SMS is more commonly been used in service industry as a channel to communicate with the customers. A simple business use case would be the business wants to send a confirmation to the customer for the service that customer has requested by SMS. Ex: Send a confirmation SMS to the customer for an appointment the service technician is due on a particular date and time.
In this blog I am demonstrating how easy it is to connect SAP C4C with an external SMS provider and use the SMS channel in service ticket to send SMS to the customers. The SMS can be sent at the back of the service ticket creation via a work flow or the agent can send the sms manually. To be precised I will concentrate on using SMS channel with in the service ticket and manually send the SMS.
The configuration steps:
- Enable the SMS Channel
- Configure a MASH up web service
- Configure a SMS channel
1. Enable the SMS channel :
Under
Business Configuration Edit Project Scope Questions , select
Sales Account and Activity Management and enable
Record Messaging Activity
2. Configuring the Mash up web service: the web service should be a rest web service.
Under Administrator=>Mashup web service
Click on New and select Rest web service
Fill in the required fields like Service name , Description.
Note: Keep a note of the service as this would be used in next step
The service information section should be configured as below
Authentication type: It depends on the authentication method that your service provider supports, In our case we had basic (with userid and pwd)
Service protocol : Select as XML
Http method: According to the documentation of SAP, it only supports Post method, May be in future Get method may also be supported.
Content type: This is bit tricky , according to the standard documentation it should be XML Body but we need to provide the sms rest URL details for both the content type and its because the SAP Supports only content type as
text/plain; charset=utf-8
3
. Configure a SMS channel
The second step to create an SMS channel, This step is mandatory for sending the SMS from the service ticket as the channel is mandatory.
To configure: Under Administrator =>Service And Social and click on the Messaging service link under Communication channel
Create a new Messaging service, here you assign the Mashup service Id , Created in step two.
Here is the
link for SAP Documentation