May 2020 Updates – BETA release of ‘Automations’

We’re quite excited about this month’s updates to VentureTel.app, with a number of improvements and features.  Of the new features we’re most excited about what we call ‘Automations’.  Automations are a set of rules that can be created to automate SMS messaging.  This is the beta release with two features currently and we’d love your feedback and suggestions for improvements or other automations that you can think of.  More details on automations below in the release notes and on support site.  Here’s the full list of new features in our May 2020 release.

• Automations (beta)
  • Missed Call – When you miss a call from a potential client or patient they just skip ahead to your competitor.  With the missed call automation, you can now try to capture that client and engage in a conversation with them via texting by sending an automated message with your own predefined reply like “Sorry we missed your call, how can we help?”  – This automation can be created in VentureTel.app, but to enable it a support ticket first has to be opened with support – do this at support.venturetel.co or email us at support@venturetel.co – (This limitation will be removed in a future release).
  • Keyword Auto Responder – A Keyword auto responder is a way to provide an automated response when receiving a text with a specific keyword or phrase.  An example of this could be a realtor advertising: Text “House on first” to 123.456.7890 for more details.  When someone texts House on first to 123.456.7890 it would automatically reply with additional details or a link to the listing.  The realtor would then also have the cell number of the person interested in the property to follow up with the potential buyer.
• Numbers assigned to groups now visible for SMS – Numbers assigned to a call group weren’t available for texting, now any member of the group can send/receive text messages for that number.
• Follow Me Settings – You can now configure your follow me settings and add a cell phone to your individual inbound call flow.  This allows you to setup which devices attached to your user ring on inbound calls and when they should ring.  As a best practice, we recommend keeping the total ring time under 25-35 seconds – go much past that and callers typically will hang up before going to voicemail (but if you’re using the missed call automation above, maybe that’s not as big a deal 😊)
• Forgot Password Reset – If you forget your password or login details, you can now request a password reset link to be sent to your email.
• Minor Improvements
  • Voicemail status change is slow – When changing the status of a voicemail (from read to unread, etc) or deleting a voicemail it can take a few seconds to update so we now show a graphic to show that it’s updating.
  • Inbound MMS messages weren’t included in the unread message count – inbound MMS messages now show in the unread message count for your numbers.
  • Option to Disabled Sound Alert – You can now disable sound alerts in the app for new inbound text messages – this is done in settings under the notifications tab.