New Contact Center as a Service delivers a human experience at scale with omnichannel, mobile-first interactions

Austin, TX — October 6, 2021 — Plivo, the cloud communications platform that enables businesses to engage with their customers, today announced Contacto, the omnichannel, mobile-first contact center platform that delivers seamless customer experiences with a human touch. Contacto allows B2C businesses in retail and ecommerce to boost customer service teams’ efficiency and enable personalized, high-touch interactions—weaving together artificial intelligence, sentiment analysis, and omnichannel capabilities to offer a superior experience, embedded directly into brands’ websites and applications.

Now more than ever, customers interact with brands online. Ecommerce has soared throughout the pandemic—in the US, ecommerce sales in 2020 grew more than 30% from 2019, with mobile commerce accounting for 45% of the total market . And this trend shows no signs of slowing down. With more mobile-first customers come more avenues with which customers can request help—retailers must be able to service their customers with the same experience regardless of channel—whether that be Twitter, Facebook, in-app chat, WhatsApp, SMS messaging, or voice call.

In fact, as B2C sees tremendous growth, with new businesses entering, disrupting and innovating in the space, a contact center built for today’s mobile-first customers will be a significant differentiator for B2C businesses. Winning and retaining customers is dependent on delivering a seamless, effective and efficient experience. No one wants to sit on hold for an hour—or repeat their problem or information endlessly—and, with Contacto, there’s a better way.

“Most businesses don’t have the time or resources to build out a fully customized call center. They’re already too occupied with running their own business,” said Venky Balasubramanian, Founder and CEO at Plivo. “That’s why we created Contacto—so every company from Fortune 100s to small business owners can provide their customers with world-class customer service interactions. Contacto’s AI-powered chatbots can quickly qualify customers and escalate tickets seamlessly to live representatives, where real-time sentiment analysis helps them provide better service—all within the brand’s existing platforms.”

Contacto: Next-level customer service with a human element

Great customer experience depends on the human touch—customers want to feel heard and appreciated while their requests are efficiently resolved. Contacto delivers on these expectations, making technology feel more human and helping agents provide contextualized, personal, and effective service in the customer’s preferred channel.

Key features and benefits include:

• Conversational chatbots: Intelligent chatbots help verify and qualify customers, increasing agent productivity and helping resolve requests faster.
• In-app chat: Embedded directly into a brand’s application, customers can easily raise a request via in-app chat, initiating their customer service journey without having to switch channels.
• Native voice calling: Contacto comes with full-featured voice and messaging capabilities, native to the platform, so there’s no need to engage costly, third-party vendors.
• Omnichannel platform: Integrating chat functionality, social media, SMS messaging and voice calls, Contacto allows customers to select the channel they prefer to communicate in, then switch channels as desired throughout their journey. For example, a customer could choose to describe their problem via voice call, then have an order tracking number sent to them via SMS. This level of channel personalization helps to reduce friction and create a positive experience for every customer.
• Customer interaction history: Contacto allows agents to view all of a customer’s previous interactions alongside their current service request, giving them the context they need to solve issues faster and create a better customer experience.
• Sentiment analysis: Agents interacting with customers see real-time coaching scores, based on sentiment analysis, so they can adopt the right approach to helping the customer. These scores help ensure quality and allow supervisors to provide effective feedback and update workflows.
• Deep CRM and Help Desk integrations: Designed to work seamlessly with a business’ existing systems, Contacto features out-of-the-box integrations with Salesforce, Service Cloud, Zendesk, Shopify and many more.

Contacto Launch Marks the Next Phase of Plivo’s Growth

The launch of Contacto marks the culmination of Plivo’s first phase as a company—its 10-year evolution in providing customers with a simpler, better business communications platform. Quietly rising to the top of the Communications Platform as a Service market, Plivo has spent the last 10 years building a solid customer base and a stellar suite of APIs alongside a comprehensive and evolving product offering. Today, Plivo’s SMS and Voice APIs are used by thousands of innovative businesses in more than 190 countries, including IBM, Mercadolibre, BYJU’s and Deckers Brands.

Now, with Contacto, Plivo is entering into its next evolution in the market—offering not only best-in-class API products for technical teams, but also cloud-based communications solutions that offer superior out-of-the-box functionality for B2C customer service teams.

“Plivo is in a unique position to offer vertically integrated, end-to-end products, and the market opportunity here is tremendous,” said Balasubramanian. “As Plivo embarks on its next 10 years of growth, we look forward to continued innovation and evolution, while maintaining our focus on providing customers with the solutions they want and need to succeed.”

To learn more about how Contacto enables B2C businesses to create better customer experiences — visit www.contacto.com.

About Plivo

Plivo is a communications platform that enables businesses to connect, engage and interact with their customers in over 190 countries. Thousands of businesses like IBM, Workday, Nutanix, and Gojek rely on Plivo to deliver better customer experiences globally. The Plivo team brings deep experience in communications and modern software to address the needs of today’s businesses – quality, scale, innovation, and agility.

Almost everyone has had a poor customer service experience at some time or another. We’ve heard them all:

• Waiting on the phone line for hours for the next available representative
• Repeating basic information over and over again as you’re transferred to new agents
• Being unable to find the answers to a simple, standard question without connecting with an agent
• Finding out the only way you could contact the customer service department was via email

We have a better way.

We want to make it possible for every company, no matter their size, to provide customers with world-class customer service interactions.

A mobile-first omnichannel contact center for consumer-facing businesses

Most businesses don’t have the time or resources to build out a fully customized contact center — especially not those nimble businesses in B2C retail and ecommerce, where efficient, effective customer service is a growing competitive advantage.

Contacto was purpose-built for today’s mobile-first consumer world so businesses can deliver the fast, flexible, and frictionless customer support that shoppers want. The platform combines traditional and emerging communication channels with an easy-to-use interface and out-of-the-box customizability to fit your business and your shoppers.

With Contacto, you can deliver exceptional customer experiences across channels, all while boosting agent productivity and effectiveness — and potentially even reducing your operational costs.

Let’s look at the channels of communication Contacto can facilitate, then dig deeper into the features of the platform.

Communication channels

The essence of omnichannel is offering a cohesive customer experience at every touchpoint, and that includes facilitating convenient communication methods for fast, easy resolutions.

Contacto comes with native, full-featured voice capabilities so there’s no need to engage costly third-party vendors for enterprise-grade, in-call features, excellent call quality, and high reliability.

Web and in-app chat embedded directly into a brand’s application or website let customers interact with retailers while they shop and beyond.

Customers can choose messaging via SMS, MMS, or WhatsApp — the leading consumer chat app. Brands can also utilize notifications to deliver proactive support updates.

Native integrations with social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are set to debut in Q4 2021.

Feature highlights

Contacto revolves around a unified agent desktop, where all communications channels are presented in a single simple interface.

That enables agents to:

• Respond to all incoming conversations from one screen, no matter their channel
• View the customer’s associated conversation timeline and interaction history
• Create and manage information in third-party systems without leaving Contacto

Contacto is designed to work seamlessly with a business’s existing systems, with out-of-the-box integrations with Salesforce, Salesforce Service Cloud, Zendesk, Shopify, and more.

With all that information in one place, agents have the context they need to solve issues faster and create a more tailored experience for the customer.

The Plivo advantage

Contacto is built on Plivo’s Premium Communications Network, which has been proven for scale over the last 10 years with billions of requests each month. Contactonatively supports voice and emerging channels like in-app chat, WhatsApp, and social media, and has prebuilt integrations with existing applications like Salesforce, Zendesk, Shopify, and Kustomer.

Sound interesting? Join our waitlist!

Interested in giving Contacto a try? You can join the waitlist to try Contacto for free, and our team will reach out when we’re ready to onboard our next batch of customers. We look forward to helping you delight your customers through service with a human touch.

We’ve all spent much more time on a customer service call than we expected. We may have interacted with voice menus, listened to long menus, and still had to repeat the same information again and again. And we’ve left with the feeling of, “Why can’t this experience be better?” Studies show these subpar experiences decrease customer retention.

In a July 2021 report, The future of customer conversation, Accenture wrote: “We’re moving to a world where customers expect to engage with brands at any time, across multiple devices, channels, and touchpoints. Customers also expect interactions to be in tune with their personal preferences and schedules.”

In today’s mobile-first consumer world, customers want fast, flexible, and frictionless assistance. That’s why we built Contacto.

Contacto is an omnichannel contact center platform that combines traditional and emerging customer service channels with an easy-to-use interface, out of the box customizability for a focus on today’s mobile-first consumer.

Contacto is built on Plivo’s Premium Communications Platform that has been proven for scale over the last 10 years with billions of requests each month. It natively supports voice and emerging channels like in-app chat, WhatsApp, social media, and has pre-built integrations with existing applications like Salesforce, Zendesk, Shopify, Kustomer, and more.

Why Contacto, and why now?

Plivo has long been focused on the back end of communications and on building its voice and messaging API business.

But based on feedback from customers, we recognized an opportunity to package that back end into a vertical application for an underserved niche. Most businesses don’t have the time or resources to build out a fully customized contact center for their customer service needs. They’re already too occupied with running their own business.

That’s especially true for nimble businesses in the B2C retail and ecommerce space, where efficient, effective customer service is a growing competitive advantage. And customer expectations are very high.

We want to make it possible for every company, no matter their size, to provide customers with world-class customer service interactions.

Communication channels

Contacto comes with native, full-featured voice capabilities so there’s no need to engage costly third-party vendors for enterprise-grade on-call features, excellent call quality, and high reliability.

Web and in-app chat embedded directly into a brand’s application or website let customers interact with retailers while they shop and beyond.

Customers can choose messaging via SMS, MMS, or WhatsApp — the leading consumer chat app. Brands can also utilize notifications to deliver proactive support updates.

We plan to add native integrations with social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram later this year.

Feature highlights

All agent activity in Contacto revolves around a unified agent desktop, where all communications channels are presented in a single simple interface.

That enables agents to:

• Respond to all incoming conversations from one screen, no matter their channel
• View the customer’s associated conversation timeline and interaction history
• Create and manage information in third-party systems without leaving Contacto

With all that information in one place, agents have the context they need to solve issues faster and create a more tailored experience for the customer.

Contacto is designed to work seamlessly with a business’ existing systems, with out-of-the-box integrations with Salesforce, Salesforce Service Cloud, Zendesk, Shopify, and more.

Plivo’s next phase of growth

With Contacto, Plivo is entering into its next evolution in the marketplace — offering not only best-in-class API products for technical teams, but also cloud-based communications solutions that offer superior out-of-the-box functionality for B2C customer service teams.

As Plivo embarks on its next 10 years of growth, we look forward to continued innovation and evolution, while maintaining our focus on providing customers with the solutions they want and need to succeed.

Sound interesting? Take a tour!

Interested in giving Contacto a try? We’d be happy to give you a quick tour. We look forward to helping you maximize agent productivity and meet customers on their terms with our unified cloud contact center for B2C teams.

Voice OTP is used to authenticate a phone number by delivering a one-time password (OTP) via a phone call. This verification is done by making a call to the mobile number and playing a sequence of digits. To verify the mobile number, the user needs to confirm the played sequence of digits.

OTPs are commonly used to verify new user registrations, online transactions, and login sessions in an app or website. In this blog post, we walk you through a sample implementation of sending a voice OTP using the Plivo Voice platform and PHLO, our visual workflow builder. Plivo’s direct carrier connectivity and intelligent routing engine guarantee the best call connectivity and quality.

Prerequisites

Before you get started, you’ll need:

• A Plivo account — sign up for one for free if you don’t have one already.
• A voice-enabled Plivo phone number if you want to receive incoming calls. To search for and buy a number, go to Phone Numbers > Buy Numbers on the Plivo console.

• Flask and Plivo Python packages — run pip install plivo flask to install them.
• ngrok — a utility that exposes your local development server to the internet over secure tunnels.

Create a PHLO to send OTP via phone call

PHLO lets you construct your entire use case and build and deploy workflows visually. With PHLO, you pay only for calls you make and receive, and building with PHLO is free.

To get started, visit PHLO in the Plivo console and click on Create New PHLO to build a new PHLO. In the Choose your use case window, click Build my own. The PHLO canvas will appear with the Start node. Click on the Start Node, under API request, fill in the Keys as from, to, and otp, then click Validate. From the list of components on the left side, drag and drop the Initial Call component onto the canvas and connect the Start node with the Initiate Call node, using the API Request trigger state.

Configure the Initiate Call node with the using the From field, and in the To field. Once you’ve configured a node, click Validate to save the configurations.

Similarly, create a node for the Play Audio component and connect it to the Initiate Call node using the Answered trigger state. Configure the Play Audio node to play a specific message to the user — for example, in this case, “Your verification code is <OTP>”. Under Speak Text, click on Amazon Polly and paste the following:

<Speak voice="Polly.Amy">
    <prosody rate="medium">
        Your verification code is
    <break/>
    <break/>
    <say-as interpret-as="spell-out">{{Start.http.params.otp}}</say-as>
    </prosody>
</Speak>

Click Validate to save.

Connect the Initiate Call node with the Play Audio node using the Answered trigger state.

After you complete configuration, provide a friendly name for your PHLO and click Save.

Use the PHLO in a Flask application

Now you can use the PHLO in a Python Flask application.

• Create a project directory and change into it.
  

  $ mkdir mypythonapp
  $ cd mypythonapp

• Install the Plivo SDK using pip.
  

  $ pip install plivo

• Install other modules.
  

  $ brew install redis
  $ pip install redis
  $ pip install flask

We recommend that you use virtualenv to manage and segregate your Python environments, instead of using sudo with your commands and overwriting dependencies.

Run the PHLO to send OTP via phone call

Now you can trigger the PHLO and test it out. Copy the PHLO ID from the end of the URL of the workflow you just created. You’re also going to need your Auth ID and Auth Token. Create a Python source code file — let’s call it trigger_phlo.py — and paste this code into it:

import plivo
import random
import redis

from flask import Flask, jsonify

app = Flask(__name__)

r = redis.StrictRedis()

def generate_code():
    code = random.choice(range(100000, 999999))  # generating 6 digit random code
    return code


# Make call to the destination number with OTP.
@app.route("/dispatch_otp/<destination_number>")
def dispatch_otp(destination_number):
    try:
        # generate OTP.
        code = generate_code()

        # Make a call
        auth_id = <auth_id>
        auth_token = <auth_token>
        phlo_id = 'Your PHLO ID' # https://console.plivo.com/phlo/list/
        payload = {"from" : "+15671234567","to" : destination_number, "otp":code}
        phlo_client = plivo.phlo.RestClient(auth_id=auth_id, auth_token=auth_token)
        phlo = phlo_client.phlo.get(phlo_id)
        response = phlo.run(**payload)
        print str(response)
        print(r.setex("number:%s:code" % destination_number, 60, code))
        return (
            jsonify({"status": "success", "message": "verification initiated"}),
            200,
        )
    except:
        return ("Error encountered", 400)

# verify the OTP enetered by the user.
@app.route("/verify_otp/<destination_number>/<code>")
def check_code(destination_number, code):
    """
    check_code(number, code) accepts a number and the code entered by the user and
    tells if the code entered for that number is correct or not.
    """
    # fetch the OTP set for the destination number
    original_code = r.get("number:%s:code" % destination_number)

    if int(original_code) == int(code):  # verification successful, delete the code
        r.delete("number:%s:code" % destination_number)
        return (
            jsonify({"status": "success", "message": "codes match! number verified"}),
            200,
        )
    elif original_code != code:
        return (
            jsonify(
                {
                    "status": "rejected",
                    "message": "codes do not match! number not verified",
                }
            ),
            404,
        )
    else:
        return (jsonify({"status": "failed", "message": "number not found!"}), 500)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run(host="0.0.0.0", debug=True)

Substitute actual values for <auth_id>, <auth_token>, and <PHLO_ID>. Save the file and run it.

$ python trigger_phlo.py

Boom — you’ve made an outbound call with the OTP as a text-to-speech message.

Simple and reliable

And that’s all there is to send OTP via a phone call using Plivo’s Python SDK. Our simple APIs work in tandem with our comprehensive global network. You can also use Plivo’s premium direct routes that guarantee the highest possible delivery rates and the shortest possible delivery times for your 2FA SMS and voice messages. See for yourself — sign up for a free trial account.

Two-factor authentication (2FA) can play a key role in securing your applications against password data breaches. Authentication with a one-time password (OTP) delivered to your users over SMS is an effective approach to implementing two-factor authentication. Plivo’s premium direct routes guarantee the highest possible delivery rates and the shortest possible delivery times for your 2FA SMS messages. In this blog post, we walk you through a sample implementation of 2FA using the Plivo SMS platform and PHLO, our visual workflow builder.

Prerequisites

Before you get started, you’ll need:

• A Plivo account — sign up for one for free if you don’t have one already.
• An SMS-enabled Plivo phone number to send messages to the US and Canada. To search for and rent an available number, go to Phone Numbers > Buy Numbers on the Plivo console.

Create a PHLO to send OTP via SMS

PHLO lets you construct your entire use case and build and deploy workflows visually. With PHLO, you pay only for calls you make and receive, and building with PHLO is free.

To get started, visit PHLO in the Plivo console and click on Create New PHLO. A pop-up window gives you a list of prebuilt templates to start with. Choose Two-Factor Authentication and click Create Application to create a PHLO with the prebuilt components to build a workflow that can manage sending the OTP via SMS, with failover to use a phone call to deliver the OTP as a text-to-speech (TTS) message.

Use the PHLO in a Ruby application

We have a demo application available for this in our GitHub repository that you can clone to see how the implementation works.

• Clone the repository from GitHub.

$ git clone https://github.com/plivo/2fa-ruby-demo.git

• Change your working directory to 2fa-ruby-demo.

$ cd 2fa-ruby-demo

• Install the dependencies using the Gemfile file.

$ bundle install

• Edit the config.yaml file. Replace the PLIVO_AUTH_ID, PLIVO_AUTH_TOKEN, PLIVO_NUMBER, and PHLO_ID placeholders with your own values.

PLIVO_NUMBER, and PHLO_ID placeholders with your own values.

Note: Enter your phone number in E.164 format.

Generate the OTP

Generate an exclusive six-digit authentication code. To create the OTP, use the time-based OTP generation algorithm. Here’s how it’s done in ruby.

code = rand(999_999)

Send OTP via SMS or a phone call

A single function helps us to trigger the PHLO to send SMS messages and make calls; the rest of the work is done by PHLO. Use the mode argument to tell PHLO whether to trigger a call or an SMS message by passing the value “sms” or “call.”

 def initiate_phlo(dst_number, mode)
    code = rand(999_999)
    begin
      phlo = @phloclient.phlo.get(@phlo_id)
      # parameters set in PHLO - params
      params = {
        from: @app_number,
        to: dst_number,
        otp: code,
        mode: mode
      }
      phlo.run(params)
      code
    rescue PlivoRESTError => e
      puts 'Exception: ' + e.message
    end
  end

Verify the OTP

After the user enters the OTP they received on their handset, this ruby code verifies it.

get '/verify/:number' do
  number = params['number']
  ##
  # verify(number) accepts a number and initiates verification for it.
	#
  code = if config['phlo_id'].nil?
           twofactor.send_verification_code_sms(number, 
           'Your verification code is __code__. Code will expire in 1 minute.')
         else
           twofactor.initiate_phlo(number, 'sms')
         end
  r.setex('number:%s:code' % number,
 60, code) # Verification code is valid for 1 min
  content_type :json
  { status: 'success', message: 'verification initiated' }.to_json
end

Test

To run the application, start Redis using the redis-server command. Build and Run the app using the command $ ruby app.rb. You can use the URL http://localhost:3000/ to run the sample application in your browser.

On the browser page, choose your country and enter your mobile number, then click on Send Verification Code. Check your mobile phone — you should get an SMS message with an OTP code. Enter the code in the browser form and click Verify, and the application will confirm that you’re verified.

What if you don’t get the SMS message you were expecting, or you wait too long to enter the value you received? The application gives you a link so you can use a phone call as a fallback OTP channel. Click on “Didn’t receive sms? Call me.” You should then receive a call, and when you answer it, you’ll hear a text-to-speech message that gives you an OTP code, which you can use in the form for verification.

Simple and reliable

Edit the sample application to see how simple it was to code. Our simple APIs work in tandem with our comprehensive global network. Plivo’s premium direct routes guarantee the highest possible delivery rates and the shortest possible delivery times for your 2FA SMS and voice messages. See for yourself — sign up for a free trial account.

Two-factor authentication (2FA) can play a key role in securing your applications against password data breaches. Authentication with a one-time password (OTP) delivered to your users over SMS is an effective approach to implementing two-factor authentication. Plivo’s premium direct routes guarantee the highest possible delivery rates and the shortest possible delivery times for your 2FA SMS messages. In this blog post, we walk you through a sample implementation of 2FA using the Plivo SMS platform and PHLO, our visual workflow builder.

Prerequisites

Before you get started, you’ll need:

• A Plivo account — sign up for one for free if you don’t have one already.
• An SMS-enabled Plivo phone number to send messages to the US and Canada. To search for and rent an available number, go to Phone Numbers > Buy Numbers on the Plivo console.

Create a PHLO to send OTP via SMS

PHLO lets you construct your entire use case and build and deploy workflows visually. With PHLO, you pay only for calls you make and receive, and building with PHLO is free.

To get started, visit PHLO in the Plivo console and click on Create New PHLO. A pop-up window gives you a list of prebuilt templates to start with. Choose Two-Factor Authentication and click Create Application to create a PHLO with the prebuilt components to build a workflow that can manage sending the OTP via SMS, with failover to use a phone call to deliver the OTP as a text-to-speech (TTS) message.

Use the PHLO in a Dotnet application

We have a demo application available for this in our GitHub repository that you can clone to see how the implementation works.

• Clone the repository from GitHub.
  

$ git clone https://github.com/plivo/2fa-dotnet-demo.git

• Change your working directory to 2fa-dotnet-demo.
  

$ cd 2fa-dotnet-demo

• Install the dependencies using the package.json file.

$ dotnet restore

• Edit the config.js file. Replace the PLIVO_AUTH_ID, PLIVO_AUTH_TOKEN, PLIVO_NUMBER, and PHLO_ID placeholders with your own values.
  

Note: Enter your phone number in E.164 format.

Generate the OTP

Generate an exclusive six-digit authentication code. To create the OTP, use the time-based OTP generation algorithm. Here’s how it’s done in dotnet.

Random r = new Random();
var code = r.Next(999999);

Send OTP via SMS or a phone call

A single function helps us to trigger the PHLO to send SMS messages and make calls; the rest of the work is done by PHLO. Use the mode argument to tell PHLO whether to trigger a call or an SMS message by passing the value “sms” or “call.”

 public int SendVerificationCodePhlo(String DstNumber, String mode)
		{
			Random r = new Random();
			var code = r.Next(999999);
            var phloClient = new PhloApi(AuthId, AuthToken);
            var phloID = PhloId;
            var phlo = phloClient.Phlo.Get(phloID); 
            var data = new Dictionary<string, object>
            {
                { "from", AppNumber },
                { "to", DstNumber },
		{ "mode", mode },
		{ "otp", code },

            };  
			phlo.Run(data);
            return code;
		}

Verify the OTP

After the user enters the OTP they received on their handset, this dotnet code verifies it.

public string Index(string number, string code)
    {
        ConnectionMultiplexer redis = 
  ConnectionMultiplexer.Connect(_configuration.GetValue<string>("RedisHost"));
        IDatabase conn = redis.GetDatabase();

    string key = $"number:{number}:code";
    var compare_code = (string)conn.StringGet(key);

        
    if (compare_code == code)
    {
            conn.KeyDelete(key);
            Verification verification = new Verification();
            verification.status = "success";
            verification.message = "Number verified";
            string output = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(verification);
            return output;
            }
            else if(compare_code != code)
            {
            Verification verification = new Verification();
            verification.status = "failure";
            verification.message = "Number verified";
            string output = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(verification);
            return output;
            }
        
            else
            {
            Verification verification = new Verification();
            verification.status = "failure";
            verification.message = "number not found!";
            string output = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(verification);
            return output;
            }
    }

Test

To run the application, start Redis using the redis-server command. Build and Run the app from Visual Studio. You can use the URL http://localhost:5001/ to run the sample application in your browser.

On the browser page, choose your country and enter your mobile number, then click on Send Verification Code. Check your mobile phone — you should get an SMS message with an OTP code. Enter the code in the browser form and click Verify, and the application will confirm that you’re verified.

What if you don’t get the SMS message you were expecting, or you wait too long to enter the value you received? The application gives you a link so you can use a phone call as a fallback OTP channel. Click on “Didn’t receive sms? Call me.” You should then receive a call, and when you answer it, you’ll hear a text-to-speech message that gives you an OTP code, which you can use in the form for verification.

Simple and reliable

Edit the sample application to see how simple it was to code. Our simple APIs work in tandem with our comprehensive global network. Plivo’s premium direct routes guarantee the highest possible delivery rates and the shortest possible delivery times for your 2FA SMS and voice messages. See for yourself — sign up for a free trial account.

SMS — short message services — is one of the best tools for building relationships with your customers. 81% of Americans use SMS every day, and more than three-quarters of Americans wish they could text with a business. SMS is one of the most popular and frictionless communication channels in the world.

How popular is SMS? According to Statista, more than 2 billion text messages were sent in America in 2019. According to Gartner, “various sources report SMS open and response rates as high as 98% and 45%, respectively.”

What Is SMS?

SMS, or text messaging, lets people send messages of up to 160 alphanumeric characters between cell phones and other computer devices. Most carriers support longer messages through “concatenated SMS,” which automatically segments messages longer than 160 characters into multiple text messages and combines them at the receiving end.

SMS is almost 30 years old. The first text message, sent in 1992, simply read, “Merry Christmas.” The service was first offered to consumers in 1993, and growth was slow, in part because, initially, consumers couldn’t exchange messages with people who had service on other carriers. Also, early “dumb” mobile phones had only numerical keypads, so sending alpha characters required multiple keypresses, using a system called T9 — short for “text on 9 keys.” After Nokia offered the first smartphone with a QWERTY keyboard in 1996, texting began to get easier.

SMS popularity increased in 2007 when the iPhone was released. CBS News reported that in the first quarter of 2006, Americans sent and received 65 texts per month. By the second quarter of 2008, Americans were sending and receiving a whopping 357 text messages a month — a 450% increase. “Nicholas Covey, director of insights for Nielsen Mobile, attributed the spike in messaging to the spread of QWERTY-style keypads, whose users send 54% more text messages than those with ordinary keypads,” the New York Times reported. By the fourth quarter of 2007, American cell phone subscribers sent more text messages than they made phone calls.

Since then, SMS usage has grown further. As of 2020, according to 99firms, 5 billion people in the world could send and receive SMS messages, and over 90% of text messages are read within three minutes.

Types of SMS: P2P and A2P

There are two primary types of SMS content: person-to-person (P2P) and application-to-person (A2P).

P2P SMS is what most people imagine when they think of text messaging. P2P SMS is generally conversational, and it takes place between real people, generally in real time.

A2P SMS comes in three varieties, as we explain in our SMS best practices guide:

1. Informational messaging happens when a consumer gives their phone number to a business and asks to be contacted in the future.
2. Promotional messaging occurs when a message is sent that contains a sales or marketing promotion.
3. Transactional messages are non-marketing messages that provide important information to customers, such as a welcome message, an order confirmation, or a shipping update.

If a business wants to send SMS messages to customers, they have to take into account certain legal and regulatory considerations. For example, senders of A2P SMS messages must obtain consent from recipients, and they must send messages from an approved SMS number type.

Different countries have different requirements and regulations regarding A2P SMS, so businesses should check local rules.

Common ways businesses can leverage SMS

SMS is the most popular messaging platform, but not all businesses take advantage of it. In 2019, 54% of consumers said they wanted text messages from businesses, but a shockingly small 11% of businesses sent them, Small Business Trends reports.

That’s a shame, because it’s not difficult to automate communicating with customers through SMS. Automation allows you to send text messages to users to welcome them after they sign up for your service. You can remind them of sales and special offers, send order and delivery confirmations, and build community and closer relationships with your audience.

One Plivo customer, Jungleworks, “relies on SMS for coordinating order information, scheduling, reminders, and arrival ETAs. Using Plivo’s SMS API, Jungleworks keeps customers up-to-date with real-time text messages throughout the entire customer journey.”

Meanwhile, Houst uses Plivo to communicate via SMS directly with their customers. Houst’s use of SMS has grown exponentially but stayed reliable. Plivo allows them to “send messages from the same phone number for each property, which keeps a great consistency and user experience.”

Build better relationships with SMS messaging

Now you know what SMS is — a simple, modern communication method that your audience uses and likes. Take advantage of the popularity of SMS to talk directly with your customers in the way they prefer. Sign up for a free trial of Plivo.

Two-factor authentication (2FA) can play a key role in securing your applications against password data breaches. Authentication with a one-time password (OTP) delivered to your users over SMS is an effective approach to implementing two-factor authentication. Plivo’s premium direct routes guarantee the highest possible delivery rates and the shortest possible delivery times for your 2FA SMS messages. In this blog post, we walk you through a sample implementation of 2FA using the Plivo SMS platform and PHLO, our visual workflow builder.

Prerequisites

Before you get started, you’ll need:

• A Plivo account — sign up for one for free if you don’t have one already.
• An SMS-enabled Plivo phone number to send messages to the US and Canada. To search for and rent an available number, go to Phone Numbers > Buy Numbers on the Plivo console.

Create a PHLO to send OTP via SMS

PHLO lets you construct your entire use case and build and deploy workflows visually. With PHLO, you pay only for calls you make and receive, and building with PHLO is free.

To get started, visit PHLO in the Plivo console and click on Create New PHLO. A pop-up window gives you a list of prebuilt templates to start with. Choose Two-Factor Authentication and click Create Application to create a PHLO with the prebuilt components to build a workflow that can manage sending the OTP via SMS, with failover to use a phone call to deliver the OTP as a text-to-speech (TTS) message.

Use the PHLO in a Node.js application

We have a demo application available for this in our GitHub repository that you can clone to see how the implementation works.

• Clone the repository from GitHub.

$ git clone https://github.com/plivo/2fa-node-demo.git

• Change your working directory to 2fa-node-demo.

$ cd 2fa-node-demo

• Install the dependencies using the package.json file.

$ npm install

• Edit the config.js file. Replace the PLIVO_AUTH_ID, PLIVO_AUTH_TOKEN, PLIVO_NUMBER, and PHLO_ID placeholders with your own values.

Note: Enter your phone number in E.164 format.

Generate the OTP

Generate an exclusive six-digit authentication code. To create the OTP, use the time-based OTP generation algorithm. Here’s how it’s done in Node.js.

const code = Math.floor(100000 + Math.random() * 900000);

Send OTP via SMS or a phone call

A single function helps us to trigger the PHLO to send SMS messages and make calls; the rest of the work is done by PHLO. Use the mode argument to tell PHLO whether to trigger a call or an SMS message by passing the value “sms” or “call.”

 sendVerificationCode_phlo(DstNumber, mode) {
        var payload = {
            from: this.app_number,
            to: DstNumber,
            otp: code,
            mode: mode
        }
        phloClient = this.phlo_client
        phloClient.phlo(this.phloId).run(payload).then(function() {
            return code;
        }).catch(function(err) {
            console.error('Phlo run failed', err);
        });
    }

Verify the OTP

After the user enters the OTP they received on their handset, this Node.js code verifies it

Test

To run the application, start Redis using the redis-server command. Start a Node.js server by using the $ node app.js command. The Node.js server will run the app in localhost on 8000 port. You can use the URL http://localhost:3000/ to run the sample application in your browser.

On the browser page, choose your country and enter your mobile number, then click on Send Verification Code. Check your mobile phone — you should get an SMS message with an OTP code. Enter the code in the browser form and click Verify, and the application will confirm that you’re verified.

What if you don’t get the SMS message you were expecting, or you wait too long to enter the value you received? The application gives you a link so you can use a phone call as a fallback OTP channel. Click on “Didn’t receive sms? Call me.” You should then receive a call, and when you answer it, you’ll hear a text-to-speech message that gives you an OTP code, which you can use in the form for verification.

Simple and reliable

Edit the sample application to see how simple it was to code. Our simple APIs work in tandem with our comprehensive global network. Plivo’s premium direct routes guarantee the highest possible delivery rates and the shortest possible delivery times for your 2FA SMS and voice messages. See for yourself — sign up for a free trial account.

Two-factor authentication (2FA) can play a key role in securing your applications against password data breaches. Authentication with a one-time password (OTP) delivered to your users over SMS is an effective approach to implementing two-factor authentication. Plivo’s premium direct routes guarantee the highest possible delivery rates and the shortest possible delivery times for your 2FA SMS messages. In this blog post, we walk you through a sample implementation of 2FA using the Plivo SMS platform and PHLO, our visual workflow builder.

Prerequisites

Before you get started, you’ll need:

• A Plivo account — sign up for one for free if you don’t have one already.
• An SMS-enabled Plivo phone number to send messages to the US and Canada. To search for and rent an available number, go to Phone Numbers > Buy Numbers on the Plivo console.

Create a PHLO to send OTP via SMS

PHLO lets you construct your entire use case and build and deploy workflows visually. With PHLO, you pay only for calls you make and receive, and building with PHLO is free.

To get started, visit PHLO in the Plivo console and click on Create New PHLO. A pop-up window gives you a list of prebuilt templates to start with. Choose Two-Factor Authentication and click Create Application to create a PHLO with the prebuilt components to build a workflow that can manage sending the OTP via SMS, with failover to use a phone call to deliver the OTP as a text-to-speech (TTS) message.

Use the PHLO in a PHP application

We have a demo application available for this in our GitHub repository that you can clone to see how the implementation works.

• Clone the repository from GitHub.

$ git clone https://github.com/plivo/2fa-php-demo.git

• Change your working directory to 2fa-php-demo.

$ cd 2fa-php-demo

• Install the dependencies using the composer.json file.

$ composer install

• Edit the config.ini file. Replace the PLIVO_AUTH_ID, PLIVO_AUTH_TOKEN, PLIVO_NUMBER, and PHLO_ID placeholders with your own values.
  

Note: Enter your phone number in E.164 format.

Generate the OTP

Generate an exclusive six-digit authentication code. To create the OTP, use the time-based OTP generation algorithm. Here’s how it’s done in PHP.

$code = random_int(100000, 999999);

‍

Send OTP via SMS or a phone call

A single function helps us to trigger the PHLO to send SMS messages and make calls; the rest of the work is done by PHLO. Use the mode argument to tell PHLO whether to trigger a call or an SMS message by passing the value “sms” or “call.”

function send_verification_code_phlo($dst_number,$mode)
{
   $code = random_int(100000, 999999);
   $client = new PhloRestClient($this->config['auth_id'], $this->config['auth_token']);
    try {
        $phlo = $client->phlo->get($this->config['phlo_id']);
        $phlo->run(["from" => $this->config['app_number'], "to" => $dst_number,
         "mode"=>$mode, "otp"=>$code]); 
        // These are the fields entered in the PHLO console
        return $code;
    }
    catch (PlivoRestException $ex) {
        print_r($ex);
    }
}

Verify the OTP

After the user enters the OTP they received on their handset, this PHP code verifies it.

<?php
/**
 * Initiate Validation process
 * @param $param[2] route param(Phone number) from index.php
 * @param $param[3] route param(OTP entered by user) from index.php
 */
$number = $param[2];
$code   = $param[3];

$original_code = $client->get('number:' . $number . ':code');

if ($original_code == $code) {
    $client->del('number:' . $number . ':code');
    echo '{"status": "success", "message": "codes match! number verified"}';
} elseif ($original_code != $code) {
    echo '{"status": "failure", "message": "codes do not match! number not verified"}';
} else {
    echo '{"status": "failure", "message": "number not found!"}';
}
?>

Test

To run the application, start Redis using the redis-server command. Start PHP server by using the $ php -S localhost:8000 command. PHP server will run the app in localhost on 8000 port. You can use the URL http://localhost:8000/ to run the sample application in your browser.

On the browser page, choose your country and enter your mobile number, then click on Send Verification Code. Check your mobile phone — you should get an SMS message with an OTP code. Enter the code in the browser form and click Verify, and the application will confirm that you’re verified.

What if you don’t get the SMS message you were expecting, or you wait too long to enter the value you received? The application gives you a link so you can use a phone call as a fallback OTP channel. Click on “Didn’t receive sms? Call me.” You should then receive a call, and when you answer it, you’ll hear a text-to-speech message that gives you an OTP code, which you can use in the form for verification.

Simple and reliable

Edit the sample application to see how simple it was to code. Our simple APIs work in tandem with our comprehensive global network. Plivo’s premium direct routes guarantee the highest possible delivery rates and the shortest possible delivery times for your 2FA SMS and voice messages. See for yourself — sign up for a free trial account.