If you don't have SMS enabled, they should have been getting a response
back saying that the message couldn't be delivered. Seems like it might
be better to leave it that way than to try to deal with it.
That said, I think there's an SMS module in Asterisk. Maybe you could
create some kind of email to SMS gateway so you could reply to the email
and have it sent back to them as a text. Maybe such a thing already
exists.
-Adam
------ Original Message ------
From: "Ken Hohhof" <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: 9/8/2016 10:08:28 AM
Subject: [AFMUG] customer support via text message
Earlier this year we enabled SMS messaging on our main business phone
number. We never announced anything, but people do send us texts,
which makes me wonder how many were dropping off the end of the earth
previously. We don't actually get a text message, it gets turned into
an email to our support address.
Problem is, customers often don't include their name, all we have is
their cellphone number. Their expectation seems to be that we will
text back and forth with them. In reality we have to call them. But
we can't investigate the problem first unless we can correlate the
cellphone number to a customer account, and then when we call them,
lots of people don't actually answer their phones, they do everything
by text message.
How are people handling this?
