Setting Up New Accounts

Collecting the Setup Information

There are a few critical pieces of information needed to get setup with Textel and several others that are nice to haves that could make the onboarding process more seamless.

Step 1: Get a List of the Phone Lines to Be Enabled

To setup the Bot appropriately, the lines need to be setup within the Textel infrastructure. This will ensure that the Bot can send and receive text messages on the desired phone lines. Only lines provided in this setup process will be available to use by the TextBot.

Are your phone lines provisioned by RingCentral?

If the phone lines are already provisioned for voice and text through RingCentral, then we will need to go through a process to release the text routing to Textel. This will give Textel the ability to handle all of the SMS/MMS routing on a line without impacting any of the voice routing. To do so we will need to:

1. Provide a signed Letter of Authorization (LOA) form
   1. We will then submit the LOAs to the appropriate carrier to grant us the permission to take over the text routing and provision it in our system

Does you need to acquire text-enabled phone lines?

If you need phone lines to use for texting, the process is simple.

1. What type of line do you need? Toll-Free or 10DLC (local)?
2. How many lines do you need?

With this information Textel can take care of provisioning the lines and setting them up in our system and for the TextBot.

Step 2: Get a List of Your RingCentral Users

Not all users and phone lines within your RingCentral account will have access to the TextBot when installed. Providing a list of users ahead of installation, ensures that we can grant the correct RingCentral users access to use the TextBot, along with their specific line permissions.

User Export from RingCentral

The simplest method to do this is to go into your admin panel to do an export of users. See screenshot below.

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1. Download the list and make sure that only the users who are supposed to have access to the Bot are included. 
2. Now you will need to specify which lines each user is supposed to have access to. We are going to determine what phone lines a user is supposed to have access to from the Direct Number (DID) column in the RingCentral user export. 
   1. If the users are all only to have access to their own DIDs, then no additional steps are required.
   2. If users are supposed to have access to multiple lines, or a different line than their DID, make sure that the numbers are listed in that column, separated by a column.
      1. For example, if a user had access both to their DID and a department-based line, then the column should be populated like this:
         1. View full size

Fill Out Textel User Template

If it is easier, we have a template that you can fill out to provide us with the information we need to automatically create the user accounts, teams, and their line associations.

Download the User Template

Step 3 (Optional): Gather Contact Information

One of the Textel TextBot's responsibilities is to auto-create teams for inbound (and potentially outbound) text conversations. If we have information for a mobile phone number stored in our system, we can include the First and Last Name in the team name for easy reference. Without this information, we will still create the team, it will just only contain the mobile phone number as an identifier. 

This step is entirely optional.

There are three methods available for getting information on Contacts.

1. A one-time import of contacts. Provide us with a file that has columns for First Name, Last Name, and Mobile Number and we will import them into our system.
2. Contact management from within the Textel platform. The RingCentral users will have access to the Textel administration platform where they can manually add contacts or do regular imports into the system directly.
3. The setup of one of our CRM Integrations for automatic contact syncing.