Exotel Developer Portal

Overview

Smart Messaging is a way to send messages in a smarter way to reach customers using link tracking . We can track if the links on the SMSes have been clicked or not, and based on that Exotel can smartly trigger SMSes and Whatsapp messages on the tenant’s behalf (or the tenant themselves can trigger them) to remind the end customer.

Pre-requisites

An active Exotel account
Integration with Exotel SMS and Whatsapp API

Flow Diagram

How It Works

Case - 1 (Happy Case)

In this case, the tenant sends an SMS having a URL via Exotel, Exotel receives the SMS, generates a unique short URL for the long URL present in the SMS and sends the SMS to the requested number. Now the end customer receives the SMS with a short URL and customer clicks on the short URL within X hours. As soon as the URL is clicked, Exotel internally receives the callback for the unique short URL and Exotel checks the mapping between short URL and Tenant in combination with destination number and sends the callback to tenant’s endpoint accordingly. Now the tenant knows that the SMS has been read by the customer. No further action is required from the tenant's end.

Case - 2

In this case, the tenant sends an SMS having a URL via Exotel, Exotel receives the SMS, generates a unique short URL for the long URL present in the SMS and sends the SMS to the requested number. Now the end customer receives the SMS with a short URL. However, the SMS hasn’t been read (i.e. the short URL hasn’t been clicked) within X hours. The tenant sees that the link hasn’t been opened even after X hour, the tenant can send another SMS to the customer with the same URL but with a different SMS template (E.g. Hurry last few hours left for your offer, Please grab: https://exo.tl/326abef78c). Now another SMS has reached the customer and if he clicks the short link within next X hours, the callback for the same received by Exotel will be forwarded to the customer and the SMS won’t be retried again

Case -3

In this case, the tenant sends an SMS having a URL via Exotel, Exotel receives the SMS, generates a unique short URL for the long URL present in the SMS and sends the SMS to the requested number. Now the end customer receives the SMS with a short URL. However, the SMS hasn’t been read within X hours. The tenant sees that the link hasn’t been opened even after X hours. Now the tenant can send another SMS to the customer with the same URL but with a different SMS template. Now another SMS has reached the customer and if they click the short link within next X hours, the callback for the same received by Exotel will be forwarded to the customer . If the customer still hasn’t clicked on the link, then the tenant can trigger a WhatsApp message as the last option.The number of SMs retries could be configurable by the tenant.

Advantages

Cost Effective - This will be good for the customers from a cost perspective as well. Whatsapp messages cost like 0.5 rupees and SMSes cost 0.15 rupees. So if a tenant sends 10 Smart SMSes, and if some end users click on the link from SMS itself, there won’t be any need to send the whatsapp message. Only when the link is not clicked, we would be sending the Whatsapp message.
We could onboard SMS as well as whatsapp tenants with this

Bill Plan

The SMSes and Whatsapp message will be charged as per actuals which means customer will be charged only for those SMS/messages which they have triggered ● For Eg (Assumption 2 SMS retries are set by the tenant):

○ If Customer hasn’t read the both SMSes and Whatsapp message triggered: 2 SMSes (2*0.15) + 1 Whatsapp message (1* 0.5) = 0.8

○ The customer didn’t the SMS first time so another SMS was triggered which was read: 2 SMSes (2*0.15) = 0.3

○ The customer has read the SMS which was sent first time: 1 SMS (1*0.15) = 0.15