Access to customer context is key to a great customer experience in voice and messaging flows. As it lets you customize your interactions specific to that customer and address their needs promptly.

In this blog post, we will walk through the steps involved in connecting to Salesforce CRM database with Twilio Studio. This means, that when a customer calls into your contact center, in realtime, we can ask the CRM for more details about the caller based on their phone number.  With this additional context, we can present an IVR tailored to their needs or use that information to intelligently route their call.

Before we get started, if you haven’t yet used Studio, I recommend taking a look at this getting started with Studio guide.

Flows in Studio are built with widgets which is a state or transition in our flow. In this post we will mainly use the ...

With Twilio Studio and TaskRouter you can quickly customized call flows. This post will walk you through the steps to receive calls on your Twilio phone number and have the callers put into a call queue. The callers will listen to music while the application arranges an agent to take their call. Agents will use their web browser, on their computer, to manage their status: offline and available to accept calls.

When a caller is added into the queue, TaskRouter creates a reservation and then asks an agent if they will accept the call. The agent has the option to Accept and be connected with the caller, or to Reject the call. If the call is rejected, TaskRouter will ask the next available agent.

When the agent accepts the call, TaskRouter will contact the agent based on the agent’s TaskRouter configuration. For example TaskRouter maybe configured to dial the ...

Twilio Studio makes it easy to manage voice call flows with its visual user interface. A Studio flow typically starts with a trigger event such as an incoming call to your Twilio phone number. The tutorial Forward Call with Studio has an Incoming Call as the trigger followed by a Connect Call To (forward_call) widget that forwards the call to a person’s phone number (see following screen print). The above flow, adds logic in between the trigger and the forward_call widget. This article is how to add logic using a Studio Run Function widget to call a Twilio Function, followed by a Split widget.

Building logic into the flow gives Studio more power to route calls to various destinations. The example here, is to choose between routing a call to the main office phone during business hours, or to voicemail after business hours.

In the my example flow, Business_hours ...

Turning coffee into some sort of API has probably been the dream of a lot of developers. In fact today marks the 20th birthday of the IETF RFC 2324 suggesting the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP). Last year, together with a friend, I hacked a coffee machine using JavaScript, but what do you do if you want to bring a bit more comfort to coffee served by baristas? Nobody wants to stand in a queue, especially at a conference!

For the last couple of years we’ve started serving coffee at various events using Twilio Barista, combining different Twilio APIs, such as Programmable SMS, Twilio Sync, and other web technologies. This way you can send an SMS to order your coffee, and get notified as soon as your coffee has been prepared by the barista.

On the birthday of the HTCPCP we figured it’s time to teach ...

Communication between the worlds of humans and machines doesn’t need to be apocalyptically hard or prohibitively expensive. In this project, we are going to build a voice call operated garage door opener with an ESP8266 dev board and a relay. In order to stitch all the parts together, we will use our visual workflow builder Studio and Sync for IoT.

We use Twilio Sync for IoT and Studio in this project, which are currently in Developer Preview. Sign up for the Sync for IoT preview and the Twilio Studio preview before you begin.

Gather the Garage Door Hardware

Our final flow will use an ESP8266 to link your garage door to a communications flow via Sync for IoT. Here’s what you’ll need:

• One Sonoff DEV or Wio Link board.
• One Grove Relay.
• A door actuator unit, which you might have already.

Alternatively, if you are good at ...