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Try Our Zapier SMS Integration Today

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Try Our Zapier SMS Integration Today

VirtualPBX Zapier Integration IconOur Zapier Integration has been updated to work with our Business SMS feature.

Having always accepted information about audio calls and voicemails, the integration now lets you choose the “Receive Text Message” option to have Zapier respond to SMS messages sent to your team members.

Our Zapier SMS integration update allows you to perform automated tasks like notifying team members of inbound texts through a separate chat platform (such as Slack), logging your inbound messages (such as in a Trello board), or syncing your texts to data recorded in an analytics platform (such as Google Analytics).

Zapier SMS Integration Example

A quick example use case can be explained in a few steps. Let’s see what it looks like to set up Zapier to wait for a text message and send notification of its receipt to the team’s Slack channel.

1. Select “Receive Text Message” Event

First, select the trigger that Zapier will use to initiate other actions. You pick the VirtualPBX app and choose its new “Receive Text Message” trigger.

VirtualPBX Zapier SMS Integration - Receive Text Message Event

2. Consider the Data You Want to Send

Sending an SMS text message to your VirtualPBX phone number from any other phone will allow the Zapier SMS integration to grab some sample data. The Test trigger step will show you the data collected that can be used in your Slack message.

Shown here, you can see that Zapier collects important information like the from and to phone numbers involved in the SMS and the body of the text message.

VirtualPBX Zapier SMS Integration - Data Points

3. Select the Slack Integration

The next step in the process is to choose the Slack integration so you can send your team a notification about your inbound texts. Here we have selected the Slack app and the Send Channel Message event.

Zapier Slack Integration

4. Create Your Channel Message

The example here shows that we have selected our Marketing channel and sent a message to our team using the From and Body dynamic fields that will change according to the senders and messages you have received.

Zapier Slack Integration - Message Body

Other Changes to Our Zapier SMS Integration

While the biggest news today is about our Zapier SMS integration, we have also updated our entire app inside Zapier to give you access to more phone call data.

Both the Call Answered and Call Ended events now provide more information in their output. Each event, respectively, lets Zapier listen for calls your team has answered or any call a team member has completed, and just like with the SMS trigger described above, you can have Zapier respond to those events with actions of your choosing.

Call Answered

Call Answered now includes information about the following data:

  • callee_id_name: The name of the person on your team who has been called
  • callee_id_number: The phone number of your team member who was called
  • local_resource_used: Whether or not the phone carrier is defined by the customer (this will read False for most customers because typically VirtualPBX automatically chooses the phone carrier)
  • owner_id: The user ID of the person who accepted an inbound call
  • reseller_id: The ID of the VirtualPBX account (unique from the system ID)

Call Ended

In addition to those new options in Call Answered, Call Ended also contains these new data points:

  • authorizing_id: The ID of the device that first handled the call
  • emergency_resource_used: Whether or not the call was an emergency (E-911) dial
  • is_internal_leg: Returns “true” if two system users spoke to each other during the call
  • other_leg_call_id: If there was a second leg on the call, this is that caller’s user ID
  • hangup_code: The reason the call was ended, such as a normal voluntary device hangup
  • ringing_seconds: The time a user’s phone rang before it was answered

Using Additional Data, and Testing

VirtualPBX Advanced Call Reports MenuThese additional data points can play an important role in how you analyze your inbound calls. These pieces of information can be moved through Zapier to many other web-based services so you can keep track of how, why, and when your calls were received and handled. This can make an excellent addition to data captured from system call logs and from our Advanced Call Reports tool.

The updates of our Zapier app also underscore the need for testing and examination of inbound call metrics. Specifically concerning user and device IDs (long strings of numbers and letters), it can be helpful to identify which users and devices correspond to those identifications.

Figuring It Out

Zapier can seem complicated at first, but we have several tutorials on our blog like How Zapier Works: Sending Voicemail Data to Google Sheets to make you familiar with the process. We’re also available through web chat 24/7 to work with you through any issues you may have.

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