Connect the power of SMS with Zapier
Introduction
SMS has been connecting people for over 25 years now and works on effectively all mobile phones. Its ubiquity and ease of use make it one of the most viable forms of communication to connect people, especially in Africa. At Echo Mobile we provide a platform that helps organizations across Africa connect with their target audiences (their customers, beneficiaries, agents, etc.) via SMS. Our customers use the Echo platform to engage, influence and understand farmers, teachers and people from all walks of life.
The Echo Mobile platform is a great tool to collect and analyze data but sometimes you need to move data into an external system. The external system can be a Google spreadsheet, a database or your company’s CRM. Zapier is a tool you can use to automate the flow of data from Echo Mobile to your desired system without any coding experience. This article describes how we used Zapier to connect Echo Mobile and Google Sheets to automate a team process at Echo Mobile. No doubt you can think of other applications relevant to your organisation.
Ordering lunch with the Echo platform
Internally, the Echo Mobile team uses the Echo platform for a humble yet important task… knowing which team members will have the lunch that day! The process involves a one-question survey on the platform with details about the meal of the day.
Once the survey is all set up, we can send it to everyone on the team to determine who will be having lunch.
The SMS surveys will go out to the team when we click on “Send Invites”. Sending out the survey on demand works but it makes more sense to schedule this survey since it is repetitive. So we’ll go to the group with our target contacts and schedule the lunch survey to run at 8.00 am every weekday morning:
The next step is to export the responses and get the number of those having
- Meat option
- Vegetarian
- Not having lunch
We then place the orders to our lunch provider and update a Google spreadsheet to track expenses — this last step is currently manual.
Automating with Zapier
Transferring the responses from Echo Mobile to our Google spreadsheet is a manual process. But we can automate this process with Zapier and have it directly add the survey responses to a Google sheet of our choice.
As people respond to the lunch survey, responses will be received by Echo Mobile and forwarded to Zapier. Zapier will, in turn, create a row in the Google spreadsheet for every response received. Here’s the overall flow…
We’ll see later how we connect the Echo Mobile survey to Zapier, but first, we need to do some set up in Zapier itself.
Setting up Zapier
On the Zapier home page sign up with your work email or a Google account (easier and faster)
Once you’ve signed up you’ll be asked to choose what you want to do on Zapier and your role. For our example we’ll choose “I have some specific apps I want to connect” and for the role, you can choose what’s most appropriate for you.
On the next step, make sure Google sheets is selected (it should already be selected for you).
Then click on finish setup. Once you’ve finished the setup, navigate to
the page which lets you send data to Google Sheets.
You should see the below page
Click on “Try it — Get Started Free!”
You should now see
Click on continue to get to the below page
Click on copy to get the Zapier webhook URL — this will be the link between Echo Mobile and Zapier.
Aside: what’s a webhook? A webhook is a URL (a web address) that can be called by one computer system to send information to another system. In our case, the Echo platform will call the Zapier webhook with our survey responses attached. Zapier can then process the information how it wants — we’re going to tell Zapier to send it to Google Sheets. See this Zapier blog post to learn more about webhooks.
Connecting Echo Mobile to Zapier
Once you’ve copied the webhook URL, go back to Echo Mobile to edit your survey. Click on “Edit” for the question whose responses you want to send to Zapier.
In our case, it is the question about lunch.
Once you click on “Edit”, click on “Advanced settings” and then on “Response handling”. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and click on “Add Scenario”
Enter R in the scenario box and then click on “External API”. The Echo platform will call the URL you enter here every time someone responds to this question.
In the external api input field enter:
join(“”, list(“the-zapier-url-you-copied”, “phone=”, [PHONE], “&response=”, RAW))
R — this is the response as interpreted by Echo Mobile
RAW — the response as typed by the respondent
[PHONE] — the respondent’s phone number
Click on “Save Question”
What did we just enter in External API? It basically just builds the correct URL for calling Zapier. It works like this: if the response of a respondent is A and the respondent’s phone number is 0721000111, the above expression changes to
join(“”, list(“the-zapier-url-you-copied?”, “&phone=”,0721000111, “&response=”, A))
The join(“”, …) bit glues together all the things provided in the list()section. In this case, it evaluates to the URL
the-zapier-url-you-copied?phone=0721000111&response=A
So when this URL is called we’ll be telling Zapier who replied and what their response was.
Testing the integration and completing the set-up
Now we can test our integration by sending the survey to a test contact (you can use your own phone number). Once you send out the survey and respond, go back to Zapier and click on “Ok, I did this”
You should see a page showing you the parameters that were sent from Echo Mobile, in our case the parameters are phone and response.
Click on “Continue” to proceed to the page below.
Click on “Continue” to proceed and select your target Google sheet. You should eventually get to this page.
Click on “Save + Continue” to proceed to where you’ll be asked to select the spreadsheet you want your information saved.
Click on “Continue” to proceed and finally click on “finish”.
That’s it! Now all your responses to the survey question you chose will be sent to the Google sheet of your choice.
Phew, let’s wrap up
That’s quite a few steps, but mostly it’s just following along with what Zapier asks you to do.
In our example, we connected the Echo platform to Google Sheets. But because we’re using Zapier you’re not limited to that — you can send data to anything that Zapier supports. That’s Google Sheets, yes, but also communication, customer relationship management and business intelligence tools. It’s a great way of automatically getting data out of Echo and into other tools you might use.
Give it a try! If you have any questions about getting this up and running please contact support@echomobile.io.
