Using Workflow Builder to notify and respond to voicemail

RingCentral Intelligent Workflow Builder enables you to easily create automated workflows for RingCentral’s voice, SMS, video, and team messaging events — with no programming required.

In this tutorial I’ll show you how you can use the Workflow Builder to send a message in the RingCentral app to notify a recipient of a new voicemail, as well as send an SMS back to the caller to let them know that the voicemail was indeed received and that a response will be coming to them as quickly as possible.

To get started, after you log into Workflow Builder and create a new automation by clicking “New automation” in the top right of the dashboard. See figure 1.

Figure 1 — Starting a new automation

Now we’ll be asked what type of workflow we would like to create. Click on “Build your own workflow” and then click “next.” This will open the RingCentral Workflow Builder’s drag and drop screen, and prompt us for the Trigger event or Action that we want to watch for. When the defined event occurs the workflow will automatically run for us.

Setting up the voicemail Trigger

Select “Voicemail received” from the drop down “Type” list. That is all we want to keep an eye on for now, you do have other filters and run counts (only once per hour for example) but we won’t go into those actions at this time. The Trigger screen should look like figure 2.

Figure 2 — Selecting the workflow Trigger

Notifying ourselves of the new voicemail

The next activity that we want our workflow to perform is to let us know that we have received a new voicemail and to send the transcript of the message to us as an SMS message. To do this first we have to transcribe the voicemail to text so that we have access to its content for the remainder of the workflow. Simply add a new Action by clicking on the plus symbol under the Trigger.

You will be presented with a pop-up menu of three “Add” options: condition, action, or switch. In our case we want to add the Transcribe Action. So after selecting “Add action”, choose the “Transcribe” option. You see the screen as shown in figure 3. Here there is currently only one option per line. The trigger for the media is “Voicemail audio” and the language is English. After you choose these settings click save.

Figure 3 — Setting the options for transcribing a Voicemail

The next thing to be done is to set up a send SMS action to send the transcript to the destination that we want. Select the “+” sign again and select “Add action” again. This time choose the “Send SMS” option and you will be taken to the following workflow design screen, figure 4. Here you have to set the number that you will be sending the SMS out from and who will be receiving it. The last item on the action is to create the outgoing text message. As you can see we have some contextual information that can be provided by RingCentral’s Workflow Builder. To be shown a list of these data items you simply have to enter the “#” symbol. We have chosen to add in the sender’s name and phone number along with the voicemail transcript. We can intermix this data with our own static text to make the SMS message more personable.

Figure 4 — Creating the Send SMS action

The received message would then look like this:

Here we can see that the data items were replaced with the live data of my name and my extension number. The full phone number would have been provided if the message was coming from an outside source. The transcripted voicemail was just a short test message of: “To get it to work this visit the following link and log in with your Ringcentral account.”

Additionally we could have the message transcript also sent to us on the Team Messaging platform. This can be done by defining in another Action called “Send chat message”. You add the Action the same way as above but naturally select the chat message option instead. The Action design screen looks like that in figure 5.

Figure 5 — Set up for Team Message insertion

Again we can insert the transcribed voicemail message while adding our own custom text to the body of the message. Here we only have to set the receiver of the message and you can do that by selecting your name from the drop down list. You can send the message to group chats as well if you want to and any chats that you are a member of should be offered on the selection list.

The sent message will look like this:

Figure 6 — Sent voicemail message

Sending an SMS to the caller

The next step that we want our workflow to accomplish is to send a custom SMS message to the person that left it. However, we only want to do this if the sender has agreed to receive SMS messages. As a reminder, you should only send SMS messages to recipients who have opted into your messages per carrier requirements. One way to manage this is to ask the recipient to state in their voicemail that they would like to receive SMS messages. For example, in your prompt to the caller you can say “If you would like to receive SMS updates regarding your call, please say ‘SMS updates’ as part of your voicemail.”

Because of the SMS opt-in requirement, we’ll break this into two steps. First we will create what’s known as a condition to check for the caller stating they would like to receive SMS updates, and if so we’ll add an Action to send the SMS message.

Creating the condition

To create a condition in Workflow Builder access the popup menu with the “+” sign below the “Send chat message” node.

This time select “Add condition” and you will see this screen; figure 6. Here we have named the node “SMS Opt-in” and selected the action output to look within the transcript for the text of “SMS updates”. Save the node’s settings by clicking the “Add” button. You are then presented with a workflow stream that has a “True” and “False” path. Each path had a “+” sign so that you can add Actions for either side of the path. Figure 7 shows this with [1] — the true path and [2] — the false path.

Figure 7 — A conditional node

The “True” path means that their voicemail message contains the text requesting for SMS messages to be sent (“SMS updates”), so we can add an Action on that side for sending an SMS to them. The “False” side means that they did not provide the required consent in their voicemail for SMS acceptance, so we won’t send them an SMS message. If we wanted to take some other action in this case, we could do so by adding those actions under the “False” side.

Sending the message

We still have to create the Action to send the SMS message to the sender of the voicemail. To do that, once again, click on the “+” symbol on the “True” side of the conditional path. Select “Send SMS” from the action options and fill in the appropriate information. Figure 8 shows the filled in information.

Figure 8 — Send SMS to voicemail provider if they gave consent

The result of the SMS being sent to the voicemail provider should look something like this (as long as they consented to receive it.

Testing your workflow

Your overall workflow should now look something like that shown in figure 9. Be sure to save your efforts and test them out.

Figure 9 — Full RingCentral Workflow design.

I hope you enjoy working with the RingCentral Intelligent Workflow Builder as much as I do. It is a great time saver for taking care of the repeating mundane tasks that can take up so much time. Replying to voicemail and sending out courteous messaging upon consent with this tool helps by taking care of these items for you automatically.

You can try out Workflow Builder yourself and play with its many potential scenarios by going here and logging in with your RingCentral account or you can read more about the platform here.