SMS to Vendors

You are probably familiar with this article on our KB.

Notification templates can be created by system administrator, someone who has access to modifying them. If your rights limit access, contact your admin, if you are an admin user, then contact us to check your license and enable access.

Thank you for your answer, Lukasz, I have access now. Can you please tell me to which vendor' phone number are the SMS templates being sent? There are several fields in a vendor's profile (Phone, Phone 2, Phone 3, Cell Phone). It only sends SMS if the Cell Phone field is updated? We mainly have the first field (Phone) updated for vendors in our database, so I just wanted to check if we should move the phone numbers to the Cell Phone field. 

And a second question: should we use a specific phone number format - for Romania, for example +40xxxxxxxxx or 0040xxxxxxxxx - or do both work?

You are right about the Cell Phone field - the text message service uses that one only.

In my experience, anything but numbers could be skipped. Any number is actually stripped of non-numeric characters by the service provider before sending, eg. if the phone numbers in your database look like +40 2000 123-40-60, they could as well be entered as 4020001234060.

The country extension must be there. When it comes to formatting, CLX offer a Number Checker on their website, but it seems to be more of a scripting approach, so may not be useful for you.

Hi Lukasz,

Thanks for clarifying this. I still have a few questions, as I tried to test how these notifications work but didn't figure things out completely. 

1. So going to Projects/Availability Requests - Vendor Filtering Rules for Availability Requests... Is there a way to add/remove vendors manually? If I were to select Language combination related, maybe I'd like to remove some of the vendors and not send templates to all who meet the language combination criteria to that specific project, for example. Is that possible?

2. The Add and Send button doesn't seem to help, as it would be more helpful if I could first add the vendors, and filter/remove some of them and then send the templates. Is it possible to check the vendors' list before sending the notification?

3. Are the notifications sent to all the vendors meeting the criteria you choose, regardless of status? Or only the Active ones? It is not very clear to me how you can control the rules when choosing the pool of vendors you want to send an availability request. 

1. In Classic Projects, you either do things manually, or rely on those vendor filtering rules completely. You can pick vendors manually per job, on the Requests tab.
   Smart Projects, on the other hand, would give you more freedom, I think, because you could use a rule and then remove vendors you do not want to notify. I am not sure however, if you would be willing to switch to this new project management sub-system any time soon.
2. Again, Smart Projects with their Job Offers seem to fulfill that need.
3. Classic Projects would notify all vendors meeting criteria (XTRF defaults to vendors with status Active, but it may have been modified on your instance). As PM, you gain more control over the vendors chosen by the rule in the Smart Projects than it is the case in the availability requests in the Classic ones.

Cardboardfish is no longer working and CLX changed their API service URL, so the SMS no longer work in XTRF, is there any chance that you will update the service URL or add it as a field so we are able to use them again?

Hi Jorge

We'll look into that to check which solution here would be better to make the SMS notifications up and running again.

Best regards,

Marek

Today SMS is out of date. It is necessary to consider sending messages via Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram.