When using cellular hardware to deliver text messages, the people who receive those SMS have the option to reply to them. When they reply, their reply message is actually delivered back to the sending cellular device, where it waits in memory. PageGate can be configured to check the cellular hardware for reply messages received by these devices.
Before you can configure reply processing, you'll first need to go in to the 2-Way sub-section of a connector configured to use cellular hardware and enable the 'GSM-AT Replies' function. Once you do, you'll need to specify a 'Reply Recipient' that should be used to process the replies. This allows you to implement reply processing in a few ways.
This is the most basic form of reply processing. All replies will be delivered to the specified recipient or group.
•Reply processing with the GetASCII API
If you own the GetASCII API, you can feed the reply information through that system for advanced processing. This allows you to modify message content and who the replies should go to but does not allow for conditional modification or conditional sending. For example, you couldn't have the program scan the body of the message for a keyphrase, then completely change who the message is intended to go to based on it. That would require the PageGate Filter Pack.
•Reply processing with the GetASCII API and the PageGate Filter Pack
Reply messages can be fed through PageGate's Filter Pack to allow for conditional sending. For instance, with the PageGate's filter pack, you can tell PageGate to conditionally change who receives the message based on what the text in the reply is. As an example, you could configure a filter system so that any time the word lunch shows up in a reply message, that reply is sent to the cafeteria group instead of the general replies group.
You could configure a system where replies from a certain phone number will always be copied to certain recipients or groups.
You could configure a system where certain keywords or phrases are replaced with other keywords or phrases. For example, you could translate a code like PD4N in to 4th Precinct.
You could configure a system to describe every element I've just described all at once.
However, you must own and implement the Filter Pack to have the functionality necessary to do conditional sending as described.