Using RingCentral Automator for no code workflows

RingCentral’s engineering team has created a new tool called “Automator” in their labs. It is currently in beta and is already showing a lot of promise. Automator allows for the creation of custom workflows in response to RingCentral platform triggers like an incoming SMS message, a missed phone call, a new voicemail, or an incoming chat message. You can have Automator respond to any or all of these triggers with individual actions or even more complex workflow multi-steps. This is similar in concept to autoresponders that can be set up for emails when you are on vacation or have a do-not-disturb time frame that you want to impose. Automator though has a more intuitive process.

Basic Templates

Automator currently offers four templates for typical events that you might want to respond to. When you gain access to the Automator web interface just click on the “New automation” button in the top right and you will see the four basic templates.

1. Out-of-office SMS replies — you can automatically respond to received SMS messages here. You can enter a date range for when this Automator template will be active. You have to provide the phone number to use when sending your reply, and the body of the text (you can use system variables like your own first and last name, the date the SMS was received, and so on to make the message more personable ). Lastly, you can control how often you want to send your message to the same incoming SMS that is triggering your response. The following is a sample screen of setting this up.

2) SMS keyword auto reply — the next template lets you send out an automatic SMS message based on keywords that are contained within the incoming message. For example, you can treat this type of trigger as a form of FAQ responder. If you receive an SMS message that contains the text “How do I setup my new laptop and external mouse”; you can have the trigger look for keywords like “setup”, “laptop”, or “mouse”. The trigger here is not bound by a date range so this automation will be active continuously after you turn it on and until you turn it off. Here is a sample screen of this kind of template in the process of being created.

3) Missed call auto response — the third basic template can also be set up, turned on, and left to run indefinitely. This one though is not based on any SMS messages. This one responds to missed calls. This would be great if you are driving or at your child’s soccer game and can’t answer an incoming call at that moment. You can set up an SMS reply to be sent when a call is not answered. Here you only have to set up your outgoing SMS number and the body of the text to be sent. You can be generic in your reply, or again, you can use system variables to make your outgoing message more readable and more personable. The throttle feature is also available here to control how often you want to send out your SMS to the same number over a set time frame.

4) The last pre-built template — that you can utilize within the Automator tool is the After-hours SMS auto-reply. This is similar in concept to the out-of-office SMS reply except that it is based on hours of the day rather than full-day dates. If you select this template all you need to do is set up the hours that you will be working. Monday to Friday from 9:00 a.m. to 18:00 (6:00 p.m.) is suggested for you but you can adjust this on a day-by-day basis. This template then sends out your SMS message to anyone that contacts you outside of these set hours. If you have Wednesdays off, for example, just turn the whole day off by turning the slider next to that day to the “off” position, which is gray; or adjust the hours to your schedule. You can throttle these messages as well, and of course, you can customize your outgoing message with system variables. The setup screen looks like this:

Custom Workflows

Those are the basic or simple trigger templates that Automator has pre-built for you. Automator can do even more with its advanced features. These advanced features allow you to build a custom workflow that may have multiple steps within it. First, let’s cover the currently provided triggers. These are events that you can have Automator watch for and perform tasks when they occur. The triggers are:

1. SMS received
2. Chat Message received
3. Call received
4. Call ended
5. Voicemail received

As you can see there are a number of triggering events here that are not solely SMS based. In fact, there is only one trigger that is based on SMS activity. The rest are based on other aspects of the RingCentral platform either Team Messaging or call-based. Once you select your triggering event you will be able to set up filters for more precision on what is actually contained within the trigger information. For example, when an SMS message is received a typical filter could be to check the sender’s actual phone number against an existing number. In this way, if you want to, you can specifically have Automator react to one phone number. Maybe you want to watch for this number as you are waiting on information on a special order you placed with the company assigned to a number. You can even add multiple filters on the same event if you want. So to continue our example, maybe there are 2 numbers that a call could come from with information on that special order you have. In the design screen, you can click the “Add filter” button to add more conditions. The figure below shows 2 filter options for reacting to an incoming SMS message from 2 possible numbers. We have also added a trigger event to watch for the contents of the incoming SMS message to have the text “special order” somewhere within it. These are all controlled by an “OR” condition which means that any one of the 3 conditions needs to be true in order for the trigger to activate. In this particular case, we can also have either filter 1 and 3 both being true or filter 2 and 3 both being true (filter 1 and 2 would never both be true).

As you can see this is a powerful workflow design tool and we haven’t set up the action that we want the trigger to perform yet. When you are done with the trigger setup you can click on the “Add” button to save what you have created so far. Be sure to explore the other triggering options which vary depending on the type of trigger.

The design area is then displayed to you. This is an area where you can envision your workflow design and the reactions that you will create based on the trigger and its filters. It looks like the following after we added in the initial trigger event of “SMS received”.

If you click on the plus sign you will be shown the popup menu with two items on it; “Add condition” and “Add action”. Select “Add action” and a list of available actions is displayed, they are:

1. Send SMS
2. Send message
3. Create meeting
4. Make RingOut call
5. Send HTTP request
6. Exit

In our example, we just want to send out a note via SMS thanking the sender for their message and then post a message in a Team Messaging Group that shows the entire SMS message followed by our own notes that we can add to the post. So let’s add 2 actions to this trigger. The first is to respond to the SMS with a friendly note. So after clicking on “Add action” you will see this screen:

The next step in our workflow is to send a note to our Team Messaging group with the notes that came in through the SMS message and add any additional instruction that we want. So add another action and this time choose “Send message”. You will see the following screen. Fill it out and click “Add” when you are done. Here we are sending a message to the Group called “Messenger Tests”. All your conversations and groups that are unique to you will show on the drop-down list under “Action params”.

Now our workflow overall design looks like this:

We have an SMS message ready to send back to the original sender and a message to be sent to our Team Messaging group when a new SMS message comes into us from either 2 specific phone numbers or the message contains the designated text. You can add more actions to this if you want as well so depending on the situation you can additionally create a new meeting, make a RingOut call, and Send an HTTP request. You can also add more conditions to the workflow and have separate endpoints depending on how the automation flows.

Another neat feature of Automator is to test your workflow before you activate it. This is a good idea especially when you are potentially sending clients automatic responses to their inquiries. You will see a “Test” button in the top right of the design screen. You can simulate the receipt of an SMS message and you can see how the workflow behaves. You should see this screen when you activate that button.

When this test is run the SMS that is sent back to the “caller” looks like the next figure and the message that is posted to Team Messenger follows that.

Remember to turn on your Automator workflow after you test it so that it can be active while you do other things.

This example workflow only has two actions, you can add multiple actions and even add conditional branches to the workflow adding complexity as you build on to it. To extend our current example, you could add multiple conditions into the workflow for many different phone numbers that might be contacting you and send out a different message to each one, or you could send as many messages to groups that you have in Team Messaging. You can launch a meeting and send the link for that meeting back to anyone that contacted you for an immediate video meeting session. You could even trigger an outgoing call if you wanted to call someone that was texting you. There are so many combinations that are available to you from within this tool.

Getting started

To find out more information on this great workflow tool before you get into the web location for it you can go here: https://developers.ringcentral.com/automator

To get started using this tool yourself go to this URL and sign in with your RingCentral credentials. https://automator.labs.ringcentral.com.

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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