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Understanding and choosing SMS Brokers

An SMS broker is a company that routes SMS messages to cell phone providers and collects SMS messages from cell phones. To do this, SMS brokers maintain hardware at the premises of cell phone providers, called Short Message Service Centers (SMS-Cs).

CIC comes with a choice of certified CIC brokers that provide all the long and short codes necessary to send and receive SMS messages. Genesys already supports the SMS brokers listed in the Broker Configuration dialog box in Interaction Administrator. These listed brokers have unique characteristics and are the best in the SMS marketplace in both price and functionality.

You can add other brokers, but you need to perform broker integration work for each new broker. To add a broker, the administrator creates an XML document defining how CIC exchanges data with the broker. For help, call the Genesys Professional Services Organization. Otherwise just select an SMS broker listed in CIC.

The CIC server connects to the selected SMS Broker, sending messages and receiving messages and status reports. When selecting an SMS broker for your Use Case consider these broker functions:

  • Does the broker cover all the geographic areas that you need? This factor is sometimes important if your operations are international.

  • Does the broker support "transaction atomicity" so that you can (if needed) track each message individually?

  • Does the broker support alphanumeric source addresses that contain characters as well as digits?

  • Does the broker support delivery receipts?

  • Are delivery receipts sent to the device?

  • Does the broker support multiple languages?

  • Does the broker allow multiple recipients in a single request?

  • Does the broker authenticate messages, based on IP address or other factors?

  • Does the broker provide shared short codes or Free-To-End-User short codes?

  • Does the broker provide special long codes or 800 number long codes?

The SMS world is a federally-regulated communication channel and as such SMS can be complicated and difficult to navigate. Check with Genesys or our partners to make sure that your customer's Use Case requires and uses the proper type of long code or short code. There are many variations of long and short codes. But, with the help of Genesys, you can make sure that your SMS requirements are met. We can also provide SMS configuration help and updates to SMS as they become available.