SMS Overview

Connecting an SMS channel to chat with customers over SMS.

Short Messaging Service (SMS) is a text-based way of communicating that has been around for a decade or more. If you would like to use the IS-Messenger platform for SMS messaging, you will need to create an account with one of our partners.

Once you have created an account and provisioned a phone number, you may connect it to the IS-Messenger platform and interact with your contacts through SMS messages just like any other channel.

Supporting Partners

If you wish to connect SMS to the IS-Messenger platform, please consider the following partners:

• Twilio

• MessageBird

• Vonage

If you are interested in using a partner that is not listed here, please request a new channel integration on the IS-Messenger Feature Request board!

Channel Capabilities

The channel capabilities of SMS supporting partners are listed below:

• Message Status Availability

• Supported File Types

• Metadata Received by Channel

• Broadcasts

• Rate Limits

Message Status Availability

The message status availability for different SMS channels is shown in the table below:

SMS Channel	Sent	Delivered	Read	Failed
Twilio	✅	✅	❌	✅
MessageBird	✅	✅	❌	✅
Vonage	✅	✅	❌	✅

Supported File Types

The file types supported by different SMS channels and the maximum file size for each file type are shown in the table below:

SMS Channel	Image Size Limit (MBs)	Audio Size Limit (MBs)	Video Size Limit (MBs)
Twilio	5	0.5	0.5
MessageBird	1	1	1
Vonage	2	-	-

Metadata Received by Channel

Different channels provide different sets of Contact's metadata to the IS-Messenger platform. The list of Contact's data you’ll be able to obtain from different SMS channels is shown in the table below:

SMS Channel	Metadata Received by Channel
Twilio	Phone number, City, State, Postal code, Country
MessageBird	Phone number
Vonage	Phone number

Broadcasts

IS-Messenger’s supporting SMS partner channels have no restrictions on the content or number of messages businesses can send in a broadcast. Broadcast messages will be charged at the usual per-message rate.

- Learn more about how to send a broadcast here. - Learn how to deal with failed broadcast messages here.

Rate Limits

A rate limit is the number of API calls an app or user can make within a given time period defined by the channel. Learn more about the rate limits of SMS channels below:

• Twilio

• MessageBird

• Vonage