Create an Icon for sending texts
Hi Guys, I am looking to do the following. Our new SaaS is used by accountants and financial advisors who in turn have their own customers. When a customer of one of my clients has a lead for their accountant or advisor I’d like to make it as simple as possible to send a text to the firm. Basically a one click text.
I’d like to be able to supply my clients a text icon for their customers’ phone home screen that when clicked on opens with my clients phone number and a message (Hey, I have someone you can help).
I’ve looked at Apple Workflow and also Launch Center Pro. They work fine for a one-off but would be too kluge for an accountant or advisor to set up, let alone one of their customers.
Ideally I’d like to be able to manage this on our end; create the link, add the message and phone number ourselves and then send the link or whatever to the accountant or advisor. She could share (email, text, etc.) it with her customers who then would have it on their phone home screen and could do the “one click” with their lead. Without getting to deep into how we make the sausage the text comes through an API into our db.
I’m more than happy to update IH on our progress and how this is working. Thoughts or ideas on solving this? Kevin
Thanks guys, we found a short-term solution using ZipWhip. They allow us to create a link-to-text button that we can put on a page and have our clients' customers add as a shortcut on their phone.
It's a tap/click/send option with the receivers phone number (Twilio) and message already embedded. Kevin
You can add button to a phone's home screen based on a URL by selecting "add to homescreen" in the browser. So make a webpage that has what you need, tell your client to tell their client to open it in their phone's browser, then go to the browser menu and click "add to homescreen". They'll have a button to push.
You should be able to activate the phone's dialer that way too https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/native-hardware/click-to-call/
If you want something to display on the home screen of your customers phone, it has to be an App (although I think you can add bookmarks if it's Android). Obviously building an app is a pretty big deal, but you could look in to a PWA (https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/). It's essentially an app that runs in a mobile browser, but with the added benefit that it can be added to the homescreen (on both iOS and Android).
For this, there are API's out there, such as Nexmo and Twilio, which let you send SMS via an API.
Then, you could set up a little website that lets people send a predefined sms message via Twilio.