Connect C4C with SMS provider in three simple steps

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:

1. Enable the SMS Channel
2. Configure a MASH up web service
3. 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