we're going to show you how to put something there, in just a minute. And then below, you'll provide your message. So whatever SMS message that you wanna send, and just remember that it is Lava enabled, and you can add merge fields from over there. And then, of course, you have the delay send until. So you can send this SMS message at a date and time in the future if you want. But really the key here is is the from part. So let's take a look at how we configure this from address and look at some of the specifics of how SMS messaging works in Rock. First, you'll need to have an SMS provider. The one that's supported out of the box is Twilio. It's one of the most popular ones out there, and it's very inexpensive to use. Once you have your Twilio account and your number purchased, the next thing you'll need to do is add that number to the SMS phone number's defined type. There's a couple ways that you can get there. On the screen here, we went to admin tools, communications, and SMS phone numbers, but you could also go to admin tools, general settings, define types, and then find the SMS phone number's defined type there. So here, it says, you'll provide a value, which is the Twilio phone number that you were given. Just put plus one and the phone number that they gave you. Then next, you'll provide a description. , , it for a department or is it for a specific person? , you can add those kinds of details description. Lastly, you'll want to assign a response recipient, which is the person that will receive responses sent to this number. We'll see shortly how that works. And so, again, the next step after setting up Twilio is to come here and add your SMS phone numbers here. Once you do that and send your message, you'll get this kind of feature. So in this case, we have an SMS message that was sent to a group of people, and you'll notice it's been personalized to the recipient using Lava. And we say, hello, Alicia. Hope to see you at the car show tonight. In this case, Alicia responds and says, I'll be there. Now, that message goes to the recipient that was defined on the SMS phone number defined value that we just looked at. So that's gonna go to the response recipient. So in this case, it's going back to Jenny, who was assigned as the response recipient for that phone number. And because it's bulk SMS, we're going to append who the response came from. So in this case, for for number three there on the screen, we're gonna see Alicia Marble at the top, then Alicia's message, and then at the end, you'll see a little code, the at 671. And you see that so you can get a message back to that person. So Jenny wants to respond back to Alicia, and she says, cool. Can't wait. And uses the at 671 code, which tells Rock to respond back to this message, back to Alicia's message in this case. And so Alicia gets that response, shown as number five there on the screen. Now, you'll notice that when Alicia gets Jenny's response, she doesn't see the code. Rock takes the code out of the message automatically. So on Alicia's phone, it looks very natural. It's going back and forth between the two phones, and it looks there's nothing in between there. But really between these two phones is Rock. And Rock is relaying these messages back and forth. So again, it feels very natural, very fluid for Alicia. And Jenny has the tools to make sure she knows who she's talking with and make sure the response that she sends goes back just to that person. You might have also noticed that both phones, both Alicia and Jenny's phones, are texting to the same phone number, and that's by design. Because this way, Alicia doesn't know Jenny's personal number, and Jenny also doesn't know Alicia's. They're both texting to that one number. So that's how you would send a simple SMS message and a little bit about, some of how the SMS messaging works in Rock. But for more details on SMS or communications in general, be sure and check out our communicating using Rock guide posted to the community website. And thanks for watching.