Shout Connect

Understand Shout Connect

Shout Connect is designed to simplify and centralize adding chat and texting into your organization, whether you have an engineering and development team or you want a no code solution using Shout's prebuilt interface and UI components. There are four common implementations described in the diagram below: first, Obtaining authorization to manage the Shout Account(s) for those associated with your organization; second, syncing orders and sending text alerts such as order and shipping confirmations and follow ups; third, facilitating team communication and collaboration with Shout group chats; fourth, using Shout to faciliate centralized messaging for announcements, messages, and notifications. Continue reading to learn about each of these common implementatons.

Authorization to Manage Shout Accounts

One of the fundamental challenges with messaging today is that each person and organization uses a multitude of platforms for communicating, from their personal cell phone (text messaging) to social platforms (Facebook, Instagram, & TickTock) and chat apps (Messenger, Telegram, Signal). Each of these applications provide consumers with basic, independently managed accounts where they control their messages (privacy controls) and their contact information (friend and follow requests). Shout provides each of its users with this same functionality, so the first step in streamlining communication is requesting authorization for a Shout Connect account to manage another Shout Account. Shout provides several simple ways to request this authorization, including the Shout Simple Connect Page, the Shout Connect Plugin, and the Shout Hosted OAuth page. Advanced development teams can also use their own standard OAuth2 flows. Each of these flows are discussed in detail in their own respective guides, but the basic premise is that once a Shout user grants your Shout Connect page authorization to manage it, the Shout Connect account can send messages, create orders, and other functions on behalf of that Shout account.

Syncing Orders and Sending Text Alerts

With many affiliate and sales business models, it can be difficult to standardize simple tasks such as sending text and shipping alerts without providing a confusing experience for customers. Shout Connect overcomes these challenges by sending these alerts from the affiliate or sales team member's Shout account, ensuring a single point of contact for all support and fulfillment questions. Shout Connect allows you to send affiliates notifications and create orders in their account when a customer places an order. The managed Shout account then delivers the text alerts and followups.

Centralizing team collaboration

The standard practice for many businesses is for their affiliates to use free consumer social medial tools such as Facebook Groups, WhatsApp, and others to manage their team communication. This often results in manual, often innaccurate team management and onboarding experiences and will lead to difficulty with team reach as large social media platforms limit the push notifications they send to users. Shout connect allows you to sync and standardize team collaboration so you automate onboarding (make it more reliable) and ensure every team member gets notified of announcements, business notifications, and team collaboration topics, all from the proper team leader's Shout account. Shout Connect allows your organization to provide a dedicated group chat for each team leader where that team leader knows exactly who's on their team along with a direct line of communication to the team through the Shout App. Adding this functionality only requires keeping your organization's team structure updated with Shout. This can be done programmatically now (via API). Reach out if you'd like to manage this manually from our interace.

Shout Connect Messaging

One of the most prevalent challenges for every business today is communication. Most people don't open email, social media platform reach is waning, and text messaging is expensive and increasingly difficult to organize and streamline. Shout connect provides your organization with a dedicated community in Shout where you can send announcments, messages, and notifications. Shout Connect also allows your organization to standardize customer communication by sending messages on behalf of connected Shout accounts. All of this can be managed programatically and from the Shout Connect interface.