Using Twilio SMS Conversations to generate leads in Salesforce

In my last post: http://www.mathewjenkinson.co.uk/twilio-sms-conversations-using-cookies/ I used HTTP Cookies to ask multiple questions to a handset. This got me thinking, what if I could use that conversation to generate a lead in Salesforce.

For example, your at an event, ‘CloudForce’ for example 😉 and you want to ask your guests about the experience they are having as well as capture the guests phone number in a lead campaign in Salesforce ready to pick up with the lead after the event. This gives you instant feedback on how people are enjoying the event, an incoming lead stream and verified phone numbers from potential customers.

In this post, Im going to build on using Twilio cookies to populate a lead campaign in Salesforce. To initiate this setup, I want to get the interested lead to message a keyword “CloudForceEU” for example. Once the initial message comes in, I want to ask 4 questions to the lead and then pass the captured data to our Salesforce instance.

To replicate this setup you will need:

  • An account with Twilio (https://www.twilio.com/try-twilio)
  • A SMS capable number within your Account Portal.
  • A Salesforce instance where you can add custom lead fields and use Web2Lead Form generator
  • A PHP based server to host the script found on my Github.  – If your savy you can make your own in another language such as Ruby or Python 🙂

Setting up Salesforce

To begin we need to add 4 custom fields to our salesforce lead’s panel. As I am choosing to ask 4 questions to our potential lead I want to capture this information so I can get an overall feel for the event as well as capturing info about our potential lead.

To add a custom field in Salesforce go to : salesforce.com/p/setup/layout/LayoutFieldList?type=Lead&setupid=LeadFields

or:  Setup > Leads > Fields and scroll to the bottom for ‘Custom Fields’ It should look something like:

Leads Generation SalesForce

Leads Generation SalesForce

Here we want the button marked ‘New’. Following the steps, we want a new text box of no more than 150 (This is WAY more than we need as we are only gathering simple responses). Fill in the details for the new field and then continue along. I tend to add the details of the question in the description so that I know what Question1 relates to. Continue this until you have all your question fields added.

Now we are going to build our Web2Lead form and capture the ID’s needed for our SMS Script.

Navigate to: Customize > Leads > Web-To-Lead

Remove all the initial fields from the box marked ‘Selected Fields’ and then import:

  • PhoneNumber
  • Campaign
  • Question1
  • Question2
  • Question3
  • Question4

You could add first name to this setup but you would need add a name collection to the SMS conversation, while its easy to do. Its not something I will be doing in this setup.

In the end your setup should look something like:

SF Web2Lead

SF Web2Lead

Then click generate. Salesforce will spit you out some code that you could use in a webform but we are going to grab the details of this code and use it in our SMS lead tracker. The code will look something like:

 

<!– ———————————————————————- –>
<!– NOTE: Please add the following <META> element to your page <HEAD>. –>
<!– If necessary, please modify the charset parameter to specify the –>
<!– character set of your HTML page. –>
<!– ———————————————————————- –>

<META HTTP-EQUIV=”Content-type” CONTENT=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″>

<!– ———————————————————————- –>
<!– NOTE: Please add the following <FORM> element to your page. –>
<!– ———————————————————————- –>

<form action=”https://www.salesforce.com/servlet/servlet.WebToLead?encoding=UTF-8″ method=”POST”>

<input type=hidden name=”oid” value=”ABC123″>
<input type=hidden name=”retURL” value=”http://”>

<!– ———————————————————————- –>
<!– NOTE: These fields are optional debugging elements. Please uncomment –>
<!– these lines if you wish to test in debug mode. –>
<!– <input type=”hidden” name=”debug” value=1> –>
<!– <input type=”hidden” name=”debugEmail” –>
<!– value=”[email protected]”> –>
<!– ———————————————————————- –>

<label for=”phone”>Phone</label><input id=”phone” maxlength=”40″ name=”phone” size=”20″ type=”text” /><br>

<label for=”Campaign_ID”>Campaign</label><select id=”Campaign_ID” name=”Campaign_ID”><option value=””>–None–</option></select><br>

Question1:<input id=”Question1″ maxlength=”174″ name=”Question1″ size=”20″ type=”text” /><br>

Question2:<input id=”Question2″ maxlength=”174″ name=”Question2″ size=”20″ type=”text” /><br>

Question3:<input id=”Question3″ maxlength=”174″ name=”Question3″ size=”20″ type=”text” /><br>

Question4:<input id=”Question4″ maxlength=”174″ name=”Question4″ size=”20″ type=”text” /><br>

<input type=”submit” name=”submit”>

</form>

 

As you can see its quite comprehensive, what we need from this code snippet; is the form URL, formID and then the ID’s for our phone number, campaign and questions. From the script above we get

  • URL Endpoint: ‘https://www.salesforce.com/servlet/servlet.WebToLead?encoding=UTF-8’
  • FormID: ‘ABC123’
  • Phone Number: ‘phone’
  • Campaign ID : ‘Campaign_ID’
  • Question 1 : ‘Question1’
  • Question 2 : ‘Question2’
  • Question 3 : ‘Question3’
  • Question 4 : ‘Question4’

This is the data we need to plug into our SMS cookie script.

At the end of the Twilio SMS conversation, the script will bundle up the details of the conversation and HTTPS POST to the salesforce URL.

Using Twilio cookies to mange the SMS Conversation

In the last post: http://www.mathewjenkinson.co.uk/twilio-sms-conversations-using-cookies/ I used HTTP Cookies to ask multiple questions to a handset. Now we are going to do the same thing, except at the end of this conversation we are going to post the data to Salesforce. You can find a copy of the script on my Github Twilio 2 SalesforceLeads.

The full script Im going to use is:

<?php
// Load the questions we want:
$question1 = ‘Hello. Welcome to the event! We would like to ask you some questions about your experience.</Message><Message>What did you think of the venue & refreshments? 5 (Exceptional) 0 (Poor)’; // by adding the </Message><Message> you can break up the initial response into a welcome message and then question1.
$question2 = ‘And the content of the Presentations? 5 (Exceptional) 0 (Poor)’;
$question3 = ‘How likely are you to attend future Twilio events from 5 (Definitely would) to 0 (definitely would not)’;
$question4 = ‘Is there anything specific you would like to discuss with Twilio? 5 (Yes, please asks someone to call) 0 (I’ll contact you if I need anything)’;
// After we have all 4 questions we can upload to the DB and thank the user for their input
$endStatement = ‘Thanks for your time. Hope you have a fun day!’;

// If we have no cookies we need to set all the cookies to nil and ask the opening question.
if(!isset($_COOKIE[‘question1’])) {
$TwiMLResponse = $question1;
//setcookie(‘question1’, ‘nil’);
setcookie(‘event’, $_POST[‘Body’]);
setcookie(‘question1’, ‘nil’);
setcookie(‘question2’, ‘nil’);
setcookie(‘question3’, ‘nil’);
setcookie(‘question4’, ‘nil’);
}
// If Question 1 is blank we can pair the answer to question 1
elseif ($_COOKIE[‘question1’] == ‘nil’) {
setcookie(‘question1’, $_POST[‘Body’]);
$TwiMLResponse = $question2;
}
// If Question 1 is not blank we find out if question 2 is blank and move up the ladder
elseif (($_COOKIE[‘question2’] == ‘nil’)) {
setcookie(‘question2’, $_POST[‘Body’]);
$TwiMLResponse = $question3;
}
elseif (($_COOKIE[‘question3’] == ‘nil’)) {
setcookie(‘question3’, $_POST[‘Body’]);
$TwiMLResponse = $question4;
}
// After we get the response for question 4, we can assign it to the question.
// Now we have all 4 questions answered and can pass the thank you note and also make a HTTP POST to our end point
elseif (($_COOKIE[‘question4’] == ‘nil’)) {
// With the last question answered, we can reply with our end statement and POST all the data from the conversation.
$TwiMLResponse = $endStatement;
// So now we have the cookies for the event and questions 1 to 3 and the BODY tag for answer 4. Now we can make a POST request to our form with that data.

// Get cURL resource
$curl = curl_init();
// Set some options – we are passing in a useragent too here
curl_setopt_array($curl, array(
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => 1,
CURLOPT_URL => ‘https://www.salesforce.com/servlet/servlet.WebToLead?encoding=UTF-8’,
CURLOPT_USERAGENT => ‘TwilioSMS’,
CURLOPT_POST => 1,
// POST fields for salesforce input:
CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => array(‘oid’ => ‘ABC123’, ‘phone’ => $_POST[‘From’], ‘Campaign_ID’ => $_COOKIE[‘event’], ‘Question1’ => $_COOKIE[‘question1’], ‘Question2’ => $_COOKIE[‘question2’], ‘Question3’ => $_COOKIE[‘question3’], ‘Question4’ => $_POST[‘Body’])

));
// Send the request & save response to $resp
$resp = curl_exec($curl);
// Close request to clear up some resources
curl_close($curl);
}
header(‘content-type: text/xml’);
?>
<Response><Message><?php echo $TwiMLResponse; ?></Message></Response>

As you can see Im only use one script to manage the conversation, updating the cookies and working out where the data needs to be updated to and eventually POSTed too. As we are capturing questions about our SalesForceEU event Im going to need 4 questions:

$question1 = ‘Hello. Welcome to the event! We would like to ask you some questions about your experience.</Message><Message>What did you think of the venue & refreshments? 5 (Exceptional) 0 (Poor)’; // by adding the </Message><Message> you can break up the initial response into a welcome message and then question1.
$question2 = ‘And the content of the Presentations? 5 (Exceptional) 0 (Poor)’;
$question3 = ‘How likely are you to attend future Twilio events from 5 (Definitely would) to 0 (definitely would not)’;
$question4 = ‘Is there anything specific you would like to discuss with Twilio? 5 (Yes, please asks someone to call) 0 (I’ll contact you if I need anything)’;

As the script gets more replies from Twilio it populates the questions cookies until they are all full of data. Then we thank the user for their time, assemble the POST request and send it off to SalesForce.

CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => 1,
CURLOPT_URL => ‘https://www.salesforce.com/servlet/servlet.WebToLead?encoding=UTF-8’,
CURLOPT_USERAGENT => ‘TwilioSMS’,
CURLOPT_POST => 1,
// POST fields for salesforce input:
CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => array(‘oid’ => ‘ABC123’, ‘phone’ => $_POST[‘From’], ‘Campaign_ID’ => $_COOKIE[‘event’], ‘Question1’ => $_COOKIE[‘question1’], ‘Question2’ => $_COOKIE[‘question2’], ‘Question3’ => $_COOKIE[‘question3’], ‘Question4’ => $_POST[‘Body’])

If we run a test between my phone and Salesforce we get:

Twilio2SalesForceSMS

Twilio2SalesForceSMS

 

and in SalesForce:

SalesForce Leed Capture from SMS

SalesForce Leed Capture from SMS

 

As you can see this opens up lots of possibilities of lead capture and accurate number sourcing from events. You can even have a campaign manager back at HQ reaching back out to leads while they are still at the event.