Does PureCloud have an SMS partner that is integrated to the platform for Customer Service? I'm thinking about the ability to provide updates to customers on the status of their open ticket or issue and report the activity through PureCloud (or externally if not available internally).

No, there is nothing now. It is in the discussion for being placed on the road map.

I am told it is definitely on the road map, they are just in the process of scoping the work.

There's not a good way for you to track progress, yet...they don't make the road map and estimated completion dates public knowledge. Eventually we'll have an enhancement request system that should be able to give some updates.

About all I can say is, ask back here toward the end of Q2 this year. They will probably have a much more accurate estimate of when it will be completed at that point. 

Any news?

I know a SMS provider that converts SMS (send and receive) to E-mail. Agent receives an e-mail with the SMS text in body. Also an agent can reply on the SMS, directly from PC.

Routing of inbound SMS and sending response from an agent is pretty much scoped. No timeline on when it might be available.

Outbound SMS (so, automated notifications and such) is for a later phase. No time soon.

@George Ganahl? - Do you have details about the routing of inbound sms? will we be able to initiate an outbound sms interaction as we do with email and phone channels today?

@George Ganahl? Any news on the SMS features or availability in premise v. PCV?

We're using a third party solution for sending SMS, we really want to use PureCloud. Hope this is coming in Q1!!!

@Katie Ritz? can you comment on this, please?

We plan to launch inbound SMS in Q1. This will allow for an end customer to initiate an SMS conversation to be routed to an agent for response back. In this initial release we will not allow for agent initiated SMS but outbound SMS capabilities including notifications and campaign related functionality are being scoped and are on the roadmap for later this year.

@Katie Ritz? Is this planned for premise, PCV, or both?

@Patrick Rada? It will be available for both, it is independent of the edges and will be a service provided by PureCloud. This means you will provision numbers for SMS through PureCloud and not directly with your telco provider whether that be PCV or another carrier. Provisioning numbers for SMS will be similar to PCV in that you will search for numbers within the PureCloud platform and then purchase them for SMS use.

@Katie Ritz? Awesome, good news. Thanks so much for sharing this with us. A few other questions:

1. For the Q1 release, is there truly no capability for agent to initiate an SMS interaction, similar to how they can initiate an email interaction? Not looking for outbound campaign functioniality, just one-off agent initiated interactions. This is a key use case for us which we shared with the product team last year. If not, when will we see this?
2. Is there support for shortcodes, does Genesys have a shared shortcode set we can utilize?

Thanks,

Jason

1. Just inbound with customer initiated contact in this first release. We are working on defining requirements for our outbound SMS offering which will provide capabilities to do campaigns and notifications and initiating contact from PureCloud. I don't have an ETA on the delivery of this feature yet. I would like to hear more about your specific use cases for an agent initiated SMS if you wouldn't mind sharing that information.
2. We will support short codes as a later enhancement to SMS or with the outbound SMS feature, not initially with this first release. At this time we don't have plans to support shared short codes.