External Interaction Campaign

Overview

Sometimes the response intended to the mobile user cannot be configured statically and needs to be a query into an enterprise system or website.

This is a common situation for businesses that already operate a comprehensive website where users can access the necessary information in real-time. In this case the business will naturally want to extend the access to the same information through a text-messaging interface.

The External Interaction Campaign is a very simple campaign that receives the user's MO and calls a third party Web Service to retrieve the desired information and goes back to the user with the MT message.

The Call

The External Interaction Campaign will always deliver (as a web parameter) the following information:

  1. mobile: The user's mobile number.
  2. mo: The user's MO message.
  3. ts: The MO origination timestamp in milliseconds
  4. shortcode: The shortcode where the MO were received.

For example: “Campaign manager parameters on blue / Configured URL on brown”

http://third.party.url?mobile=13057763416&mo=Hello&ts=1456847686174&shortcode=67213

http://third.party.url/?fixedparam1=fixedvalue1&fixedparam2=fixedvalue2&mobile=13057763416&mo=Hello&ts=1456847686174&shortcode=67213

The Response

The third party web service must respond with a XML message as follows: 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 
<message> 
    <text></text> 
</message>
Tag Description
<text> The response text

Example 1: A valid XML response with static text: 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 
<message> 
  <text>This is a simple static message</text> 
</message>

Sample Use Case

Airlines that want to provide on-demand flight status information to their customers is a prime use case of this feature. User can simply text in the flight number and will receive the latest flight status information as a response.

For this case the Web Service call will look like: 

http://www.airline.com/textservice/mobile=18131234567&mo=Flight%20Status&ts=1456847686174&shortcode=67213

And the response: 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<message>
  <text>Airline name flight number YLL3212 is on time and is expected to land at 12:00 today.</text>
</message>

Reporting

Standard reports for keyword linked to Web Service type campaigns are similar to the simpler keyword campaign: