1.4 - Example 2: Sending an SMS when connected to an agent

Let's now move to the next example. It's going to be a very short but useful one, we'll look at SMS and placeholders.

Imagine the following scenario:

You want to know how customers found out about your company or how they like your service. But you don't want to bother your agents by repeating the same three questions every time they talk to a customer. So, you came up with an easy solution: Whenever a customer successfully connects to one of your agents, they will automatically receive a text message with a link to a survey. This way, they can answer the survey after talking to your agents.

Getting started

To test this setup, you will need an SMS-ready phone number. Get in touch with our support at support@babelforce.com for ordering one.

For this to work, we set up another one of our magic Automations:

The Automation happens on 'Call bridged' event
Select the Action 'send SMS'
Trigger = Always

For setting up the content of the text message you have quite a few options.

In our example, we insert a phone number, but you can also write your company's name, like "MyCompany" as FROM address.
You want to use the placeholder {call.from.number} to send the SMS to the caller's phone in the TO field.
And finally, you can add a link to the message body. In our example, we added an expression to the text message link which equals the customer's phone number. This would enable you to keep track of who left feedback. But this is only optional. You can create the link however you prefer and how it fits your processes and systems best.

Feel free to follow the video guide for this process:

You probably wonder what that looks like when you receive the SMS. Here we go ⇢

Of course, you can do many more things, for instance, you can decide to use a Trigger to only send the SMS if the caller is calling your service from a mobile number or only if the caller was dialing a certain number.

But this goes a bit too far. We will investigate the full world of Triggers within Automations in a later section when we look at integrations with helpdesks.

For now, let's continue to our last example in this first part of the chapter, section 1.5, Automations in calls and queues.