Send and receive texts

Where to text from, what Sent, Delivered, and Failed mean, and why a text might be refused.

Once your number is registered for texting (see Set up text messaging if you haven't done that yet), you can send and receive texts from four places in Hey Quad.

Where to text from

The Inbox. Every text thread shows up alongside tickets and voicemails in the unified Inbox. Open a thread to read the full conversation and reply from the same pane.

A contact or company record. Open any contact or company with a phone number and click Text. This starts a new thread or opens the existing one with that number.

Ticket replies. If a ticket has an SMS channel available, reply from the ticket's reply box the same way you'd reply by email — pick the SMS tab and send.

The softphone's Messages tab. The softphone (browser, desktop app, mobile app, and Chrome extension) has a Messages tab for reading and replying to texts without leaving the dialer. See Use the in-browser softphone for more on the Messages tab specifically.

Who can see which texts

Every number has its own "Text messages go to" setting, on the Phone numbers page and on each extension's Phone numbers tab. It is separate from where the number's calls go, because a number answered by a call flow belongs to no one person.

A number's texts go to one of three places:

• An extension. The person who owns that extension owns those conversations. Nobody else on the team sees them.
• A shared inbox (a queue). Everyone in the queue sees every conversation on that number and any of them can take one. This is the default for a number whose calls are answered by a call flow or a queue.
• The AI receptionist. Reserved for when the receptionist answers texts; for now those conversations are visible to owners and admins only.

Owners and admins see every conversation in the organization regardless, so nothing is hidden from the people running the business. Where texts go covers the setting itself and how to change it.

When you buy a number, its texts follow its calls. A number that rings extension 101 texts extension 101. A number answered by a call flow goes to your shared inbox, which starts out containing everyone. Change either at any time.

Taking, assigning, and moving a conversation

The header of a text conversation in the Inbox shows who it belongs to and gives you three controls:

• Take — assign it to yourself. This is what you do with a conversation sitting in a shared inbox that you're about to answer, so a colleague doesn't answer it too.
• Assigned — hand it to a specific teammate. They get the notification from then on.
• Move to… — put the conversation into a shared inbox so the whole team can work it, or take it back out of one.

Moving a conversation into a shared inbox adds the team to it; it doesn't take it away from whoever's number it arrived on.

Which numbers you can text from

The From picker offers only the numbers whose texts come to you — your extension's numbers and the numbers belonging to any shared inbox you're in. Owners and admins can text from any of the organization's numbers. This is why an agent can't accidentally text a customer from the billing line.

What message statuses mean

Every text you send shows a status:

• Sent — Hey Quad has handed the message to the carrier.
• Delivered — the carrier confirmed the message reached the recipient's phone.
• Failed — the carrier rejected or couldn't deliver the message. Common causes: the recipient's number opted out (see Opt-outs and consent), the sending number isn't registered or has fallen out of registration, or — for healthcare organizations — the message doesn't match an approved template.

Why a text might be refused before it even sends

If you try to send from a number that isn't registered, or whose registration hasn't propagated yet, you'll see a warning in the composer. If the recipient has previously texted STOP to your number, sending is blocked until they text START again.

Organizations that handle protected health information are restricted to a set of approved, non-clinical message templates, managed under Settings → Privacy & PHI. If your organization has this restriction on, free-form texts outside the approved templates will be refused — use one of the approved templates instead, or ask an admin to add a new one.

Pictures and attachments (MMS)

MMS support depends on whether the specific number and carrier combination supports picture messaging. Not every number can send or receive MMS — check the number's capabilities on the Phone numbers page before relying on it for pictures.

Notifications

When a new text arrives, the people the number routes texts to get a bell notification: the extension's owner, or everyone in the shared inbox. If the conversation has been assigned to somebody, only they hear about it. When a number has no owner at all — a receptionist number, or one whose extension has been deleted — the organization's owners and admins are told instead.

Threaded texts (ones tied to an open ticket) open the ticket when you click the notification; texts that aren't tied to a ticket open directly in the Inbox.

Common gotchas

• A text that says "Sent" isn't guaranteed to have reached the phone. Only "Delivered" confirms the carrier handed it off successfully — "Sent" just means Hey Quad handed it to the carrier.
• Replies land wherever the original thread lives. If a customer texted in from a number tied to an open ticket, their reply threads onto that ticket automatically. If not, it shows up as a loose conversation in the Inbox.
• A colleague's conversations aren't in your Messages tab, and that's deliberate. If you expected to see a thread and don't, the number it's on routes its texts somewhere else. An admin can point it at your extension or add you to the shared inbox that has it.
• The SMS report and its CSV export are owner and admin only, because they cover every conversation in the organization. Your own conversations are in the Inbox.
• A long text costs more than a short one. Outbound texts come out of your organization's pooled segments, and a message over 160 characters is split into two or three segments before it is sent. Inbound texts are free and never counted. See How texting is billed.
• The softphone's Messages tab is reply-only from most surfaces — starting a brand-new conversation to a number you haven't texted before is easiest from a contact record's Text button.