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Marc Rosa
planned
Exciting news: we’re exploring support for text-based chat channels like SMS, WhatsApp, and iMessage!
Do you have a strong use case for SMS or want to share your thoughts? We’d love your input! Contact Marc at marc@getthread.com or the Thread Support Team (ask to connect with Product) to review early concepts and share your feedback.
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Andrew Williams
Marc Rosa A tie in for Apple's Messages for Business would be awesome.
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Joe Silva
Adding some context to this, SMS is a great idea but difficult in practice. Using it for one-way communication, such as temporary passwords, is better than for two-way support.
Because SMS is not threaded now, we found that customers would post updates on unrelated tickets. For example, any user can only have one SMS-type ticket open at a time; if the ticket is open, anything the user sends will be posted on that ticket. So, if you are working on a monitor issue via SMS and the same user sends in an SMS request for an emergency. At the same time, the original ticket is still open; the content for the emergency would be added to open a monitor issue ticket. This can lead to delays in support.
In addition, we found that users would use the reply-by-text feature for our phone calls if they could not answer at that time. To break this down, the tech calls the user; the user cannot respond; the user selects the message button (iPhone) and selects a standard response such as "Can I call you later?". This now causes your team extra work merging tickets for uninformative responses.
The last issue is that the SMS number must be your primary support phone number; you cannot give a client two numbers to use. There are creative ways around this, such as forwarding the SMS number to your main line, but it's clumsy. The best implementation would be to use a service like Twilio; let us use our API keys to tie our Twilio account into Thread. This would allow us to select and use any numbers we have in Twilio.
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Master User
a tixt.us integration would make this easy for you guys instead of needing to develop in-house.
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John Snyder
Master User: If you are using tixt today to receive SMS based tickets from your customers you can already use Thread to respond to your customers!
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Master User
John Snyder: because we can respond to tickets in Thread, no matter the source right?
However, I think the idea is more along the lines of a true Omnichannel support tool. That means being able to directly send and receive SMS from one place (as well as multiple social messaging platforms). I haven't tried Tixt with it yet, but I am not sure that routing via CW PSA is the same experience for either the tech or the client.
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John Snyder
Master User: So tixt works off of discussion notes the same way we do. You can manage and respond to the tickets that come in through your tixt number using Thread inbox or pods. I tried it myself recently and it seemed to work great and from my perspective was a better experience than using the discussion notes directly for responses. How do you respond to tixt messages today?
Jacob Berezin
WhatsApp business integration would be amazing too.
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Master User
Jacob Berezin: whatsapp would be awesome! I wish we could get some votes and updates on https://feedback.getthread.com/integrations/p/provide-support-to-clients-in-whatsapp
Jacob Berezin
Master User: done i upvoted it - ill send to some of my contacts as well
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Derek Gabriel
Twilio would make a nice integration here.
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Teal Sunshine
SMS has quickly become the only way we can reach many of our clients, especially high profile ones. I would love to see SMS as an additional connector.