I’m definitely in support of this feature. We often get requests from end users asking us to send them a quick text, but we have internal policies that prevent us from communicating through personal cell phones. Because of that, we simply do not have a way to text them today. Having SMS built into the platform would solve that immediately while keeping communication centralized and compliant.

This would also be a big help for approvals. Being able to text a primary contact for approval would speed things up significantly. Right now, since there is no mobile app and our emails are not always whitelisted, approval emails sometimes get filtered as spam or missed entirely.

Another major benefit would be technician alerts. Instead of relying only on Teams notifications, SMS could be used for reminders about upcoming tickets or to notify a technician when a ticket has been updated.

It would also be extremely useful for on-call scenarios. If a priority one ticket hits the board after hours, sending a text to the on-call technician would ensure they are alerted immediately and reduce response time.

yes!!!! right now we have some crazy mashup of twilio --- > high level --> Zapier --> Autotask

we'd like this too

whats the timing?

Twilio being integrated with Thread might bridge the sms and not be 1 platform specific

Adding some context to this, SMS is a great idea but difficult in practice. Using it for one-way communication, such as temporary passwords, is better than for two-way support.

Because SMS is not threaded now, we found that customers would post updates on unrelated tickets. For example, any user can only have one SMS-type ticket open at a time; if the ticket is open, anything the user sends will be posted on that ticket. So, if you are working on a monitor issue via SMS and the same user sends in an SMS request for an emergency. At the same time, the original ticket is still open; the content for the emergency would be added to open a monitor issue ticket. This can lead to delays in support.

In addition, we found that users would use the reply-by-text feature for our phone calls if they could not answer at that time. To break this down, the tech calls the user; the user cannot respond; the user selects the message button (iPhone) and selects a standard response such as "Can I call you later?". This now causes your team extra work merging tickets for uninformative responses.

The last issue is that the SMS number must be your primary support phone number; you cannot give a client two numbers to use. There are creative ways around this, such as forwarding the SMS number to your main line, but it's clumsy. The best implementation would be to use a service like Twilio; let us use our API keys to tie our Twilio account into Thread. This would allow us to select and use any numbers we have in Twilio.