SMS channels allow your business to communicate with your clients over SMS. SMS channel is available worldwide. No matter where your business is located or where your customers are, you can use the SMS channel to generate more results for your business.
We integrated with Twilio to let you send and receive SMS. Twilio doesn’t provide phone numbers for all countries, but if there is no phone number available for your country, you can buy a phone number from a supported country and communicate with customer worldwide.
We handle all the complexity for you. Your customers can easily opt out of SMS with the “STOP” keyword.
1 – Connect your Twilio account to Chatrace
If you don’t have a Twilio account, you can create a new account here for free.
The video below shows how to connect your Twilio account to Chatrace. If you didn’t have an account on Twilio before, the video shows where you can buy the phone number in Twilio to send SMS to your customers. You will need to enable send SMS to the countries you want to send SMS to here.
Collect phone number
If a user sends an SMS to your business phone number, your chatbot will automatically save the user number. But you can ask your customer for their phone number from any channel like Messenger, Instagram, Viber, Google Business Message, or Telegram … and send the user SMS.
Before you send an SMS, you need to have the user’s phone number. If you don’t have a user’s phone number, You can ask your users their phone numbers with the “Get User Data” block and save the user’s phone into the “Phone” system field.
Get consent to send SMS
To save the user consent to send SMS, you need to use the “Set SMS Opt-In” action. You can find this action in the “Actions” block. We advise you to use this action when the user presses a button to give consent. Your SMS will not be sent if you don’t set the user consent using the “Set SMS Opt-In“.
We created a flow to ask for the user’s phone number and consent. You can get the flow now for free here.
Creating SMS flows
The process of building flows for all channels is the same. We recommend you always use the Omnichannel message type.
If you want to force a message to be delivered over SMS, you need to use the SMS message type.
Useful links
SMS pricing in Twilio
Global SMS Best Practices
Twilio SMS Source & Destination Coverage
SMS works differently in every country. See how it works in your country