SMS Support Agent
Answers every inbound text in one short SMS, straight from your playbook, and hands the thread to a named person the moment it stops being a question you already answered.
Texting is the fastest support channel you can offer and the easiest one to do badly: every segment costs money, people write in shorthand, and a five part reply gets ignored. This agent reads the text, answers from the playbook you write, and sends one message under 300 characters back to the same number. Anything it cannot settle in two replies goes to the person you name, so customers get a fast answer and your team only sees the threads that need a human.
## What people use it for
- **Where is my order texts** - The most common inbound text is a status question with an order number in it. The agent answers it from your playbook in the seconds after it lands, rather than at the bottom of a shared inbox.
- **After hours cover** - Texts arrive at 11pm and on Sundays. Questions the playbook covers get answered immediately, and everything else gets a straight line saying a person has it, so nobody stares at a silent thread until Monday.
- **Appointment and delivery changes** - Clinics, salons and delivery teams get the same three asks all day: move it, cancel it, confirm it. The agent handles the ones your playbook allows and passes the rest on, with the customer told which is happening.
- **Keep the phone bill small** - Brevity is written into the instructions: one message, under 300 characters, no signature and no link unless your playbook has one. A single segment reply is both the cheapest and the one people actually read.
## Before you fork
**What do I need to connect before this works?**
A Twilio account with an SMS capable number pointed at this workflow for inbound messages. Your playbook and the person who takes over go in as variables during setup. There is nothing for customers to install, and the phone your team already uses does not change.
**What does it cost to run?**
One short agent run per inbound text, plus whatever Twilio bills you per message segment, which is charged by them and not by us. Keeping replies under 300 characters keeps most answers to a single segment. A line taking 200 texts a day is 200 small runs a day.
**How do I stop it saying the wrong thing to a customer?**
It answers only from the playbook you write, and when the answer is not in there it says so and hands the thread over instead of improvising. It sends no links unless your playbook contains them, stops after two replies to the same person, and hands over immediately on money, account access or anger. You can rehearse it on the staged texts before pointing a real number at it.
