Aerialink Conversations for Service Providers

Introduction

The White Label messaging platform enables you, as Service Provider, to start a Software-as-a-Service business under your own brand and provide your customers conversational-style messaging software. It’s a turnkey solution that offers instant setup and configuration of customer accounts and allows your customers’ existing phone numbers to be text-enabled. White Label seamlessly interfaces with the Aerialink Gateway, connecting your customers to mobile end-users around the world. The subscription-based SaaS can be managed in Aerialink’s private cloud, your own private cloud or your customer’s own registered domain.

In this guide you will receive step-by-step instructions and learn concepts key for service provider setup of the application. To learn more about what the application is and how to perform functions as an agent, see our For Agents guide. For standard admin instructions (like the ones your customers will need), check out For Admins

Please refer to the 8xx Reach tab on our Long Code Reach List for supported carriers on this route.

Step 1

To get started with White Label, Convey will provision your own account so that you as the Service Provider can text with your customers. This setup also lays the framework for you to add sub-accounts and customers. You can choose a custom domain address or utilize a default conversations domain address with your company name.

Step 2

Next, you as the Service Provider can brand your account using the Theme feature to add logos and select a color scheme. This “Owner Theme” can also be used for any of the companies - your customers’ sub-accounts - set up under your account, or they can each have their own theme.

Step 3

White Label enables Service Provider-level accounts to create and manage multiple “companies” within the application, and select the functionality each company will receive. Each company is a self-contained instance of the application that can be modified to suit your needs as a service provider, and is used by your customers. Although you will attribute administrative accounts within each company which will give those users admin control over that specific company, they will not be able to access the service provider account.

The Service Provider will set up their customer’s company account by initiating a request to Convey via our Help Desk. Once the account is provisioned in the Aerialink Platform, the Service Provider can add the company.

Service providers can also manage a company’s agents, numbers and groups.

Get Started

The dashboard of a service provider looks similar to any other account with one exception - access to the Service Provider Menu.

To access the service provider menu:

1. Log into the application
2. Click the dropdown for your company, located in the upper right-hand corner of the page.
3. Select “Service Provider Menu.”

Optional Features

Conversations for Service Providers offers many optional features you can use to customize your Conversations experience for you and your users, such as:

• Email forwarding by user
• TXT relay by user (forwards messages to the native messaging app on an agent’s mobile device)
• Account-wide MMS enabling
• Number-specific MMS enabling (allow inbound and/or outbound)
• Message concatenation enabling
• Private groups
• Agent-Number lock (allows agents to send messages only from numbers assigned to them)
• Country code requirement disabling (+1 will no longer be required when setting contact number for end-users)
• Dealer Intelligence Repair Order Status*

*Available to auto dealers with Dealer Intelligence on their accounts

Brand The Application

As a White Label user, you can alter two themes - the Service Provider theme and the Company theme. Setting the Service Provider theme allows you to fix the application’s color scheme, your Service Provider logo, the application logo and application name for all company accounts set up under your Service Provider account. Then, any Company-level theme beneath your Service Provider account can alter the theme somewhat by changing the color scheme or the company/application logo.

By default, a Service Provider’s theme carries over to each of their sub-accounts/companies. Each individual company has the ability to modify this default theme. The company may change the theme colors, and replace the Service Provider’s Application logo with their own logo. However, the Company cannot change or replace the Service Provider’s Logo.

To alter and customize your theme:

1. From Settings, click “Theme” under the “APPLICATION” subsection on the left-hand sidebar.
2. Select the turquoise “EDIT THEME” button at the top of the page.

Company Logo

Note that the tip text recommends a logo that is at least 350 pixels wide with a transparent background. However, be aware that transparency is only supported via GIF and PNG image types, so be sure to save your image as one of those two formats and that transparency is enabled upon saving. Otherwise, the image uploaded will display a white background.

Add New Company

Adding a new company requires the configuration of three components:

• “New Company” details.
• At least one number associated with the company.
• At least one agent in the “admin” group.
• A new connection or subaccount under your Aerialink Platform Portal account. (See Account Structure below for details.)

You can access your Companies by clicking either on “Companies” under “COMPANIES” in the left-hand nav, or by clicking the “Companies” link on the Service Provider Overview page.

1. Click the “Service Provider” link in the dropdown menu in the upper right corner.
2. Access “Companies”
3. Click
4. Retrieve the API credentials from Aerialink Platform associated with your connection.
   
   
5. Enter the desired settings for the company.
   
6. Click when finished.

Account Structure

The proper structure of a Service Provider’s Platform Portal account is critical for the delivery of customer-level transaction reporting and invoicing. Please review the Account Structure options with your CSM.

In summary, a parent-subaccount structure allows us to prepare your invoice broken down by customer. If you don’t need that level of invoicing (e.g. you have a system external to Aerialink which segments transactions by customer) then we would structure your Platform Portal account with a unique connection for each of your customers instead of using subaccounts. Whichever format you utilize, both provide segmentation for better reporting capabilities and will align to your Conversations subaccounts for the addition of new numbers.

You can add a connection through the Connections API, or simply contact our Help Desk Portal and our team will set your new connection or subaccount up for you. If you need separate invoicing for the new Company, request a subaccount; if you don’t, request a new connection with a Conversations endpoint. As a best practice:

1. Please provide the team the same name for the new connection or subaccount that you intend to use for the new Company in Conversations (e.g. specify in your support request to name it “ABC Company.”)
2. Specify the number(s) that will be associated with the new Company so that they can be added to the connection or subaccount.

Once this has been set up, you will use the API credentials for the connection/subaccount to link the Company on Conversations to your Platform Portal account and send traffic.

Individual View

A company’s account configuration may be set to this view on the Company Profile page. Enabling Individual View removes some features for a simplified user experience designed for a single user. Some of the changes are outlined below.

Message Center

Because the Message Center will now be used by only one person:

• “Owner” button is removed, thereby disabling “Transfer” and “Claim Ownership.”
• “Just Mine,” “My Groups” and “Unassigned” Views are removed

Settings

Because this configuration allows for only one agent and one number:

• “Company Profile” is disabled
• “Agents” is disabled
• “Business Numbers” is disabled
• “Auto-Assign by Number” is disabled
• “Groups” is disabled
• Quick Replies can no longer be “shared.”

Concatenated Messages

A company’s account configuration may be set to allow concatenated messages which removes the 160 character limitation. If concatenated messages are enabled, an agent may include up to 459 characters/spaces in a single message send. This is sent as multiple messages.

Important Note: Unlike the AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile networks which support concatenation - automatically splitting their messages and then sewing them back together in order - the Sprint network lacks this support. Therefore, messages in excess of 160 characters may arrive at Sprint destination handsets out of order. Because of this, the standard 160-character limit is recommended.

Company Profile Settings

Manage MMS Messages

Delivery of MMS (Multimedia Messages) to U.S. and Canadian destinations is supported on 8XX and standard business numbers, as well as on U.S. short codes specifically certified for MMS delivery. Additional details regarding file type and size can be found here, but note that images are resized by the application for improved delivery to carriers.

A Service Provider account may enable a sub-account with MMS. Note that once the account is MMS-enabled, each individual number must also be MMS-enabled. In other words, MMS is enabled at both the connection and the number level.

MMS Storage

Inbound MMS media is kept for forty-five (45) days after which the messages expire and are removed from our system. Conversations will replace the expired MMS web link with a default media icon in the conversation thread. The media is stored in the cloud before sending the event to Conversations which provides a publicly accessible web link to the media.

MMS Storage Optional Feature

Storage and retention may be controlled by a Service Provider with a configurable storage folder in the cloud. Use your own public Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3) cloud storage for the storage of inbound MMS. Amazon S3 buckets, which are similar to file folders, store objects, which consist of data and its descriptive metadata. To set up the storage and retention of MMS on your side:

1. Create a public bucket in AWS S3.
2. Contact our Help Desk Portal with the bucket name. If you use a custom domain for Conversations and want the MMS URL to use that domain, specify that in your support request. For custom domain when receiving MMS, note that only http protocol is supported.
3. Once you receive the incident number (it will be in the subject line of the email), call your Account Director or our support number to provide your S3 key & secret and reference the incident number.
4. Allow up to fourteen business days for setup of the storage configuration.

MMS Sensitive Data

Enforce a strict policy with your clients to not request sensitive data from their customers. MMS weblinks are publicly accessible and downloadable. Financial details such as images of credit cards or account numbers, private data such as drivers license, social security, or sensitive information such a medical content could be at risk of public access if sent as MMS.

Manage Company Agents

Adding Agents

To add an agent a Company you’ve created:

1. Select the Company to which you wish to add the agent.
   
2. Once inside the Company, click “NEW AGENT FOR COMPANY.”
3. Ensure that the desired company is selected in the “Company” field, then fill out the information for the agent.
4. When finished, click “ADD AGENT.”

Restricting Agents

Conversations allows an SP to programmatically limit the number of agents that may be added to an account. This can be aligned with the subscription plans you offer to customers. Use it to free up SP admin tasks by allowing a Company Admin to add and disable agent users within these limits.

This resource feature is also used to help manage system usage. When the “Limit Number of Agents” configuration is left blank, no limit is applied. However, to avoid application latency, it is recommended to limit accounts to twenty (20) agents, and ten (10) concurrent users. Application latency measures the delay between an action and a response. Over the Internet, individual delays at the application can accumulate, as each element in the chain of communication is linked to others. Application performance is tied to usage in general, hence, concurrent users and message activity both impact the number of requests to the application. For example, you could have thirty agents on an account but only five concurrent agents at any one time. For this reason, the configuration does allow some latitude for number of agents.

To restrict the number of agents that can be added to a Company:

1. Access your Service Provider menu.
2. Where the max number of agents is left blank by default, insert the number you would like the cap to be. Leaving it blank allows it to remain uncapped.
3. Save.

Enable Admin Permissions

Enabling Company Admin permissions allows agents to add users, edit company profile settings and add new business numbers.

To enable admin permissions on an existing agent:

1. Navigate to your Service Provider menu via the dropdown menu in the upper-right corner (under your profile name).
2. Click “Agents,” and filter by company.
3. Find the existing agent you would like to award administrative permissions and check the “Admin” box.
4. Save this change.

Keep in mind, these instructions are for existing agents. You must first create the agent profile, then you can promote them to the Admin level.

Enable Private Agent Conversations

SP Admins can configure a Company account to restrict agents so they can only see conversations which are either within their own groups, or even their own individual queue. A minimum of two agents must be added to the account to attribute Private Conversations settings.

1. Select “Companies” through the Service Provider menu.
2. Choose the desired Company.
3. Click the “edit” button which takes you to the Company Profile configuration page.
4. Under the “Privacy” section, check the box labeled, “Limit seeing individually owned conversations to group members.”
5. If the Company Admin needs a shared view for visibility to all conversations, check the “Admins can view all conversations” box.
6. Click “Update Company” to save.
7. Next, navigate to “Agent Groups” through the Service Provider menu.
8. Click “New Group.”
9. Select the desired Company for the group.
10. Name the Group, “Private System - Do not transfer.” This label should help to prevent agents from transferring conversations into this group by mistake.*
11. Finally, in the “Private” dropdown menu, select “Yes.”
12. Save the configuration.

* Note: If the Company Profile is configured with “Individual View” enabled, the “Transfer a Conversation” feature is not exposed and therefore not an option.

Inbound conversations initiated by customers which arrive as “Unassigned” will be visible to all agents. To avoid this, set up auto-assign rules.

Delegate Numbers & Groups

In order for your customer’s account to work, you must add at least one text-enabled number.

A single company may have add multiple numbers. A number may be set to auto-assign to a specific agent or group.

Numbers

1. From the desired Company’s page, click “NEW NUMBER FOR COMPANY.”
2. In the “Name” field, enter a name unique to the code you are adding. (optional)
3. In the “Number” field, enter an Aerialink long-code, TEXT number, or SMS-enabled Toll-Free Number you wish to associate with the specific Company’s account.
4. Select the Company.
5. Choose which agent(s) or group(s) (if any) you would like to receive the number’s messages automatically.
6. Select “SAVE NUMBER” when finished.

Bear in mind that Numbers can also be viewed on the account level for you as a Service Provider. If you select “Numbers” under “APPLICATION” on the left-hand side, you can add a new number without going through the individual Company’s page - this is convenient if you are adding multiple numbers to multiple Companies simultaneously.

Manage Groups

The “Admin” group is created by default when a Company is created. To add additional groups:

1. Click “Groups” under the Application section of Settings.
2. If no Groups exist, click “New Group.”
3. Choose the Company the group will exist within. This will also determine which agents can be a part of the Group, as only agents within that same Company will have access to that Group.
4. Enter the Internal Name the application will use for the Group.
5. Enter the Nice Name you wish your agents to see.

Set Group Privacy

Set the group configuration of “Private” to “Yes” to limit visibility of the conversations within that group to members of the group only.

Manage Opt-ins & Opt-outs

For more details about opt-ins and opt-outs, see the Agents User Guide.

Gateway-Level Settings

There are some additional options for Service Providers which can and may be enabled on the application account:

• By default, the gateway’s “Enforce-Opt Out” blocking agent is disabled to allow application-level logic to manage opt-out.
• Service Providers can set up a gateway-level, auto opt-out confirmation message in the platform portal via the Hosted Auto Replies feature (e.g. “You have opted out and will receive no more messages”). This is not a requirement, but an optional courtesy message to provide confirmation to a user that the opt-out did in fact get logged.
• A single gateway-level message can be applied across connections and numbers, or the message can be customized by connection and number.

Disable or Delete Elements

SP Admins have ownership of provisioning and deprovisioning Conversations accounts and assets. To provision a company account, please refer to the Add New Company instructions.

To deprovision a company account, there is a three-or-four-step disabling process depending on the number type. Two of the steps are handled in Conversations while one step is handled in the 10DLC portal in the event that any of the business numbers are ten-digit long code numbers. The fourth and final step is a support request for deprovisioning at the Aerialink Platform account level which stores your master set of numbers.

Conversations for SP accounts have a “per-entity” fee which is billed in arrears. The deprovisioned account will be billed for the current month in the coming invoice, and removed from subsequent invoices. 

Deprovision a Company Account

Step 1: Disable Account Assets

1. In Conversations, use the “Switch To” function from the SP menu to log into the Company account using an Admin profile.
2. Navigate to the Business Numbers list page.
3. Click the “disable” toggle switch to the disabled position for each number.*
4. Navigate to the Agents list page.
5. Click the “disable” toggle switch to the disabled position for each agent.*

* If there are too many assets to manually disable, submit a request to our Help Desk Portal for our team to do this for you from the backend.

Step 2: Disable Conversations Account

1. From the SP Admin page, navigate to the Companies page.
2. Click the “Edit” button next to the account to be disabled.
3. Check the box labeled, “Is Completely Disabled.”
4. Click the “Update Company” button to save the settings.

Step 3: Deactivate the 10DLC Campaign (for Long Codes only)

If any of the Conversations Account’s Business Numbers are ten-digit long codes, log into the 10DLC registration portal to deactivate the campaign.

Step 4: Submit a Support Request

1. To remove numbers from your core Aerialink account altogether, submit a request to our Help Desk Portal with the numbers you wish to remove. Note that you are not required to remove all numbers if you wish to use them in the future. If the numbers remain in your core account, you can use the Platform Portal to reassign them to another connection.
2. In your support request, be sure to indicate any dedicated connections associated with the relevant Conversations account you wish to have removed from your core account, as well.

Delete Messages

In order to maintain data integrity for audit purposes, messages and conversations cannot be deleted through the application. To request messages to be deleted as an exception case, please contact our Help Desk Portal with the specific message’s credentials and your request and reason for deletion. An example of an appropriate exception case would be a mobile end user sending in Personal Identifiable Information (PII) such as a credit card or driver’s license number. Because there should be no use case in which an agent requests this information of an end-user, it would be an appropriate exception case to request that this information be deleted.

All exception case requests are reviewed on an as-needed basis.

Removing Messages Containing Prohibited Content

Under special circumstances, we permit the purge of a specific message or conversation in the event that it contains prohibited content, such as PII (e.g. driver’s license number, social security number, credit card SMS or MMS, PHI (Protected Health Information)) or any content falling under the category of SHAFT (Sex, Hate, Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco).

To remove content falling under the above parameters, submit a support request to our Help Desk Portal and provide the conversation ID and account/company name and date of messages.

Note: inbound MMS can be stored in a secure AWS S3 storage folder for data control and retention.

Prohibited Use Cases

Crisis and Emergency Communications

Crisis and/or emergency text messages are not supported as a use case via Aerialink’s Conversations application as it is architected primarily for one-to-one text chats. These chats take delivery precedence over other delivery functions to support an interactive, real-time-like experience for end-users.

Because 1:1 communications are prioritized, other delivery functions may experience message delivery delays during high 1:1 usage times. Non-conversational delivery functions include the Distribution Lists feature (both “send now” and “scheduled”), the forwarding of a message to an agent’s email address, and text-based auto-replies (time-based auto-replies are not impacted). These functions will wait in line to allow conversational messages through first. In the telecommunications industry, this is referred to as “traffic shaping” by queue management systems and is a common practice for message delivery, used frequently by carriers to prioritize chats over bulk message sending (among other things).

The Convey Aerialink SMS API can be used to connect to an external mass communications tool. Please refer to our emergency use case article for more details.

Other Prohibited Use Cases

Please refer to this article for prohibited text messaging use cases.