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Smart SMS
Smart SMS
Jenny avatar
Written by Jenny
Updated over a week ago

A great feature of Textline is Smart SMS. Smart SMS is a special department that allows you to text from multiple numbers at once. This means that instead of needing a department for each phone number you want in Textline, you can have one department with up to 100 numbers. This is a feature for those companies that would like to maintain a localized presence by having numbers using many area (or country) codes, but controlling it from one location. Interested to learn more? Read on below. If you know what it is and want to set up Smart SMS, click here to skip to setup.

Geo-Match

Smart SMS is a way for companies to get numbers in many areas of the globe so that their customers feel like someone locally is communicating with them. This feature ensures that the customer will always communicate with the same number. This is great so that companies don’t have to worry about switching phones number based on load, they can just run their business from the Smart SMS department.

How does this work? Well here are a few details:

  1. Outbound Message to New Contact: Smart SMS will assign contacts to the closest number possible based on area code. If you have a number that matches the same area code or overlay, it will assign that. If not, then it will randomly assign a number from your Smart SMS group.

  2. Inbound Message from New Contact: A contact can text any number in your Smart SMS group, but upon a response from an agent, Smart SMS will proceed as in point 1.

  3. Contacts will stay with the same number forever, UNLESS: the contact is assigned to a phone number you remove from your group. In this case, Smart SMS will then re-match the contact as if you were sending an outbound message to a new contact (as in point 1 above).

What about different countries?

With Geo-Matching in Smart SMS, you can have phone numbers from multiple countries in the same group! This means that if you’re a European business, you can have a number for each country that Textline supports. If you’re an international business with locations in many US states, Canadian provinces, and European countries, you can get a local number for each location.

Matching Order

Here's the order of matching:

  1. Same Area Code

  2. Overlay Area Code (more on overlayed area codes here)

  3. Random number from the same country

  4. Random number from your Smart SMS pool

Set-Up

Interested in Smart SMS? It’s really easy to get started:

  1. Go to your organization's settings page by clicking on the Settings gear at the top

  2. Within Settings, click on Departments

  3. In the Departments tab, click New Department

  4. On the New Department page, you’ll see a brain icon with the words "Add a Smart SMS Number," click on the Select button below.
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  5. On the next page, you’ll be asked to name your Smart SMS department and select the area code for your first phone number.

  6. Upon creation, you’ll come to the settings page for your Smart SMS department. Here is where you can start to add the other area codes that you would like to use.

  7. Once you’ve added your phone numbers to your group, head to your Conversation Dashboard. Start using your brand new Smart SMS department just like any other department.

In Use

When looking at a conversation within your Smart SMS department, the only difference will be each post will include the number that it came to or from. You’ll notice it includes the contact or agent name and timestamp with each message.

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