With Make You Can Automate Voice Calls and SMS Applications Created on Plivo

Voice and SMS apps are the name and automation is the game. Expanding our ever-growing repository of apps/services, we bring to you Plivo. 

Plivo is a cloud API platform and global carrier service provider for voice calls & SMS. It is a platform that gives you everything you need to create voice & SMS applications to reach your customers. Plivo is available in over 200 countries.

This app gives you the power to create a powerful voice and SMS apps to allow you to keep in touch with your customers while they are on the go. 

As shown in the image above, it allows you to make phone calls, buy local numbers, send SMS, and etc. all on one platform. 

And, with Make you can link these capabilities with other apps/services to automate these processes and streamline your work. 

Let me show you how!

So, what’s available?

It’s recently launched, but there is already a rich list of modules that will give you countless integration possibilities. These include:

Triggers

• SMS received

• SMS received (instant)

• New recording added

• Call received

• Call received (instant)

Actions

• Send SMS

• Make a call and speak text

• Make a call and play audio

• Respond to an incoming call

What can I do with these?

With these modules you can automate a host of tasks:

• Send SMS reminders & alerts to your customers

• Forward an incoming call to your personal phone number

• SMS notifications on your phone

• Run a live SMS poll

• Forward an incoming call to your personal phone number

These are just a few of the possibilities that are available. 

To start, all you need is a Plivo account and an Make account and connect away to your other favorite apps/services. Once connected you can change the way and the speed in which you communicate with your customers. 

To show you the benefit here is an example: Automate an SMS poll and subsequently respond in real-time to your customers.

Step 1 — Run a live SMS poll

Running a live SMS poll allows you to connect with your customers in a new way. You can run an SMS contest, ask a question for a survey, follow-up, and overall gain valuable insights from your customer base. 

Plivo gives you the opportunity to send SMS, but with the power of Make, you can link this up to another app/service to more easily and quickly track responses. Plus with Make, you can accomplish this in real-time. 

For the first part of this use case, Plivo provides a great example of how to run a live SMS poll, here. In their example, they show how to set up a scenario between Plivo and Google Sheets to easily receive the answers from the poll and record it in a Google Sheets spreadsheet.

For the next step, we will show you how to respond to a live SMS poll by sending an SMS to customers to thank them for their answer.

Step 2 — Send SMS to customers

Sending a response back to your customers is just as easy! 

Now that the base of the scenario is created (Plivo’s example), all you have to do is build off of it to send a response back to your customers. 

To begin, go back into the same worksheet that was created to run a live SMS poll. Next, create a new column titled, “Response” and write a message underneath in the first row. For this case, type “Thank you for your response!”. This will be the message that will be sent back to your customers after they respond to the SMS poll.

Now that your spreadsheet is updated, you can now update your scenario. Next, return to the scenario that you created to run a live SMS poll. 

You will want to add a module that will automatically pull your response message and link it with the phone number that sent the answer, in order to send the response back by SMS. 

To do so, add the Get a cell module from Google Sheets. This will allow you to retrieve the specified cell of the response message.

Next, you will want to attach this message to the appropriate number. This will require you to aggregate together the Add a row and Get a cell modules. 

This will allow you to accurately map both the number and the message together to send the final SMS back to the customer.

Finally, you will add the Send SMS module from Plivo to send the response message back to your customer. In this final case, map the combined aggregation to the Send SMS module.

Now with this deluxe scenario, you can run a live SMS poll, receive and record the answer, and send a message back, instantly. Overall, quickening your response time and allowing you to keep in better touch with your customers. 

With Make you can expand the scope of your possibilities. 

If this has inspired you or would like to check out our service, visit www.make.com and try it for free today!