Set up SMS keyword auto-responders with RingCentral Automator
RingCentral’s engineering team has created a new product tool called “Automator,” a free Labs beta project that allows you to build your own custom workflows for RingCentral voice, SMS, video, and team messaging. With Automator, you can treat SMS messaging as robustly as a modern email system.
This tool makes it easy to respond to incoming SMS messages with automated replies that can be set up based on various scenarios. Choose from pre-built templates to create out-of-office replies or weekend do not disturb responses, or use a custom workflow to add advanced criteria.
For example, if you are sent a support request message you can respond with a text message saying you will add it to the support queue and then post the details to the appropriate group within Team Messaging or even trigger a HTTP call to your support system’s API.
Building your automation
Go to this web address https://workflow.labs.ringcentral.com and log in with your RingCentral credentials. If there is still space available in the beta program, you’ll be able to log in and create your automation.
If you have access, you will see a simple interface that will list any Automator workflows that currently exist similar to this screen. If there are no automations then the list will be empty.
In our example, we will set up a more complex workflow that has 3 steps. To create a new automation click on the “New automation” button. The following screen will appear.
For our example, we will be responding to a text message that is received with the content of “support request” somewhere in the body of the message. So select “Build your own workflow” and click next. The following screen shows.
Here you have to select what kind of event/trigger you are expecting. Select “SMS received” from the drop-down and click on “Add”. Next, you have to add at least one filter for the trigger to act upon. [1] Here we are adding 2 conditions on what the incoming SMS message contains [2] with an “OR” condition between them. This means that either of these 2 conditions can exist in order to have the trigger fired.[3]
The next option is to consider if there is a potential for a high number of trigger actions, in this case, multiple SMS messages asking for product assistance coming from the same source mobile number. [4] Since most carriers charge by the number of texts you send it is a good idea to implement this control. You can filter, or throttle, the number of times you respond to the trigger over a set time frame. In this situation, though it may be hard to tell if the requests for help are unique, it may make more sense to respond to each support request. For that reason, in our example, we are leaving this option turned off.
Next, click “Add” to create the trigger. The next screen that is displayed is the design area for the overall automation that you are building. So far we only have a trigger event that will be watching for things to occur, now we have to create the events that happen in response when the trigger is fired.
To build the next part of our custom workflow we will need to add a new “Node.” To do this, click on the plus sign and select “Add action” from the popup menu. You will be asked what type of action you want to create and in our case, we want to reply to the sender that we have received the request for support and will be working on it.
Select “Send SMS” to create a reply. The next screen allows you to set up the outgoing text message by providing the outgoing number, the target number, and the message body itself.
When you have finished filling in this screen click on “Add” to finish the action creation. Next, we want to add another task to the workflow to send the content of the original incoming support request SMS to our tech support group within the RingCentral App. If you would rather auto-generate an API call to your support ticket system, you can do that as well by using the “Send HTTP Request” action.
Once again, click on the plus sign to add another action, and now choose “Send Message” to post to a team messaging group.
You will be asked what conversation or group to send the message to [1] and the content of this message. You can hit the pound key (#) to display a list of variables that can be used to add system-supplied data into the body of the message. [2] This can help make the message more personal.
You can name your automation if you want to change it from the offered title. In the top left of the design area, you can edit the title. Click the small pencil icon [1] to start the editing process, then just click away from the editing area when you are done.
You can now save and test this automation or just save it if you have more work to do on it later. [2] Just saving it does not enable it, so be sure to test it and then if you are happy with the setup turn it on. My sample would send out this auto-response followed by the message being added to the “Messenger Tests” Team Messaging group.
That’s it, you have just set up an Automator automation! With RingCentral Automator, you can now build more complex workflows and auto-responses to meet your marketing, sales, support, and other customer care needs.
To learn more about RingCentral Automator, and see samples of other workflows you can build, visit our Automator Developer page.
Please let us know what you think by leaving your questions and comments below. To learn more about RingCentral features make sure to visit our developer site and if you’re ever stuck make sure to go to our developer forum.
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