The SMS Robot

The latest robot to raise up from my table and sing "Puttin' on the Ritz" is an SMS* bot coded for a mobile sales force stretched across the country. Up to 200 cell phones all on different carriers and the goal was to create an avatar which would quiz the sales staff via individual text messages. The goal was to encourage their sales staff to stay prompt with responses from customers. The SMS bot would text them a weekly quiz and record the results texted back to the server by the staff. The first five sales agents to answer correctly from each sales group were declared the winner. The SMS solution was handled by the modules (a back-end software developed here 15 years ago and still going). The SMS protocol is different for each carrier. This is a slick solution that features a "Top Score" board on the client back-end and a handy auto-response feature.

*Short Message Service (SMS) is a text messaging service component of phone, web, or mobile communication systems...