Like many businesses we have a need to send and receive SMS with our clients whether that be to engage them with our service, organise a time to speak or to send passwords for sensitive documentation.
We already have a VoIP phone system built into our Salesforce CRM but there was no SMS functionality. I spent some time looking for a 3rd party application but I couldn’t find a solution that met the following criteria:
Some of the applications felt like they were just bolted on to Salesforce with little integration while others were requiring a significant additional cost per user and still didn’t quite meet our needs.
In the end I couldn’t find a solution that worked for us so, with a good working knowledge of Salesforce and Zapier, I started piecing together a process to develop the existing activity functionality in Salesforce to support inbound and outbound SMS.
5 hours later we had a fully integrated solution that just needed some good old fashioned testing 💪
First of all we will build out outbound functionality which allows our advisers to send personal or templated SMS messages to their clients simply by creating a task in Salesforce.
Utilising the existing standard Activity object in Salesforce I built out a new record type and stripped it right back to a basic set of fields that would be required to send an SMS.
You will want to create a workflow which fires on creation of an SMS activity which sends an outbound message from Salesforce to an endpoint in Zapier.
In Zapier you will want to build a zap to catch an outbound xml call from Salesforce and then pass that information into MessageBird to translate the activity fields into an SMS and send on to the intended recipient.
When you have it working correctly you should have a completed task in Salesforce documenting the outbound message as well as a text message on your phone 👍.
MessageBird is a brilliant platform that now does a lot more than SMS including voice and other communication channels. They have recently built out a useful visual flow builder which can help with automation.
The first thing you will want to do is push any new messages from MessageBird to a Zapier webhook.
It gets a little more complicated here particularly if you are using both Lead and Contact objects in Salesforce. If you have records across both objects you will need to query both to find the record related to the mobile number you received the reply from.
For the purpose of this example I am only referencing Contacts but it is exactly the same process for Leads. Either way the cleaner your data and the less duplication you have in Salesforce the better.
Once Zapier has received the inbound message there is a bit of work to update the string which is sent from MessageBird to match the format of the mobile number we have in Salesforce. Once we know it has been structured correctly to make a positive match we find the Contact record in Salesforce with that mobile number.
With access to the relevant Salesforce record we create an open task for the adviser who is associated with that Contact which includes the body of the SMS whilst also sending them an email alert for good measure to let them know they have an inbound SMS waiting for them.
When everything is working correctly you should see an open activity in the Contact record in Salesforce waiting to be actioned by the record owner 😎.
The introduction of our SMS functionality into our Salesforce environment was a big success. Where the functionality is native to Salesforce the adoption among our advisers was instant and having another channel to communicate with our clients has resulted in an increased level of engagement.
If you are looking to replicate in your organisation and need some guidance you can pop me a message on linkedin.
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