Salesforce and Twilio Resources: Communicating In and Outside of Salesforce

Salesforce and Twilio Resources: Communicating In and Outside of Salesforce

As a Solution Architect at Twilio, I get asked about the building blocks of integrating Twilio into Salesforce…a lot. Some of the most common scenarios I get asked about are click-to-call, creating Call Centers within Salesforce’s OpenCTI, making outbound dialers, integrating SMS for creating cases and two way conversations, mobile marketing, to name a few.

Since Twilio is an API, and Salesforce is a platform, the sky is the limit on what you can do, but this blog post has  number of examples . The top part are resources for developers, below there are links for fully built solutions that use Twilio.

Resources for Developers

Twilio-SFDC Helper Library:  This is the “official” helper library.  Twilio has a number of helper libraries covering the major programming languages, including this one.

SFDC Click2dial:  Below is a step by step tutorial of how to implement OpenCTI with Twilio. Fork the code on GitHub here.

When you’re setting this up, agents will be using Click 2 Call in Salesforce and the SalesForce OpenCTI toolkit. You’ll use Twilio to easily make a phone call from within the browser, embedded in Salesforce.  The initial features are limited, which is intended to get developers up to speed on a development environment they can then customize to fit their needs.

Client-ACD: This sample app provides basic inbound call center functionality, implemented as OpenCTI for Salesforce.

This version is written in Ruby, hosted on Heroku, and and work as a Twilio Softphone within Salesforce (or outside of Salesforce).  It demonstrates several concepts, but an important one is agent state tracking and Automatic Call Distribution – sending an incoming call to an agent who is “Ready”.  It also has activity tracking in Salesforce and Salesforce screenpop information. See more on GitHub.

Salesforce Use Cases: SMS Alerts and Conference Calls

Ameer Badri, another Twilio solution architect, covers using SMS from within Salesforce in this post.

He’ll also show you how to create a conference call from Salesforce Cases, and save the recording.

IVR

In the presentation below, Patt Paterson (@metadaddy) covers the basics of building an IVR and sending SMS. This is definitely worth watching and a great starting point as it covers the full spectrum of integration.

Twilio Partners!

All of the above resources are tools for developing apps with Salesforce and Twilio and require development.  If you need a prebuilt solution for Salesforce and Twilio, there are lots of options, on the AppExchange.

Call Center:

• New Voice Media 
• LiveOps
• FastCall
• RingDNA

SMS:

• SimpleSMS
• Zapier
• SMSToLead
• SMSSupport

Marketing/Call Tracking:

• Velocify

Conference calling

• ClearSlide 

Two Factor Authentication

•  Twilio TFA

If I missed a few ping me or comment, and we can update this with other SFDC/Salesforce integrations (focus on those that are on the AppExchange).