If you’re using the Gladly IVR, you can deflect some phone call traffic to SMS by giving your voice Customers the option to receive support via SMS instead of waiting. This is a good option if you typically have a high volume of voice calls and will allow your Agents to focus on the most critical issues via voice while still being able to connect with Customers with less urgent needs via SMS.
If you configure IVR to SMS, a caller can choose that option in the IVR. This will send out an SMS from the phone number they have called into. You will have the option to configure this outgoing message as well as the flow when the SMS succeeds or fails. If it fails, we typically recommend a recording saying something like “sorry, your request failed” and then connecting the Customer to an Agent via phone. If it succeeds, we recommend a recorded message that says “Success! Looking forward to texting with you,” then hanging up and sending out an SMS message.
You can also use Gladly’s Send SMS API to set up a similar SMS workflow. Typically, we’d recommend this approach if you have a lot of phone numbers but only want to make one of them “SMS-able” or if you have lots of international numbers and you want to enable IVR TO SMS on, but only one of them (e.g., UK) is SMS-enabled.