SMS Capabilities

If your agents are Offline or Unavailable when a new lead comes in, Callingly can send an SMS message to your lead, letting them know you will be in touch.

supervisor_account Owners and Admins can enable SMS. Approx. reading time 3 min.

How SMS works

Outbound SMS

If a new lead can't be reached, Callingly can send them an SMS — a text message — letting them know they will be contacted soon. If you choose to activate SMS, the system will send a message under two primary circumstances:

  1. If all agents are unavailable because they’re offline
  2. If no agent picks up

The message the lead receives is fully customizable. More on how to turn this on and customize the message below.

An SMS will only be sent once to any individual lead. This prevents them from being spammed with the same message repeatedly if it takes a while to make contact.

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Note: New leads will not get this message if they become a lead through an inbound call to one of your purchased Callingly numbers. They will only receive an SMS if they become a lead through your integration, such as through a form or email submission.

Inbound SMS

Callingly can also receive inbound SMS messages to any purchased numbers. If a lead sends a text to one of your purchased numbers, that message will be forwarded to the agent or team configured for that number.

The message Users receive will be from the phone number that the lead texted — not the lead’s phone number. It will contain the original text as well as the phone number of the lead.

Example

John has the phone number (555)426-5646. He sends an SMS to the main Scranton team number for Dunder Mifflin paper company: (415)943-4591. His message says,

Please call me ASAP. I have an urgent need for 5,000 reams of your heaviest card stock.

The primary team has seven agents assigned to it. John’s message is sent to each of the seven agents on the primary team, from the phone number (415)943-4591.

The message each agent receives reads:

+15554265646: Please call me ASAP. I have an urgent need for 5000 reams of your heaviest card stock.

To reply to the message, the agent must send a new text from their phone to the number included in the received SMS. They can do this simply by clicking on the sender’s phone number in the message and starting a text thread from their phone’s texting app.

How to enable SMS

The SMS feature is enabled per team on the Teams page of your account. To enable it:

1.
Click the Settings icon {insert settings icon} next to the appropriate team.
2.

Flip on the toggle under the heading Send SMS If Team Unavailable, found near the bottom of the side panel that appears. Doing so will cause a box to appear.

3.
Enter a message into the box. This is the message your leads will receive.
4.
Hit the Save button at the bottom of the page to be sure your changes are saved.
To disable SMS, simply flip the toggle to Off.

Future features of SMS

We’d love to create additional SMS capabilities in the future. Let us know if there's anything specific you'd like to see! We’re delighted to hear from you.

Pro-tip

You can change this SMS at any point in time. Simply follow the steps above, and alter the message in the box, remembering to Save your changes

Common questions

What countries are supported for SMS?

Phone numbers for purchase in-app are available for US, Canada, and the UK. This means that US, Canada, and UK numbers are included in SMS. If you need a number for a different country, this can be accommodated. Please reach out to our support team for help with this.

What SMS features are coming in the future?

We have a few thoughts for our SMS roadmap, but nothing is set in stone. We’d love to hear from you regarding what you’d like to see.

A lead called in, and the call was missed, but they didn’t receive an SMS. What do I need to do?

Only leads that come in through your integration to enter the outbound call flow will receive an SMS. Leads from the inbound call flow will not receive an SMS. Leads will also only receive a message after the system tries to connect the lead with an agent but fails.

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