How to setup automatic SMS for Missed Calls and Voicemails.

First, it is important to caution you around sending SMS to parties who have not opted in or provided consent. We removed missed call automation templates because of the risk it creates for customers - if it is determined by carriers (not RingCentral) that a person is sending automated SMS messages to people without their consent, you may lose access to SMS all together. So please, use this feature with an abundance of caution. 

Let’s break this problem down into smaller pieces.

Let’s take the easy one first: someone leaving a voicemail. 

If someone leaves you a voicemail then you should build an automation using the Voicemail received trigger. Technically, even though you may feel you missed a person’s call, from a networking perspective the call was NOT missed. The call was successfully connected to an extension and an action (leaving a voicemail) was taken. So solve this problem, with a Voicemail received trigger. You will need to create or copy this automation to every extension at which a voicemail might be left. 

Next, let’s talk about missed calls. 

A “missed call” in everyday parlance has a different meaning than a missed call from a telephony and routing perspective. 

In a telephony context, a call is only missed if the call is terminated prior to the user taking the expected action within the routing element they are engaged. In other words:

• If a customer is in a call queue waiting, and they hang up prior to being connected to someone in that queue, that is a missed call, and in fact that is the only way a call queue can miss a call. 
• If a customer is engaged with an IVR menu, then it behaves differently. When connected to an IVR extension, I am actually connected to the extension, and if I hang up, the call is registered as “call ended” not “call missed.” So the behavior is not necessarily consistent with call queues. 

So I would recommend the following:

1. Create an automation using the Missed call trigger for each of the user extensions that may ultimately receive a phone call. 
2. Create an automation using the Missed call trigger for each of your call queues. If you don’t have call queues, consider adding them to your flow. There customer can wait until an agent becomes available, and this will allow you to detect them giving up prior to being connected. 

There are no automations you can really add to your IVR menus to detect missed calls there at this time. But between the various missed call and voicemail received triggers, you should be able to catch most calls and send a reply of some kind to those callers.