Setting up a text alert system for IT and hardware monitoring doesn’t have to be hard. We provide comprehensive tutorials for every feature and are always ready to answer your frequently asked questions.
How can I automate emergency text alerts with TextMagic?
We mentioned that TextMagic’s API can integrate with other software. You can configure TextMagic to send automatic SMS updates to your staff whenever an abnormality occurs. Directly track changes to your servers or hardware and instruct TextMagic to forward abnormalities via text message.
Your team can filter and interpret these messages, re-word them in layman’s terms, or even ignore them if they are minor. IT monitoring text alerts can also be sent manually to hundreds of customers or automated with Zapier:
For email notifications configure the Trigger as “New email” and the action as “Send message”.
For text notifications, configure the trigger as “New incoming message” (TextMagic) and the action as “Send message” (TextMagic).
Follow all the steps required by Zapier to generate an SMS template for emergency alerts and their distribution to relevant contacts.
What is the best way to announce scheduled network maintenance?
Every software company has to take its service offline temporarily, in order to perform upgrades or maintenance. The way that you communicate these events to your customers is fundamental to the success of your business. Here are a few recommendations:
Give users at least a few days’ notice. Schedule recurring text alerts several times before the maintenance and include short links to a detailed blog post, so that they know what to expect (check out our SMS templates section for ideas). You should also communicate the upcoming downtime on other channels, such as social media or email.
Follow-up via SMS as soon as your software is back online. When it comes to scheduled downtimes, it’s better to be pessimistic with your estimations.
Let users know how to contact you during the maintenance.
Also, let them know WHY the downtime is essential; WHO will be affected; WHEN it will occur and HOW long it will take; and WHAT is going to happen after it is finished.
What is the best way to automate SMS customer support?
We recommend purchasing a dedicated number for customer support and configuring auto-responders for common inquiries (e.g., “server down”, “outage,” etc.):
Step #1: Analyze the keywords used in most customer support requests.
Step #2: Log in to your TextMagic account or sign up for a free 30-day trial. Navigate to Services -> Automation Rules.
Step #4: Create a new rule (e.g., “server maintenance”) and add “maintenance” in the keyword field. Click “Continue.” Every text containing this keyword will trigger an automatic response.
Step #5: Select your auto-response type. In this situation, we would choose “text message” and write down the information we want to share. A great idea would be to link back to a blog-post or server-status page wich contains real-time updates.
Step #6: For complex customer inquiries you can also set-up voice call forwarding.
