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Elena Fedianova

Bitrix24 and Africa’s Talking integration

We have written earlier about integrations of Bitrix24 with M-Pesa and Transunion. At present INTERVOLGARU has completed several integrations for AfrikaLoan company. The article is about the integration with Africa’s Talking SMS-service (https://africastalking.com/).

The task

AfrikaLoan company needed to send text messages (SMS) to their customers. The tasks were to send text messages:

  1. Automatically via Bitrix24 workflow.

  2. Manually via Bitrix24 service.

  3. Via sms distribution lists.

Integration

The issue was to convert phone number into the desired Africa’s Talking format without hyphens, parenthesis, spaces, plus signs. The problem is that local people use two forms of the phone numbers for the calls: full with the code of the country (254) and short with or without null instead the country code. We had to change the phone number format according to Africa’s Talking requirements.

The proper decision was:

  1. Delete zero at the beginning if it exists.

  2. Add the country code at the beginning of the number. For example, the number 012345678 will be converted to 25412345678.

  3. If the number is faulty (too long or short, has wrong signs) sms will not be delivered.

Automated sms sending

Sms is sent automatically by Bitrix24 via internal AfrikaLoan rules in the cases of:

  • loan confirmation,

  • payment notification,

  • payment delay notification,

  • payment confirmation,

  • end of the loan notification.

The sms sending is processed via Bitrix24 workflow that makes routine operations easy, accurate and time-saving.  

Manual sms sending

The interface for manual sms sending is presented below.

SMS text messages are sent manually unless they were sent automatically to verify a phone number, to sign an agreement (e.g. in case of wrong number).

Sms sending via distribution list

To send SMS to a group of customers Bitrix24 user needs to create a distribution list in Excel CSV format as shown below,



then download the file to the Bitrix24 and click the “Send” button.



The Bitrix24 user can work with sms lists via “Sms dispatch” tool. After the sms sending the dispatch tool displays the result of sending. As we see below sms to a wrong number has not been delivered.


The sms sending report at Bitrix24


Sms distribution list

Result

The integration of Bitrix24 with sms-service Africa’s Talking:

  • control the process of the customer notification ensured,

  • the AfrikaLoan service simplified and made more convenient for the customers,

  • the time wasting for the micro loan deals supporting significantly minimized.

Does your business face the same issues? Just call INTERVOLGARU.



  • 10.06.2019