When your app uses the SMS.CX API to send a message, the message is delivered (or undelivered/failed for whatever reason) and the recipient responds at some point. Your application must be able to respond to events that occur over a notification channel when this occurs. A Webhook is a notification channel used in modern apps. Webhooks allow your app to subscribe to get notifications when a specific event happens, such as when a consumer responds to a message. The webhook will trigger for different events (delivery report status, received SMS, shortlink click, contact opt-out, etc.) and make a request with data to the callback URL you saved in your SMS.CX account settings.
If you want to ask a customer to confirm their attendance at an appointment, you may use the SMS.CX API to send them a message. A confirmation or cancellation message is sent by the customer. When the SMS.CX platform receives this confirmation or cancellation message, a Webhook will alert your application. This message will include all of the information needed by your application to take appropriate action, such as the user's response text and phone number.
Without Webhooks, developers would have to continuously send the same status request to the SMS.CX API to see if the customer has responded.
This is expensive and adds unnecessary latency, i.e. the time it takes between requests to check for new messages. Webhooks are only activated when an event occurs, and they happen in real time, so there is no delay and your application receives the end user's response message right away.
The unsung heroes of the modern internet are Webhooks. Webhooks allow apps to alert each other of critical events in real time, whereas APIs allow programs to make queries to each other.
Webhooks allow you to create rich applications. We provide webhooks for certain tasks, such as informing consumers about: