Can I use a Twilio Flow to call a group of sales team numbers, wait for one to answer, THEN call the new lead and connect the two?

Question

I'm new to Twilio and don't write code, but it seems like this can be done in Studio, I'm just not seeing how yet.

So far, I've used Studio to make a very basic flow that calls a sales lead, then connects the call to sales agents. Basically, a new sales lead submits a Google Form with their phone number on it, then, using webhooks by Zapier, that number gets sent to the Rest API that triggers the Flow. I use a "Make Outgoing Call" widget to call the lead, a Say/Play widget to ask the lead to wait while being connected, then a "Connect Caller to" widget to connect the lead to the first agent that answers (of several called at the same time). It works great, but we would rather reverse it so that the list of agents is called first. Once an agent answers, then Twilio calls the new lead (contact.channel.address) and connects the two.

Is there a way to do this in Studio? The "Make Outgoing call" widget only calls the contact.channel.address and I'm not seeing any way around this. Maybe there's a different widget or app that I need to use?

Thanks, Steve

Answer 1

Unfortunately, there isn't a straightforward way to do this using all Studio Widgets.

The Multiple Numbers (Simulring) approach tends to be problematic in practice, since the sales agents often have voice mail enabled on their mobile devices and even if you set a dial timeout to cancel the call leg before their voice mail picks up, sometimes their devices are out of cell coverage or turned off/on do not disturb, etc and go right to voicemail, which will result in the sales lead being connected to the sales agents voicemail rather than a live sales agent.

Reversing the flow, where the sales agents are called first requires a variation of the Make Outgoing Call Widget which you've seen is not supported in Studio. The Make Outgoing Call Widget uses the Twilio Voice Calls API and would also a problematic in your use case since by default, each Twilio account has 1 Call Per Second, so unless the dialed sales agent list is randomly shuffled, the first agent on the list would have the greatest opportunity of answering the call as the other sales agents are queued and released at 1cps; you still have the Voicemail issue which you could possibly address using Answering Machine Detection/AMD Logic or Human Detection/Alternatives to AMD. You also need to handle the Simuluring logic in your code (since it is built into the Dial verb but not a part of the Twilio Voice Calls API), calling multiple parties/sales agents and then cancelling outstanding attempt call legs when a sales agent successfully answers the call.

One possible option, but not practical in Studio, is to use SMS to alert the agents of the sales lead and a messaging service (Copilot w/Scaler for higher SMS throughput - understanding the carriers can filter Long Codes and Toll Free). One Toll Free, which should not be used with Scaler would give you 3 messages per second throughput, and the first agent to respond to the SMS gets called by Twilio and then complete the connection to the sales lead.

So this is a build effort.