Multi-conversation routing strategies for RCS?
Hey everyone,
My company has a platform that communicates with customers through SMS. Our team members text a customer through a pool of numbers. The system assigns an outbound number to the customer based on the project we are communicating with them about. This way, when they text that number back, we know they are talking to us about that project, and we can route their incoming message to the right area.
If a customer is communicating with us about 2 different projects, then they'll be assigned 2 numbers from the pool so that Project A texts will use Number A, and Project B texts will use Number B.
We are looking into using RCS in certain regions where we have a customer base but SMS availability is one-way or non existent. Unfortunately, RCS senders are "global", insofar as they are basically our company name and not mapped to something like a phone number. This means we can (effectively) only have one outgoing identity, which completely defeats the multi-conversation mapping structure we have when using traditional SMS.
Is there a best practice for handling this kind of situation? That is, the ability to direct an incoming RCS message to a particular topic based on some kind of metadata other than the sender's phone number alone (since that is not enough to identify the project they are communicating about)?
I've thought about a few options, but they all have their downsides and are clunky or difficult to handle.
The last outgoing message determines the topic. We know what project an outgoing message is related to, so we can "swap" the project of incoming messages to the last project we messaged them about. Downsides: if they message us about Project B for example, then it will end up in the Project A queue (if that's what we sent them a message about earlier) and there's nothing we can do about it; if we're actively messaging them from both projects in a short period, then their responses will never end up in the right place.
After some time passes, incoming messages will ask for clarification about which project they are asking about. Once they select one, the system will route it to that project and remember their selection for a while. Downsides: clunky and probably too chatty over time; users may not see the message so it will remain undelivered until they do; users may not properly remember the correct project name.
Selected project can be switched with a command. This is kind of an extension to #1 but they can switch topics with an SMS command. Downsides: I kind of hate it and also no one is going to remember what the command is or that they can even do this. Our users tend to be generall unsophisticated.
I would appreciate any thoughts or comments about best practices. The answer may be that RCS is just never a good use case for this, in which case that is also helpful to know.
Thanks!