Getting Started

Send SMS Text Messages with Pipelines and Twilio

Twilio is a service used to automate SMS text messaging. Including Twilio within your Quickbase ecosystem can be a huge value gain, adding efficiency to internal processes, like alerting employees out in the field or providing transparency to your customers with real-time updates. In this blog, I'll be focusing on a Work Order use case where we provide the customer with real-time status updates throughout the lifecycle of the Work Order. 

Getting Started
First things first, login to your Twilio account and make sure you have your Account SID and Authentication token ready to go in order to authenticate your Twilio channel. From your Twilio profile, click on Settings → General. The API Credentials dialog will display the following...


Once you have the above information go to your pipeline, locate the Twilio channel, and copy/paste the Account SID and Auth Token accordingly.

For a more detailed breakdown of authenticating to your Twilio account, click here.

The Use Case

As I mentioned above for my use case I'll be using the example of a Work Order. We will be sending status updates to the customer as the order is received, the technician is on his way, and when the technician has arrived. In this example, I have two tables, 1 for my Work Orders and a related child table for Status Updates. Below is a breakdown of the relationship and the fields we'll be using in the pipeline.


The idea here is everytime we add a new status update it will trigger Twilio to send an SMS text message to the phone number of the contact on our Work Order with any additional details we provide.

The Pipeline

Step A: Quickbase record created(trigger)
1. Locate the Create record trigger and drag it into Step A. 
2. Select your Status updates table from the table dropdown.
3. Specify fields needed for subsequent steps. e.g. Status, Contact Name, Contact Phone Number, Order #, Details etc.


Step B: Send Message (Twilio Action)
1. Locate the Send Message Action within the Twilio channel and drag it into Step B below the Trigger in Step A.
2. Authenticate to your Twilio account and select the number you wish to use for these messages.
3. Drag the Phone Number from Step A into the corresponding "To" field.
4. In the body create your own message using a combination of your own words and the fields from Step A.
e.g.

Hi {{a.work_order_contact_name}}. Your status for Order#{{a.work_order_order}} has changed to {{a.status}}. {{a.details}}

That's it! The pipeline is complete! Now to see the finished product!

​After reading this you should now be ready to create your first pipeline utilizing the Twilio channel! It's a quick and easy way to augment your Quickbase ecosystem by gaining more efficiency and transparency throughout your many workflows! Drop a comment and let us know other ways you plan on using the Twilio channel!