SMS conversation with MobileConnect

Question

Does anyone have experience handling MO (inbound) SMS messages in MobileConnect? Our use case is sending an outbound message to a contact from within Salesforce. If the contact replies how can we see/capture the response? Are we limited to the Text Response template with a Keyword? Does this work differently with a private short code instead of a shared short code? Any help/advice is appreciated.

Answer 1

Depending on your use case and what you want to have happen, is important to note the following regarding your solution.

To send an SMS from Salesforce, you need to initiate the SMS using:

• APEX Call to create the SMS sende via the MC API
• Salesforce Entry Event in Journey Builder, and send the SMS via Journey Builder (note: The contact needs to exists in MobileConnect and opt'ed in to a keyword on the BU here)

When receiving a text-response or whatever flow you have, again, you have a couple of options - but the main thing to consider comes down to your contact model (does the same mobile number exist more than once?).

Overall what you need to ensure is that:

• The subscriber within mobile connect has an attribute with the SFID stored
• And, depending on use case, that your SubscriberKey is equal to the SFID

What this enables is that:

• When you receive a text, you could use AMPscript to pull the the SFID variable, and the use that variable to create whatever you want to inside Salesforce Core (using CreateSalesforceObject)
• If you use the SFID as SubscriberKey, you could also just add a row to a data extension which would allow you to inject people into a journey, which, would allow for the journey to control bevahior and record creation inside Salesforce Core.