Plivo Integration

• Plivo API integration – It’s been a long time coming, and requested by many people, and now we have finally integrated the Plivo SMS gateway into the platform! They provide a very robust and reliable communications backbone. UltraSMSScript is now built on the 3 best and most well-known SMS/Voice gateways there is and you have the choice to choose between them!
• Kiosk Builder – We now have a kiosk builder for those who wish to build loyalty kiosks and display those in the stores. The digital loyalty kiosk is a new cutting edge tool that lets you create an easy to use digital kiosk display. A digital kiosk provides your on-site customers with a user friendly and engaging display – letting them join a mobile club, check-in to a loyalty program, and check their current status.

  The loyalty kiosk is a stand alone tool that is easy to create, deploy and can be fully customized for any business. Eliminate the need for customers to carry paper or plastic punch cards which are often lost, misplaced, or forgotten. Customers can now easily check-in to a loyalty program directly through the digital kiosk by inputting their mobile number. Our kiosk ties into our current SMS loyalty program feature, and once the kiosk is created, it will look great displayed on a 7-10 inch tablet display.

• SMS loyalty punch code notification – Currently in our SMS punch code loyalty rewards, a punch code is generated automatically on a daily basis, however the user had to log into the platform to get the new punch code in order to display this in the store for their customers to text in. We now have added a punch code “Notify” checkbox, which will give the user some options to have the punch code emailed to the email address registered in their account, any email address they input, or a mobile number they want the punch code texted to when it is generated.
• Call Forwarding – Another frequent requested feature, is call forwarding. You can now select a number assigned to your account you want the call to forward and input the forwarding number. Any calls made to that number in your account will forward to the number you input. Previously, we only had voicemail capability. It’s important to note that 2 voice credits will be deducted for each minute since the gateways charge per minute for 2 legs of the call, an inbound leg from the caller to your Twilio/Nexmo/Plivo number and an outbound leg from Twilio/Nexmo/Plivo to the number you are forwarding the call to. Each leg is billed separately to your Twilio/Nexmo/Plivo account on a per-minute basis.
• Bulk SMS sending throttle – We have added a sending throttle to the bulk SMS page, which will control the rate messages are sent. Per carrier restriction, the fastest(default setting) you can send SMS on 1 long code is 1 SMS/second. However, you can slow that down to exercise extra caution. The slowest setting will send at rate of 10 SMS per minute or 1 SMS every 6 seconds per long code.
  NOTE: Selecting slower throttles will cause the script to execute at a slower pace, and you need to be aware that there may be certain PHP timeout properties that could be exceeded if set to a low value. Keep in mind if you’re on a shared server, most web hosts will only allow these properties to be increased to a certain point since they don’t want other processes and scripts bogging down a server that is shared by others. This is why we recommend a VPS since you have more control over timeout properties such as these.
• 2 new ‘Group Types’ – In the groups module where you create your keyword and auto-reply message, we now have added a “Property (Real Estate)” group type and a “Vehicle” group type. If these group types are selected, it will show additional fields to be filled in related to property or vehicle information and when someone texts in a keyword associated with these group types, it will return this information along with the auto-reply message.
• Notify new user sign-up – Kind of in line with the previous feature, we have also added a “Notify” option in the groups module. If checked, you can enter in a number which will be notified via SMS whenever someone texts in a keyword to join a group. Clients of ours in the real estate market wanted to be notified via SMS whenever someone texted in a keyword about a specific property, however it can be used for all group types.
• Enable/disable birthday SMS wish – Currently, the birthday SMS wish can be enabled/disabled under settings at a global level, so the birthday capture message will go out for all groups after a new user joins that group. However, you may only want certain groups to have the birthday SMS wish enabled for and this will allow that down to the group level.
• Allow birthday capture to accept just date – Currently, if you have birthday SMS wishes turned on and accept birthdays when people text them back in, they must enter the text message in format “Birthday: 1970-01-23” for example, with the word “Birthday” preceding the date. However, now all that is required is the actual date in format YYYY-MM-DD. So if they just text back “1970-01-23”, it will capture that date and add it to that contact’s record.
• Create country specific credit packages – Since the gateways charge different rates for different countries, some of our clients promoting across more than 1 country needed to create different credit packages for those countries. You now can create different packages for different countries and only those country’s packages will be shown to the user depending on what country they selected when registering their account.
• Added birthday and email fields on add/edit contact form – Added 2 new fields to the add and edit contact form when manually adding or editing a contact. You can now add a birthday and email address when adding/editing a contact.
• Account log-in from admin panel – Currently, if you want to log-in to a client’s account to look around or troubleshoot anything, you have to obtain their credentials and manually log-in to their accounts. We wanted to make this easier to manage for the admin, so we now have added a log-in button next to each user in the admin panel where you can simply log-in to that user account by pressing that button.
• Added ‘release number’ feature from non-users report – Currently, you can only release(remove) numbers for a user from the users module in the admin panel. However, some of our clients requested we add that same feature directly to the “non-users” report in the admin panel to make it easier to manage. Now, you can run a report of all the non-users in the system within a given date range, and if they have numbers assigned to their accounts, you can release those numbers directly from the “non-users” report, rather than jumping back to the users module.
• MMS/unicode credits – For our clients on Twilio, we are now subtracting 2 credits for each message that is MMS type. Twilio charges more for MMS messages and many our clients wanted to deduct 2 credits for each message instead of 1 and so we have now added that in. For SMS messages containing unicode(non-GSM characters), accounts will be charged 1 credit for each 70 character segment. This is because SMS messages that include 1 or more non-GSM characters are separated by the gateway into messages of 70 characters or less. So if you have a message that contains a unicode character and is 110 characters in length, 2 credits will be deducted from the user account balance since the gateway charges for 2 messages in this case.

As you can see, this is a big release with MANY new features and enhancements that will bring even more value to our clients. Take UltraSMSScript for a test drive to see everything in action!