SMS Messaging lets your agents receive inbound SMS (text) messages and initiate outbound text messages as a channel to interact with your organization's contacts. You can also use SMS Messaging for Proactive SMS text campaigns in Personal Connection.
CXone Mpower offers another SMS solution, Inbound/Manual Outbound SMS, that treats inbound and outbound text messages as work items
Customizable method of delivering contacts to an agent via Studio scripts.. The advantage of SMS Messaging is that it's a regular ACD channel (similar to chat). Texts appear in an SMS workspace in the agent's application.
SMS Messaging works like this:
- A contact sends a text (SMS) message to your organization, or an agent sends a text message to a contact.
- Within a framework called the "text hub", SMS Messaging opens a "room" for handling the SMS interaction. This framework is behind the scenes and not visible to either customers or agents.
- CXone Mpower routes the message to an agent based on your configured skills and routing script.
- The agent handles the interaction from within an agent application. This keeps the agent experience consistent for all channels, since agents use the same application to handle voice calls, chats, email, work items Customizable method of delivering contacts to an agent via Studio scripts., and SMS interactions.
Goldy Locks runs the customer service contact center for Classics, Inc. Her agents handle incoming calls, chats, and SMS messages from customers looking for retailers that carry books from the Classics Three Bears imprint, as well as from those who experience issues with their book purchases.
Key Facts about SMS Messaging
- SMS Messaging must be enabled in your tenant before you can configure the necessary skills, points of contact, and so forth.
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SMS Messaging supports up to 12 concurrent sessions. You can configure the number of sessions at either the user or the team level. The same session limit applies to both SMS Messaging and chat when you use both, as shown in the following example.
The Bears, one of Goldy's teams in the Three Bears contact center, is configured with a limit of five chat/SMS sessions.
Agent Tiffany Grimm is assigned to both the chat and SMS skills. She is currently handling two chats and two SMS interactions. CXone Mpower could deliver one more chat or one more SMS interaction to her.
Agent Hans Anderson is assigned only to the chat skill. He is currently handling three chats. CXone Mpower will not deliver any SMS interactions to him, but could deliver up to two additional chats.
Agent Elsa Snow is assigned only to the SMS skill. She is currently handling four SMS interactions. CXone Mpower will not deliver any chat interactions to him, but could deliver one more SMS interaction.
- When an agent accepts an SMS interaction, a two-hour timer starts. The timer resets whenever an SMS message is sent or received. This keeps the session alive in case the contact does not respond right away, but prevents a session from being kept alive indefinitely.
- Sometimes a session may time out, but then the contact later responds to the agent's last message. The restarted interaction may be sent to a different agent. The new agent can load transcripts from the last ten sessions associated with the DNIS The number dialed on inbound or outbound voice calls. or ANI Also known as caller ID. Listed phone number of an incoming voice call. to review the earlier conversation and better assist the contact.
- Administrators can end an SMS interaction manually by using a forced disconnect. However, doing so ends all active SMS interactions and may prevent interaction transcripts from being saved if that functionality is enabled.
- SMS Messaging is currently only supported in MAX and Salesforce Agent Lightning.
- SMS Messaging is available in the United States and Canada. Long codes, toll-free long codes, and short codes are all supported.
- SMS Messaging is also available in more than 15 additional countries using long codes only. Ask your CXone Mpower representative for more information.