Customers already text your business number. They text it when they're on hold, when they can't find the order confirmation email, and when they want to know if the technician is still coming at 2 PM. If nobody answers, those texts disappear, and the customer calls back angrier. Adding SMS as a support channel mostly means catching messages that are already arriving.
This guide is for support leaders adding text to an existing phone and email operation. It covers the inbox setup, the response targets worth committing to, templates that save time without sounding canned, handing a conversation off from a phone call, and the compliance basics that keep your number from getting filtered. We make Ready, so the examples use Ready's two-way messaging and Inbox. The structure applies whatever tool you pick.
Decide what text support is for before you buy anything
Text is good for short, asynchronous exchanges. It handles badly anything that needs a long back-and-forth, a screenshot walkthrough, or account verification with sensitive data. Before you configure software, write down which requests you'll take over text and which you'll redirect.
A reasonable starting split:
- Good over text: order and delivery status, appointment confirmations and reschedules, "is this still happening" questions, sending a link or a confirmation number, quick yes/no answers, follow-up after a call.
- Redirect to phone or email: billing disputes, anything requiring a card number or full date of birth, multi-step troubleshooting, complaints that are clearly escalating.
This list also shapes your carrier registration, covered below. Support traffic registers as a customer care use case, and registering as marketing when you mostly send support replies is a common way to get throttled. Our guide on matching use case to what you actually send goes through that choice.
Set up the two-way inbox
The core of text support is one inbox where every inbound message lands and any agent can see the full thread. In Ready, inbound replies go to the Inbox in the app. For accounts connected to GoHighLevel, they also sync two-way into GHL, mapped per GHL location and sub-account so agencies keep each business's conversations separate.
One number, many agents
Customers should text one number and get an answer from whoever is free. They shouldn't have to know which agent they talked to last week. That means a shared inbox, not individual agent phones. The hard part of a shared inbox is avoiding two agents replying to the same customer at once. We wrote a separate guide on routing, assignment and avoiding double replies in a shared SMS inbox. Read it before you put more than three people on the queue.
Text-enable the number customers already have
If your support line is a landline or a number on a phone system, customers will text it whether or not it can receive texts. Either text-enable that number with your carrier or provider, or put your text number everywhere customers look: the website footer, order confirmation emails, the voicemail greeting. Ready accounts get their own numbers, each on the account's registered 10DLC campaign.
For platforms: send ticket updates through the API
If you run a helpdesk or vertical SaaS product and want ticket updates to go out by text, the send is one request:
POST https://api.tryready.com/v1/messages
X-API-Key: <key>
Idempotency-Key: 3f1c2a9e-6b1d-4c7e-9a52-0e8f1b7d4c11
{"to": "+12125550199", "body": "Ticket #1042 update: your replacement shipped today. Reply here with questions.", "consent_attested": true}The Idempotency-Key makes sure a retried request never sends twice, which matters when your ticketing system retries on a timeout. Opt-outs are refused up front and not charged. Full reference: docs.tryready.com/api/messages.
Set response targets you can actually hit
Customers who text expect a faster answer than email gets, but not an instant one. The worst outcome is silence. A two-hour reply that sets expectations beats a 20-minute reply that arrives after the customer has already called.
These are targets we'd suggest as a starting point, not industry benchmarks. Adjust them to your staffing:
| Message type | First response target (business hours) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Inbound question, business hours | Under 15 minutes | Measure first human reply, not an acknowledgment |
| Inbound question, after hours | First thing next business day | Say so in your after-hours acknowledgment |
| Follow-up within an active thread | Under 5 minutes while the agent is on it | Customers are often still holding the phone |
| Escalation to phone | Call within 1 hour | Text first to ask if now is a good time |
| Proactive update (delay, reschedule) | Before the customer would notice | A text 30 minutes before a missed window beats an apology after |
Two practical notes. First, track first response time on the inbound side separately from resolution time. Text conversations often stay open for days while the customer waits on a delivery. Second, don't count an automated acknowledgment as a response. It's fine to send one, but your metric should measure when a person engaged.
Write templates that don't sound like templates
Reusable templates are the biggest time saver in text support. Most inbound texts fall into a dozen categories. Ready has reusable templates, and the AI message writer can help draft and tighten them. It also runs a spam-filter check on the wording. Agents send replies themselves. Ready no longer lets accounts create or switch on an AI reply agent, but one set up earlier may still answer inbound texts on its own and bills each reply it sends.
Keep them short, and watch the segment count
Every segment is billed, inbound and outbound. A standard SMS segment holds 160 GSM-7 characters, and longer messages split into 153-character segments. One emoji drops the limit to 70 characters (67 per segment when multipart). A 100-character reply with a smiley face is 2 segments instead of 1. Ready swaps curly quotes, long dashes and ellipses for plain ones before sending, so pasting from a doc won't inflate the count. Emoji will.
A starter set
- Order status: "Hi {{first_name}}, order #[number] shipped [date]. Tracking: [link]. Reply here if anything looks off." (about 110 characters, 1 segment)
- Reschedule: "We can move you to [day] at [time] or [day] at [time]. Reply 1 or 2 and we'll confirm."
- Moving to phone: "This one's easier on a call. OK if [agent name] calls you from [number] in the next 30 minutes?"
- Closing: "Glad that's sorted. This thread stays open if you need us again."
Put the agent's name in escalation templates. "A person named Dana will call you" gets picked up more than an unknown number does.
Handle the handoff between phone and text
Most support teams already run on phone, so text has to fit around calls rather than replace them.
Phone to text. During a call, an agent often needs to send a link, a confirmation number or the steps they just explained. Send it as a text into the same contact thread the customer can reply to. The call and the text then sit in one history instead of two systems.
Text to phone. When a thread gets long or tense, ask before calling (see the template above). If you use the Ready Dialer, the agent clicks to call from the dial pad in the dashboard or in GoHighLevel. Recording and transcripts are available when the call is consented. Inbound calls ring the open pad, and missed calls show up as a Missed call card in the contact's Inbox thread, so an agent can work them alongside the text inbox. The Ready Dialer costs $0.025 per minute, and each started minute is billed as a full minute. Only answered time is billed, so a ring-out costs nothing. A call answered by voicemail counts as answered.
Missed calls. A customer whose call went unanswered is the easiest person to win back. Work the missed calls first, and consider texting first so the customer knows a callback is coming.
Budget for it: every reply is billed
Text support is two-way, so budget both directions. On Ready, a reply you receive is billed like a text you send: the Standard rate of $0.0075 per segment plus a $0.0045 carrier fee per segment.
Worked example, with stated assumptions: a support team handles 1,500 text conversations a month. Each averages 4 outbound and 4 inbound messages, all single-segment.
- Segments: 1,500 × 8 = 12,000
- Standard rate: 12,000 × $0.0075 = $90
- Carrier fee: 12,000 × $0.0045, itemized separately on the bill
- Registration: $25/mo for registration + $2/mo per number
That excludes the optional compliance surcharge. Scrubbing and landline validation each add $0.003 per segment when switched on for an account, and both are off by default. If your agents use emoji freely and replies average 2 segments, the message cost roughly doubles. That's the strongest argument for keeping templates plain. Our post on budgeting a two-way inbox when each job takes several texts runs this math in more detail.
On price: raw CPaaS APIs like Twilio and GoHighLevel's LC Phone have a lower per-segment rate. What Ready adds is the registration handled in-app, the inbox, templates, automations and compliance controls in one place. If your engineering team would rather build the inbox on a raw API, that's a legitimate choice.
Compliance basics for support texting
Support texting carries less risk than marketing, but it's still A2P traffic and still subject to carrier rules and the TCPA. Compliance is ultimately your responsibility. Here's what reduces the risk.
- Register. Unregistered 10DLC traffic gets carrier-filtered. Ready handles brand and campaign registration in-app. You pay $25 at submit (the first month), then $25/mo for registration + $2/mo per number. Most approvals take 2 to 7 days. An account can send up to 500 texts a month before it registers, and after that it has to register. The first 20 one-to-one texts are free, so use them to test before you register, because they end once a registration is paid for. To send, you add a card and get a number, which is $2 a month with the first month charged when you get it.
- Honor STOP. Ready processes STOP and UNSUBSCRIBE automatically, and the opt-out applies across all campaigns. Make sure HELP gets a useful answer too. Our keyword routing tree guide covers how STOP, HELP and YES each get handled.
- Respect quiet hours. Ready holds sends outside permitted local hours based on the recipient's area. Plan proactive updates around that. Campaigns, drip campaigns and automations wait up to 24 hours for the window; a one-to-one or API text is held only if the window opens within 6 hours, otherwise it is refused and must be resent; a one-to-one reply to someone who texted you in the last 24 hours goes out at any hour.
- Keep support threads as support. A customer who texted about a late order hasn't agreed to promotions. Don't add them to a marketing campaign because they're in the inbox.
- Keep your own consent records. Ready records the sender's attestation on bulk and API sends: who sent, to how many, and when. It doesn't store per-contact opt-in wording, timestamps or page URLs. Your store or CRM keeps those. (A contact who signs up on a Ready-hosted opt-in page is the exception: Ready stores that sign-up, with the time, IP address and exact wording, and support@tryready.com can send you a copy.)
Where to start
Start small. Text-enable one number, pick the eight request types you'll handle over text, write a template for each, and commit to a first-response target your current staff can meet. Run it for a month, check the segment counts and response times, then expand.
If you want to try it on Ready, sign up, send your first 20 one-to-one texts free, and register once you've seen how the inbox fits your team.