For the last 2 years, you've been able to respond to customers' anonymous text messages by sending a text. You've also been able to receive customer comments by email, but couldn't respond. We've changed that.
Now, if you've set up your preferences to receive customer comments by email, you can reply to those emails right from your phone or computer. We'll send your response back to the customer, and the customer (as always) won't see your email address or cell phone number. It's awesome!
We're glad to bring you this feature and we apologize for rolling this out until just recently. We had our reasons.
Technical Reasons Why We Held Off On This Feature
When you respond to a customer by email, most people will tend to write much more than would fit in a text message. So when TalkToTheManager sends your response to the customer by text, we have to split it up into multiple texts, since text messages are short and have a size limit. That means the customer could get 2, 3, 4, or more messages from that one response. We were declining to do so for the customers' sake, since some customers have to pay per text because of their plan. Times have changed since, texting plans are cheaper, and customers can always opt-out should they feel they are getting too may texts.
There is also a restriction when a manager responds by text. Many times a message will go long when writing a text, and that their carrier will split a long message, and not realize that we'll get multiple pieces, and only the first will have the customer number on it. Since each text coming in to our system from a manager needs to have a customer number (so we know who to send it to), the second and other messages would trigger a warning message back to the manager. We've run into this ourselves and it's a pain. We are working on a way to make this smarter and understand that the messages are together, even when we receive them separately.