Rock U - Communications - SMS Pipeline

Transcribed Video Content

The SMS pipeline is a really cool feature that will make communications for your organization easier and more efficient. It's got a bunch of great benefits, you can use one phone number to do any number of things, and you only need one webhook to be able to use it instead of multiple webhooks. And so without further ado, let's dive in and check out how to set it up. From the home page, we're going to head into admin tools, and we're going to go to communications. And from within communications, we're going to click on SMS pipeline. Now, this is how the page will appear when you first access the SMS pipeline. There will only be one step, which is always the first step, which is incoming SMS message. And this will not be able to be changed. You can't move it. You can't do anything with it because, again, always the first step is we get an SMS message coming in. But what happens after that? That's where the pipeline comes into play. So just the instructions say, drag and drop here. You can drag and drop either a reply, a launch workflow, or an SMS conversations action. So let's set that up right now. First, we're going to send the person a response. So I'm going to have reply be my first action after the incoming SMS message. Then let's say that we want to launch a workflow, and so I'm going to drag that there. And then let's say that we want to end with SMS conversations, that once we're done with the reply and the workflow, we're going to go to SMS conversations. Now, I'm going to add it to the bottom, but I could just as easily add it in between the reply and launch workflow options or have it be the first step. You can put it wherever. And then, of course, once it's placed, you can adjust the order if you need to quickly and easily just that. So let's dive into each of the actions to show you some of the options that you have associated with each one. We'll start with reply here at the top. And so by clicking on the reply bar, you see I get some options that open up over here on the right. I can change the name from reply to something reply for serving. I'm going to click continue and make sure that that's enabled, and I'm going to circle back to what that means in just a minute. Down here we have filters. Now you can filter based on the incoming, so the external SMS phone number, and or you can filter according to the message content. And so in this case, I renamed this reply for serving because I wanna send this response for messages that contain the word serving. And there's an any or an all, and so this is a series of ands or a series of ors, and I'm gonna do any because they might say instead serve. And if I receive a reply with serving or serve in the message, then I can send a response. And that'll be my response to any incoming SMS messages that contain serving or Serve. And I'm going to click Save. And as soon as I do that, you'll notice that now I have this little down arrow that's been added to my Reply for Serving since I changed that name from Reply to Reply for Serving. And so this all comes from this area here that we set up. The new name has now been applied and that down arrow relates to the Continue checkbox. And what does that mean? That means that once the reply has been sent, we are going to continue to the next step in the pipeline, and we're not going to just stop. If we were to unselect Continue and save it, not only does that go away, but what that would mean is that if we received an SMS message coming in with serving or serve in the content, we would send this response back to the person and then it would just stop. Now, the Continue only applies for a successful process. And so if we received an SMS message that did not have serving or serve in the content, then it would automatically continue on to launch the workflow. Only if this is selected are the criteria met will it then continue on. And I'm gonna leave it that. And so in this model, what this means is the person did have the word server serving included in their text message. Even though that's true and even though we sent them a response, we're still going to carry on down to the workflow, which has similar options. So I'm not going to spend much time on the first two areas here because they all do the same sort of thing. But down here at the bottom, we have some additional workflow options that we can use. So here, we'll pick the type of workflow to launch. And so we can pick I'm going pick a disk request. Not that that necessarily makes sense for what we're doing, but just for example purposes. We also have an option for Pass Nameless Person. If selected, the Pass Nameless Person option will cause a nameless person to be passed into the workflow. And so what does that mean? Nameless people are sort of their own entity. It just means that you've received an SMS text message from someone that you don't know who it is, and that phone number isn't in the system, so you just have this phone number floating around that's not tied to any particular individual. And so this is asking, do you still want to carry on with the workflow for this person? Yes or no. So you'll leave that box checked or unchecked accordingly. Below the past nameless person, we have the workflow name template. And this is the Lava template to use for setting the workflow name. And down below it, directly related, is the key or value list of workflow attributes to set with the given Lava Merge template. And so we can save these options, and I'm going to click on save. Now you'll notice that this does not continue, which means if this is successfully processed and looking at this there's no reason why it wouldn't be, we don't have any filters or anything that, it's not going to continue on. However, if we were to add something that the message contains, again, if we were going to use serving or serve. And we were successful in identifying that the incoming message has the words either serve or serving in it, then it would continue on down to the SMS conversations. And this one is very basic because this is usually the end of the line for the SMS pipeline. It doesn't need to be. Obviously, you can use the continue button. But typically at this point what it means is that you're gonna take the conversation to the SMS conversations page and anything else that happens would happen from there. So all you can do here is add filters and change the name. And that's all it takes to set up your SMS pipeline. There's a lot more that you can do. That was a very basic example, so be sure and check out the documentation that we have posted online in the communicating using Rock book for all of the options and different things that you can do as well as some different examples. Again, hope you enjoyed this video and found it informative. Thanks for watching.