Text Message Templates

With the increasing importance of phones in daily life, you may find that sending text messages to clients and other contacts offers a more effective means of communication and faster response rate than email or certainly standard mail, and a more efficient option than a phone call. Text message templates can help standardize and simplify the process of writing and sending out text messages. Texts that you frequently send can be saved as templates, and you can include Merge Codes to have SmartAdvocate automatically fill in case-specific information. The Text Message Templates administrative page is where text message templates are created and managed. All of your text message templates are listed in a table, with columns for the name of the template and the content of the text message. There is also a column containing a right-click icon in each row. Clicking the icon, or right-clicking anywhere in the row, brings up the options Edit and Delete. Delete lets you delete the template (there will be a confirmation message first to avoid accidental deletion) and Edit brings up the editing panel. To the upper left of the table is the Add Template button, which brings up a blank editing panel for creating a new email template.
The add/edit form contains text input fields for the template name and content of the text message. There is also a button labeled Insert Merge Code. Clicking this button brings up a table containing an abridged list of merge codes suitable for use in a text message. Before opening the table of merge codes, set your text editing cursor to the location in the text message where you would like to include a merge code. Then open the table, find your desired merge code, click the code, then click Insert to insert it at that point in the text. Click Close to close the table. Be cautious about the length of the message, however; the permissible length of text messages depends upon the text message provider used by your firm. Limits may range from as few as 160 characters to up to 5,000 characters. Some merge codes may be replaced with large amounts of text, bringing a message above the character limit. The template edit form indicates the number of available characters remaining, depending on the text message provider used, but this will not include the information that replaces the merge codes in the message.
Text message templates are used in the Mass Texting screen and when Sending SMS Text Messages.