Using an SMS Gateway called 46elks and some Go we can automate a customer feedback process which is usually done manually by calling a customer. This was an idea I had when I worked at a large sales company in Sweden a few years ago and my task was to find things that could be automated to save money and speed things up. To keep track of feedback and manually handle negative comments I also piped the messages to Slack which we will be doing in this guide as a bonus at the end. The following is a how to guide describing how you can create this yourself. You can find the full source code on Github.
SMS Gateway
The first thing we need to is find a SMS Gateway for sending our text messages to our customers. I met 46elks at HackForSweden this year and it seems to perform really well when I used them for this guide. However, you could go with any SMS Gateway and some of the more popular options are Twilio, Amazon or ClockworkSMS. Most gateways will provide similar APIs so it shouldn’t be too hard to replace my 46elks implementation with another provider.
