Using the SMS channel

Important update: We will be removing Zendesk Connect on October 31, 2021. In order to continue using proactive messaging, you’ll need to partner with another provider that offers similar functionality. See Removal of Zendesk Connect for details.

Connect uses Twilio, Nexmo, or Plivo to deliver your SMS campaigns.

This article contains the following topics:

• Requirements
• Providers
• Troubleshooting

Requirements

• Make sure you're adding phone numbers for each of your users via API identify call or CSV upload. You can see what percentage of your users have a phone number by going to Settings > Users and looking at the phone_number attribute.
• Phone numbers can be either long code or short code.

Providers

Please find documentation about where to find your API credentials for each provider in the table below.

Table 1.

Provider name	Provider docs (external link)
Twilio	Twilio API credentials
Nexmo	Where to find Nexmo API key
Plivo	Plivo API authentication

Troubleshooting

Below are issues you may encounter when using the SMS channel.

Messages not being sent because of "missing contact info"

• Are you sure you're sending phone numbers for your users? Try navigating to a few of your user's profile and ensure that they have valid, current phone numbers associated with them.
• If you are using Segment to send events to Connect, make sure you're using the right attribute name. Segment requires an attribute called phone which they will then change to phone_number before sending to Connect.

Phone number is invalid

• Connect validates phone numbers before updating a user's profile. Numbers must comply with E.164 formatting.