Tag: Text messaging

Working with SMS – A New Feature

In addition to email, BizConnector supports SMS (text) messaging – both outbound and inbound.

Outbound text messages, which are set up as rule actions and are sent when a rule fires, have an impact unlike emails. For example, they are more likely to be read immediately by their recipients and are useful when simple communication is required, such as confirming an appointment, and perhaps responding to a question.

Outbound and inbound text messages show up as related lists (after installation) in your Salesforce Lead and Contact pages.

sms_related_lists

In addition to message logs, rules can be defined which can fire on receipt of an SMS message.

sms_rule

Up till recently, rules based on inbound SMS messages were restricted to text messages from people who were already saved in your Salesforce Lead or Contact database.

But now that has changed! We are pleased to announce that inbound SMS messages can result in a new Lead or Contact record being created. And that rules can be written to fire when this happens.

This new feature now enables a type of application: For example, capturing new lead subscriptions – eg. when people send a specific text or number pattern to your SMS number.

I hope this gives you some ideas for applications or workflows that you can build using BizConnector. If you have questions or would like a demo, please contact us.

Triggering Messages Based on Anniversaries

BizConnector makes it very easy to trigger emails, SMS messages, and other actions based on the anniversary of any date in your Lead, Contact, Account, or Opportunity records.

This could, for example, be a birthday, an appointment date, or a contract start or expiration date.

As usual in BizConnector, this is done by setting up a rule. In the Rule Editor, you will find ‘pseudo’ fields that are related to date fields in your records. These ‘pseudo’ fields are not real fields, but they are inserted in the field list to make it easy to create a condition.

For example, let’s say we want to send a message on the anniversary of an appointment:

The above condition reads ‘Five days before the appointment anniversary’. That’s all it takes to make the rule fire. This example makes the assumption that you want to send a message five days before the date. Once it fires, you can set any action – for example send an email or sequence of emails, send an SMS message, etc.

Do you have any need to automate messages on the anniversary of a date? If you would like more information about this and other features of BizConnector, please contact us.

Happy messaging!

 

Using Rules To Automate Appointment Reminders

Here’s an innovative use of rules that was recently launched by one of our customers: Automatically texting reminders to the broker and buyer, or the broker and seller, just before an appointment.

This customer happens to be in the real-estate industry, but this idea can be used in other industries as well.

Based on a BizConnector feature that fires a rule a certain number of minutes before the date/time value in a specified field, the customer defined the rule to fire 90 minutes before the appointment.

This uses a ‘pseudo field’ ‘Minutes To Appointment Date/Time’, which is not found in the original object definition, but is derived from the fact that Appointment Date/Time is a datetime field.

The rule action was then set as:


The template ‘Text Notify New Appt Set for Agent’ – sent to the Real Estate Agent – has the contents:

‘You have a new {!Lead_AppointmentType} appointment on {!Lead_AppointmentDateTime}. Please contact {!Lead_FullName} ({!Lead_MobilePhone}) to confirm’

where {!Lead_AppointmentType} can be ‘seller’ or ‘buyer’ when it is actually sent out.

When sent, the message would be something like ‘You have a new buyer appointment on October 23, 2:30pm. Please contact John Smith (917-555-1212) to confirm’.

How does this work? This rule, based on ‘Leads’, is watching the Leads database, and fires when a new record is added (or a record is updated) which matches the rule condition. As soon as it fires, it sends out the SMS message.

Of course, emails can be used instead of, or together with SMS. And you can use ‘Days To’ instead of ‘Minutes To’ for the lead time.

That’s all there is to it!

For more information about this, or to attend an online demo, please contact us.