Phone & SMS

Phone & SMS is where your business gets a phone line of its own. You pick a number, you get cleared by the mobile networks to send text messages from it, and if you want, an agent answers incoming calls for you and writes down what was said.

Everything here lives under Phone & SMS in your dashboard, and it has four parts: Phone numbers, SMS registration, Voice agent and Calls.

Read this before you start

Two things here have real consequences, and both of them happen outside TribeNest.

A phone number costs money every month. It is not a one-off purchase. The moment you buy a number it becomes a recurring monthly charge on your account, and it keeps costing that until you release it. Buy the number you need, not three you might use.

Registering to send text messages submits your legal identity for approval. The mobile networks require every business that texts people to be registered under its own name. That means filling in your trading name, your business address, your contact details, and (depending on which path you take) either a company registration number or the last four digits of your own SSN or SIN. A real person at the messaging regulator reads what you submit and decides whether to approve it. This is a filing made in your name, so everything you put in it needs to be true.

There is no way around that second one. You cannot send a single text message from TribeNest until your registration is approved, and there is no shared number to borrow in the meantime.

What you can do here

• Buy a phone number in one of several countries, toll-free or with a local area code.
• Submit an SMS registration so the mobile networks will let your messages through.
• Watch that registration's progress, respond to a rejection, and resubmit.
• Switch on a voice agent that answers incoming calls, knows about your catalogue, events and membership, and takes a message when it cannot help.
• Set business hours, a forwarding number, and safety limits on how long and how often the agent talks.
• Read the transcript of every call, and play back the audio if you chose to record.

How it fits together

The order to do this in

If you are starting from nothing, this is the sequence that works:

1. Buy a number first. A registration covers a sender, and a sender is a number you own. Go to Phone & SMS then Phone numbers and click Get a number. Pick toll-free unless you have a specific reason not to.
2. Start your SMS registration. Go to SMS registration and choose the path that matches your situation. Fill it in carefully. The most common reason a registration is rejected is a vague answer about how people opted in.
3. Wait for approval. Toll-free takes around five business days. The other two paths take five to ten, sometimes longer. There is nothing you can do to speed this up, and there is no partial state where you can start sending early.
4. Send your first text campaign. Once the banner at the top of the page turns green, go to Emails then Messaging and send to a segment that has consented to hear from you by text.
5. Switch on the voice agent, if you want one. Go to Voice agent, give it a name and an opening line, set your hours, and turn it on.
6. Check your calls. After a few days, open Calls and read some transcripts. It is the fastest way to find out what your callers actually want.

Who on your team can see this

Access to this area is controlled separately from the rest of your dashboard, and it is split in two. One permission covers phone numbers and the SMS registration, because submitting a registration is a legal filing in your business's name. A second permission covers the voice agent and call transcripts, because a transcript is a record of a private conversation with a caller.

That means you can give someone the ability to read call transcripts without giving them the ability to buy numbers or file a registration, and the other way round. See Permissions for how to set that up.