Send SMS directly from your cloud telephone system with Access4

Sending SMS and MMS directly from your business phone system enables superior customer experience, personalised communication, and improved cyber security. 

Businesses of all sizes have been moving their expensive, aging on-premises phone systems to the Cloud in droves in the past two years. 

Legacy on-premise phone systems are a security risk, a financial drain, and do not provide the agility needed by a distributed or hybrid workforce. 

A key benefit of moving to cloud telephony is the advanced call features for call handling and call management and the ease of scaling up or down.

And now, businesses can add sending SMS and MMS directly from their cloud telephony portal with Access4.

How can an SMS gateway benefit your customer communications ?

As consumers, most of us will have had our own experiences with useful, timely SMS arriving to provide us with reminders and information personally specific to us. 

These stats will resonate with us:

• Open rates of text messages are as high as 98%.
• 80.5% of consumers check their text notifications within five minutes of receiving a text.

There are a number of simple and obvious ways that sending an SMS will allow you to provide a meaningful benefit to customers. These include:

* Courier Tracking 

Do you ship items to customers?

Providing shipping tracking information for impending deliveries is really useful information for customers who may need to meet the courier to sign or who may want to change instructions to the delivery company.

When you send customers SMS shipping information, it also presents a level of professional credibility and gives the customer 'peace of mind' that the item they have ordered is being processed and is on its way.

* Appointment Reminders and Confirmations

Send an SMS as a reminder of a service appointment - doctor, dentist, school, car servicing - or even a reminder of an in-person event or webinar they have signed up for.

This use of SMS is also super useful and generally welcomed by customers. 

It can also minimise wasted time caused by customer appointment no-shows. If sent early enough, the customer can confirm their attendance or give notice that circumstances have changed and they can no longer attend. This may allow your business to reschedule and offer an appointment to another customer. 

* Omni-channel customer service responses

Imagine your service agent is on the phone to a customer and needs some information to continue processing the enquiry or claim.

Perhaps you need something from the customer like photographs of a damaged item or evidence of a paid invoice; or maybe you need a copy of an identity document like a driver licence. You can SMS the customer and they can reply with an image or details.

Alternatively you may need to send information to the customer. This can often stop a customer service call from progressing. Don't stop the call to send a follow-up email. Resolve the enquiry in one call to save both yourself and the customer time, and win higher levels of customer satisfaction. 

How can an SMS Gateway benefit your business operations and security?

Some examples where having an SMS Gateway could benefit your business are:

* Apply Multi-Factor Authentication (2MFA) security protocols

Multi-Factor Authentication requires the customer to provide a secondary means of verified identification or authorisation. This is a common use case of SMS. is a common use case particularly in the finance, health and government areas where highly sensitive personal data is involved.

SMS can send an authorisation code that allows access to an online account. Similarly it can be used as an option to verify identity to reset a password.

This level of 2MFA security can be applied to businesses of all sizes and across all industry verticals through use of an SMS gateway.

Another example of a SMFA use case is when members of a team share one account. An SMS Gateway can be set up to deliver the code to a shared mailbox or to a distribution list. 

* Automate repetitive customer service tasks

What can be automated will be automated. It inevitable as we push forward as a society with applying artificial intelligence to our workplace operations.

An SMS gateway may be able to start the ball rolling. Are there regular calls that your customer service representatives are making that could be replaced with an SMS?

In our business we have a requirement to have a customer authorisation form completed at either 12 or 24 months . Failure to complete the form would limit the Telstra services we could access or activate on the customer's behalf. We tried sending emails with a renewal form but these would get lost in inboxes or set aside to complete and forgotten.

There is an urgency about an SMS that an email can not replicate. This would be an example of where an SMS notification could have more cut-through than an email, and with a link to a form that could be completed on the phone, this could have a higher success rate.

* Communicate with your customers

Communicate to, or market to. 

Let's start with communication first.

Perhaps you have a notification about your product or service that you need to share with customers urgently.

This could be a confirmation of a booking, notification of a cyber security threat or planned outage, a change to an office address, or perhaps a deadline that is approaching for renewal of a product or service they have subscribed to.

More broadly, it could be a weather warning, a road closure, directions to an event they are attending, shipping tracking information, appointment reminder, account authorisation, or notice that an item has been delivered.

And now marketing.

An SMS gateway will allow you to manage your customer database and segment your customer lists.

This can allow you to send marketing SMS to selected customers. This could be a special offer or promotion, a special event, a newsletter with a link to more information or to an online shop.

There is nothing wrong with using an SMS gateway for marketing activity, so long as your customer consents to receive these messages. 

In fact market surveys have shown that 57% of people are willing to supply their phone number for marketing purposes if given an incentive to do so - like a discount or entry into a competition or prize draw.

When can you send an SMS to a customer?

The law in Australia allows SMS to be sent when the recipient gives express consent, or inferred consent.

Inferred consent arises from the recipient's conduct and ‘existing business or other relationships’. An example of inferred consent includes customers being contacted after purchasing an item that includes an ongoing warranty.  Inferred consent is also established when recipients are subscribers to magazines or other publications, members of frequent flyers clubs, registered users of online services and more.

Express consent is when the recipient specifically signs up to receive SMS messages.

A good rule of thumb is to consider the nature of the SMS and whether it is a transactional communication that is genuinely useful to the customer, or, alternatively if the customer has opted in to the service. 

How does sending SMS from your phone system work?

First off, in order to take advantage of the Access4 SMS Gateway you have to have the Access4 cloud telephony solution.  Find out more about Access4 cloud telephony here.

The Access4 SMS Gateway is a portal which provides automated message scheduling and direct marketing to your contacts. You can

• Set up a contact database
• Set up business-critical workflows for use cases like booking and order confirmations, and shipping information.
• Set up security authorisation with automatic 2FA workflows
• Send single messages or schedule campaign deliveries
• Track links to landing pages, surveys or websites
• Customise your sender ID and reply options

The SMS Gateway sits inside the Access4 SASBOSS platform. 

What does the Access4 SMS Gateway cost?

The cost of the Access4 SMS Gateway is mainly dependent on the number of messages that are sent. Each message will cost $0.10c.

There will also be a monthly cost of $25 for each virtual standard number required, while gold/vanity virtual numbers may also be available but could cost up to $300 per month.

At set-up stage there may be costs associated with onboarding, training and portal set-up dependent on the level of support you require.

Customers may also have the option of a taking up a Managed Service which would provide access to an IT service desk to set alerts, make changes to workflows, monitor usage, troubleshoot, explain billing and provide reporting. 

Who is Access4?

Access4 is a wholly Australian-owned and operated vendor, based in Melbourne.

The company launched in 2016 and has grown enormously over the past 7 years providing cloud telephony and unified communications as a service.

 Access4 utilises the same Broadsoft - now known as Cisco Broadworks - carrier-grade unified communication software platform that is the backbone of Telstra's cloud telephony products.

Learn more about Access4

MobileCorp and Access4 

MobileCorp came across Access4 at the start of the pandemic when we - like many other businesses - needed to upgrade our communications to allow us to work effectively from home.

We have now adopted Access4 as our cloud phone system and for our Microsoft Teams Calling.

We have now been an Access4 partner for two years and have deployed Access4 cloud calling and UCaaS solutions for a range of business customers across healthcare, finance, not-for-profit, travel, and retail industries, and for head office and call centre functions.

MobileCorp Access4 Services