How to Send Bulk SMS and Email Broadcasts

The Notification Center is where you send a one-way announcement — a service update, a planned outage notice, a promotion — by Email or SMS to a whole list of people at once. It's completely separate from your regular ticket conversations: a broadcast never creates a ticket, and recipients can't reply to it.

Every recipient is kept private from every other recipient — no one on the list can see who else received it.

Opening the Notification Center#

Look for Notification Center (megaphone icon) in the left-hand navigation of the Agent Portal's Tickets area. This takes you to the broadcast history list, where every broadcast you've sent is logged.

Composing and Sending a New Broadcast#

1. From the Notification Center list, click New Broadcast.
2. Choose a Channel: Email or SMS. The form below changes depending on which you pick.
3. If you chose Email:
   • Enter a Subject.
   • Write your Message.
   • Under Recipients (BCC), either:
     • Pick a saved list from the Use a saved list... dropdown (only lists saved for the Email channel appear here) — this fills the recipients box for you, which you can still edit afterward, or
     • Type or paste email addresses directly, separated by commas, semicolons, or new lines.
   • A live counter below the box shows how many recipients you've entered.
4. If you chose SMS:
   • Write your Message. A live counter shows the character count, whether it's being counted as GSM-7 or Unicode text, and how many SMS segments each recipient's message will use — keep an eye on this if you want to stay within a single segment (160 GSM-7 characters, or 70 Unicode characters).
   • Under Recipients, either pick a saved SMS list the same way, or type/paste phone numbers directly (commas, semicolons, or new lines). Numbers are cleaned up automatically — spaces, brackets, and dashes are stripped out for you.
5. Click Send Broadcast.

You'll be taken straight to that broadcast's detail page, which shows you the outcome as soon as sending finishes.

Recipient limit: a single broadcast can go to up to 100 recipients at a time, since each send happens immediately rather than queuing in the background. If you paste in more than that, you'll be told how many you entered and asked to trim the list before sending.

Composing a new SMS/email broadcast

Screenshot needed · broadcast-compose

Checking Delivery Status#

The broadcast list#

The main Notification Center screen lists every broadcast you've sent, with its Reference # (e.g. NOT-20261112-A1B2C3), Channel, Subject (for email), number of Recipients, current Status, and when it was Created.

What each status means#

Drilling into a specific broadcast#

Click its Reference # to open the detail page. This shows the full message, the overall status, and a table listing every single recipient with their own individual result — Sent or Failed. For anyone who failed, the reason is shown right next to their name (for example, a bad phone number, or a provider error), so you know exactly who to follow up with and why, instead of having to re-send to the whole list.

Managing Broadcast Lists#

A Broadcast List is a saved, reusable set of recipients for one channel — build it once, then just pick it by name the next time you compose a broadcast instead of retyping everyone.

Viewing your lists#

From the Notification Center, click Broadcast Lists. You'll see every saved list with its List Name, a colored channel badge (Email or SMS), and its recipient count.

Creating a new list#

1. From the Broadcast Lists screen, click New List.
2. Enter a List Name and choose its Channel (Email or SMS) — this can't be changed once the list has recipients saved to it.
3. Add recipients using either or both of:
   • Option A — paste recipients: type or paste them directly into the box, separated by commas, semicolons, or new lines.
   • Option B — import a CSV or Excel (.xlsx) file: drag a file onto the upload box (or click it to browse). The first column is treated as an optional Name, the second as the email address or phone number. Anything in the file is added on top of whatever you typed in Option A — it never replaces it, and any duplicate entries are automatically skipped.
4. Click Save.

If anything you entered couldn't be used (an invalid email/number, or a duplicate), you'll be told how many rows were saved and how many were skipped, and why.

Editing an existing list#

Open a list from the Broadcast Lists screen and you'll see every recipient as its own editable row (Name and Email/Phone Number columns):

• Edit any name, email address, or phone number directly in its row.
• Click Delete on a row to remove that one recipient.
• Click + Add Row to add a new recipient by hand.
• To add a batch of new people at once, drag a CSV or Excel file onto the Add more recipients from a CSV or Excel (.xlsx) file box — this only ever adds new rows on top of what's already there; it never wipes out existing recipients, and duplicates are skipped automatically.
• Click Save when you're done.

Exporting a list#

Click Export CSV or Export Excel on any list to download its current recipients as a spreadsheet file.

Deleting a list#

Click Delete on a list, then confirm. This only removes the saved list for future use — it has no effect on any broadcast you've already sent with it.

Using a saved list when composing#

When writing a new broadcast, the Use a saved list... dropdown next to the Recipients box only shows lists that match the channel you're currently on (Email lists when composing an Email broadcast, SMS lists for SMS). Picking one fills the Recipients box for you — you can still add to it or remove entries by hand before sending, since it's just a quicker starting point, not a locked-in selection.

A Note on Auto Contacts#

The Auto Contacts lists you'll see elsewhere in the Agent Portal (the automatically collected "every number/address we've called or been called by" lists, under the Contacts area) are a separate feature and are not available as a recipient source here. To message people from Notification Center, use a Broadcast List you've built yourself, or paste/import the recipients directly when composing.

Tips#

• Build a Broadcast List once for anything you send regularly (monthly updates, a customer segment) — it turns a repeat broadcast into a few clicks instead of re-typing or re-pasting a long list.
• Always check the detail page after sending, especially on anything larger than a handful of recipients — a Partial Sent result is easy to miss if you don't click in and look.
• For SMS, watch the segment counter while you type — trimming your message to fit one segment can matter if you're sending to a very large list.