>Also, is there any way to route text messages through a call center ...
Yes; any number of providers offer inbound text messaging delivery to your webservice (or via SMPP or SMTP); routing could be relatively straight forward, subject to your other (important!) issues.
I don't think responsiveness is unsolvable, there are plenty of companies doing support via text chat with a browser, and in many cases, this is not a terrible experience.
You could also send an immediate reply to the first message with an expectation of response time to help the user know that they got the message; combined with a note next to the 'text for help' messaging to call if you don't hear back right away, this could help with the dropped SMS problems.
You still are likely to have communications issues when problems develop between your SMS provider and your user's carriers. Something were you say 'if we don't hear from you in a while, we'll give you a call to clear things up' could work here (provided sufficient staffing to place the calls in a timely fashion)
Yes; any number of providers offer inbound text messaging delivery to your webservice (or via SMPP or SMTP); routing could be relatively straight forward, subject to your other (important!) issues.
I don't think responsiveness is unsolvable, there are plenty of companies doing support via text chat with a browser, and in many cases, this is not a terrible experience.
You could also send an immediate reply to the first message with an expectation of response time to help the user know that they got the message; combined with a note next to the 'text for help' messaging to call if you don't hear back right away, this could help with the dropped SMS problems.
You still are likely to have communications issues when problems develop between your SMS provider and your user's carriers. Something were you say 'if we don't hear from you in a while, we'll give you a call to clear things up' could work here (provided sufficient staffing to place the calls in a timely fashion)