With the new release 9 Voicent Dashboard, you can simply click a button to send a text message. Of cause, in order to do that, you need to have a SMS/text message enabled and setup on Voicent Gateway.

After you click the text message button, a popup windows allows you to enter the message and click Send.

When you are doing an outbound SMS campaign, your customers may respond to you with more then what you asked for. In some cases, you may want to see whatever that response was.

This tutorial will require:

1)BroadcastBySMS – Outbound

2) IVR Studio – SMS Inbound Designer

3) Voicent Gateway – Handles the IVR Studio design and actually receives the Incoming SMS

The incoming SMS design is fairly simple and straight forward. We will look for a few specific response, then for everything else, send it in an email.

Steps:

a)Open IVR Studio and select “File”->”New”->”Inbound SMS Application”

b)Right click Incoming SMS node in the top left of IVR Studio and select “Add Next Element”->”Text Command…”

c)Give this node a name and select finish. We will name it “Node One”.

d)Right click the node you just created and select “Add Next Element”->”Prompt”.

e)Give that node a name and the SMS response for this one will be “opt out”.

f)Select the “Prompt” tab at the top and select “New” and for the message type “Thank you, you have been opt out of future messages”. You will want to do something with this opt out in the action section of the node, but that will not be covered in this article. Select “OK”->”OK” when you are done designing the prompt.

g)Select the first node you made, “Node One”, and select “Add Next Element”->”Prompt” and give it a name. Instead of using “SMS Response is:” we will be using “Any other SMS response” and select the “Prompt” tab at the top.

h)Select “New…” under the prompt window and type your desired response, we will be using “Thank you for your response”. Select “OK”.

i)Select the “Action” tab at the top and select “New…”->”Send Email”

j)Configure your email server and add ${__VG__EXCEPTION_INFO__} to the message body, which will put their SMS response in the email body

That is it, when the system receives a text message it will send that as an email.

Wanted to know if there is a way for customers to sign on by texting me a code or do I have to enter all the numbers in automatically?

With Voicent IVR Studio, you can create custom inbound SMS applications. With an inbound SMS application you could have people text your phone number and automatically store their number to a file or a database. Not only can you store their phone number, but you can do essentially anything you need. You could have it send them information back based on certain things. More specifically if you wanted the people who sent you a text message that said “Sign Up” to be signed up, you could easily check for “Sign Up” in your text messages then do whatever you want with that phone number.

I have downloaded and installed Voicent8a as an evaluation. Running the setup worked well. Importing my SMS Call List worked well, (20 were imported). Now I would like to create groups, (like Managers and Captains and Guards), and assign the appropriate contacts to the appropriate groups. Then when I need to mass SMS the Managers Group, I want to create my SMS text, select the Managers group and then send. Naturally I would want to be able to do the same for the other groups as well. I cannot find where to create groups and assign people to them.

With Voicent software, this is relatively easy to implement.

Simply create a call list for each group. For Broadcast By SMS software, each list is a Windows file with extension (.soc). So create your manager’s list and save it to a file such as manager.soc; do the same for other groups. When you need to send text to a group, such as the captains group, simply open captains.soc file.

In addition, you can design customized messages for each group using the built-in Message Designer. When you need to send a specific message, select it for the broadcast message and click OK.

That’s it.

I would like to know if I can use the Voicent Broadcast by SMS software with a CDMA modem. I have a bulk sms account for a CDMA network, but I would like to use your software with it, instead of the included GSM modem. Thanks

In theory, if the modem supports the following interface/standard, it should work: ETSI GSM 07.05 interface. Since it is a GSM standard, it may not be supported in the CDMA modem you have.

To try it out, connect your CDMA modem to your computer, normally through a USB cable. Install modem driver if necessary. Find the COM port it is using, then open Voicent Gateway, select Setup > Options > SMS tab, add the COM port. The gateway should restart. If it fails to start, check to see if the COM port is used by other software, such as the software come with the modem driver. If it is, exit from the software and restart the gateway.