ViaUpdated a year ago

Via is a professional Mobile Commerce platform for eCommerce businesses. It enables businesses to send personalized messages to their customers for increased revenue and customer satisfaction.

How it works

With the Via-Gorgias integration, your support staff can now receive questions from your customers and respond all through SMS. This decreases response time dramatically and allows the customer to not have to worry about keeping a specific support chat open or active.

This integration is specific to Via version 2.0. When the integration is configured and enabled, all inbound messages from eCommerce customers (excluding some common trigger responses like “Stop”, and “Y” or “Yes” to confirm opt-in) will be routed into the Gorgias platform and users of that platform will be able to type and send responses which will flow through Via and out to the end consumer as a text message coming from the same number they originally messaged.

An important thing to note as to how this integration works is that the conversation between a user in Gorgias and a customer using their SMS number will be visible in the Gorgias ticket if the Gorgias user is responding from within Gorgias, whereas replies from VIA directly won't appear in the Gorgias ticket. However, the entire conversation will be visible in Via at all times.

Setup instructions

Please follow the steps below:

From the Settings menu within Gorgias, navigate to the Rest API section:

1. Then, in Via, open the Integrations menu within the Settings section and select Gorgias:

1. Now, copy the Base API URL, the Username (email), and the Password (API Key) from Gorgias and paste them into their respective fields in Via. Enable the integration and select 'Save' when done. That’s it!

Subscribing a customer

These steps will create a customer and a ticket in Gorgias.

Create a campaign in VIA and reach out to the customer:

2. In the Campaign Creator, you can name your new campaign, select the target audience, enable smart sending, and lastly choose if you want to use A/B testing.

Enabling smart sending will automatically exclude anyone in your targeted audience who has already received a message from your brand within the previous 8 hours.
Enabling A/B Testing allows you to optimize the content you send to your audience by creating multiple variations of your campaign and identifying the best-performing version with your audience.

3. Next, select either the Split Send or Winning Metric. Split Send will divide your message variations out evenly across your entire campaign audience. Winning Metric sends your variations to a subset of your campaign, identifies the best performing variation, and distributes the winners to the remainder of your audience.
If you select Winning Metric, you'll also need to select what percentage of recipients receive the test messages (10% or 20%), the duration of the test, and the specific criteria to determine the winning message. You can choose click-through rate, conversion rate, or earnings per message.

4. Lastly, select how many message variations you want to create (up to five).

Your campaign is almost ready to go! For further details on how to design your campaign, please refer to Via's guide here.

Once the campaign has been sent, the customer needs to reply with “Y” or “YES” to confirm the opt-in:

That’s it, and in order for the customer to unsubscribe, they simply need to text the word “STOP”, and they can resubscribe by sending “START”. Note that once the subscription has ended, the customer will receive a text message confirming it, but since the message is sent from VIA, it won’t be visible in Gorgias:

Limitations

• MMS is not supported for inbound or outbound messages, this integration only supports SMS.
• A “Via Customer” is created under Customers in Gorgias and it is CRITICAL that this customer is never deleted. This customer is automatically created when the integration is set up in Via, but if deleted, the entire integration will break.
• If a ticket is already in the trash is marked as “delete forever”, no future message from that subscriber and phone number will surface in Gorgias.
• Once a customer has unsubscribed, you will not be able to send them a new campaign. They will need to resubscribe.