SMS Shared Inbox

What is an SMS Shared Inbox?

An SMS Inbox is like an Email inbox. All your customers messages go there and you respond from there. But an SMS inbox lives on a single phone. Only one person can respond to those messages and there’s no easy way to share the inbox with multiple team members.

An SMS Shared Inbox adds a layer of team collaboration to an SMS inbox. It receives SMS messages from all your customers, and enables your team to work together to respond to those messages.

Does my business need an SMS Shared Inbox?

If your business receives and responds to customer messages over SMS, you definitely need an SMS Shared Inbox. It allows your team to respond to messages from any device and ensures conversations aren’t lost if a phone is lost.

What are the benefits of an SMS Shared Inbox?

With an SMS Shared Inbox, you'll be able to:

• Add private notes to a conversation, only visible to other members of your team
• Assign conversations to specific team mates
• Prepare and share canned responses, so your customers see a consistent voice
• Categorize conversations with labels
• See consolidated customer communication history, across all communication channels
• Analize and detect trends using reporting data, and use it to make smart decisions

How to create an SMS Shared Inbox?

Enchant provides shared inbox software that can be used to manage customer conversations across many communication channels (SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Email, etc). The SMS channel works through Twilio, a telephony provider.

To create an SMS Shared Inbox for your business:

• Create an Enchant account, so your team has shared inbox software.
• Create a Twilio account, and get a phone number through Twilio. Alternatively, you can port an existing number to Twilio.
• In Enchant, head to channel settings and add a new SMS Channel. Provide your Twilio API key to connect Enchant to your Twilio account.

Once setup, incoming SMS messages coming to the provided phone number will result in conversations being created in Enchant. Your team will login and response to those conversations from Enchant.