Send Twilio SMS from chatbot

Twilio is one of the most popular messaging and calling service worldwide. It offers a lot of services that you can use to empower your business and automate the conversation with your leads on their phones and outside your website.

• Get Leads : Triggered when a new lead is captured.
• Get Appointments: Triggered when a new appointment is booked.
• Get Conversation: Triggered when a lead completes conversation.

Depending on your use case you will be mostly interested in the Get Appointments or Get Conversation trigger. But if you want to trigger the Twilio SMS/Call at any point in conversation you can use our External API object. Keep reading to learn more:

• Send an SMS / Call with Continually app
• Send an SMS/Call using External API

Send an SMS / Call with the Continually app

1

Open Zapier, click Make a Zap and search for Continually as the first step. (If you can't find Continually in the app list then you need to connect it first).

2

Choose your trigger and your Continually account. In this example we picked the Get Conversation trigger

3

Finally, test your trigger to get a sample data.

4

In the Action step, search for Twilio and select it. Then pick the action Send SMS or Call Phone. To authorize the connection you need to provide your Twilio Account SID and your Auth Token, both can be found on your Twilio dashboard.

5

Now you just need to construct the message/call you want to send as you see fit.

6

Finally, test the action, it should send an SMS / Call to the number it picked from the data sample. Now when the trigger your picked happens the zap will run and do the specified action.

Note: Twilio needs the country code to be able to send the SMS/Call successfully. Make sure you ask your leads to enter their number with their country code if you serve people in different countries.

Send SMS/Call instantly withing chat conversation using External API 

The External API is one of our most powerful tools, it can be used to send HTTP calls to other services and webhooks. We will use it to send a webhook call to a ZAP to initiate an action of Sending SMS or calling a phone number within the conversation itself.

1

The only difference from the above method is the Trigger step, instead of picking the Continually app, pick the Webhooks app, then choose the Catch Hook trigger event. This will give you a unique URL that we can use to send information to it.

2

Open the bot you want and add an External API object to it. Add the webhook URL that Zapier gave you and choose the type as Post. Toggle the Add parameters button and add as many fields as you want, to send the value of a field you need to place it within curly brackets and an @ symbol, like this : {@phone}

3

Click on the Send Request button and go back to Zapier, click on Test trigger and you will see Zapier has caught the test call we just made. Continue the rest of the Action steps as the above method. Once the External API object is reached in conversation the zap will run and the action you specified will be executed. 

Note: You must capture the phone in a prior step to the External API object to be able to pass its value.