How does SMS work and how to activate it?
Benefits
SMS communication makes it easy to reach your customers in a personal and reliable way.
97% of all SMS messages are, on average, read within 15 minutes. This is an incredible open-rate compared to emails, that often are opened late, or not at all.
By sending out notifications by SMS you have a much greater chance that the information you send out will actually be read, at the time of sending.
This can be of great value if you want to send out notifications as reminders to return an item, fill out a form, information about how to use the service before the booking starts, etc.
How to enable it?
If you can not see this enabled today, under Settings → Notifications → "+ Create Notification" → Actions → "Send SMS", contact support@sharefox.no and they can help setting it up for you.
How does it work?
SMSes are sent to customers or managers through the use of our Notifications module. Read more about it here: https://help.sharefox.no/article/163-notifications.
SMS size and concatenated SMSes: The standard size of an SMS is 160 characters. Any message larger than this will be automatically split by the service gateway and merged together on the receiving side, usually by the user device. The receiver will perceive it as one sms, but you will be charged for the actual number of SMS technically sent (or in accordance with your SMS plan).
- 1 – 160 characters = 1 SMS
- 161 – 306 characters = 2 SMS
- 307 – 459 characters = 3 SMS
Sending confirmation: Once the SMS sending has been triggered in our sending gateway Intellipush and forwarded to the operator network, a confirmation can be seen on the Activity panel of the corresponding order (Order page → Information tab → Activity). The final SMS arrival on the user device cannot be confirmed by Sharefox, as this may depend on specific network operator processes (such as retrying if user device is turned off) or device level settings.
Tip: Test that the SMS is reaching all major phone carriers in your country. Go to Settings -> Notifications, and create a new notification with Action set as "Send SMS". Then go back to Settings -> Notifications, and click on the "paper plane" icon to the right of the SMS notification:
Clicking on it, you can enter a phone number, and send an SMS to it. You should ideally do such a test with several phone numbers, from some of the biggest phone carriers in your country - to make sure that the SMS is received.
Character encoding: Our sending gateway uses GSM-7 encoding. For information on supported characters, please check here.
Pricing
The price per SMS is 1 NOK / 0,1 EUR for Nordics, Australia, US, Canada and EU/EEA.
For large volume contracts, contact support@sharefox.no for more information.
Configuration
You will have one sender name which will be a string like "Yourcompany". This sender name needs to be within some constraints:
- At maximum 11 characters
- Be within A-Z, a-z, 0-9, whitespace, and no special characters
- Characters, like Æ, Ø, Å is not accepted.
- Empty value is accepted.
As a default, the system will create a default sender name for your shop, based on the shop name. To change it, please contact support@sharefox.no. To reveal what sender name is set up for your shop, you could send a test SMS to yourself (see instructions higher up in this help article).
Note that not all tele companies might support the sender name to be shown - but in general this is supported. If your sender name is entered with more than 11 characters, it will be truncated.
Compliance requirement: Before activating this feature, please be aware of any legal requirements in your jurisdiction and make sure you are compliant. In Norway for example, SMSes can only be sent if the user has provided active consent, and in general it is prohibited to use such a feature for marketing purposes. Please make sure your terms and conditions and privacy policy are updated to reflect this accordingly.