title	date	author	tags
Integrating Intercom with Twilio	2015-10-12 15:00 +0000	bob

Intercom's powerful Conversations API and Webhooks makes it a breeze to build support and engagement workflows with other channels such as SMS.

SMS in 2015

SMS (or "texts") have an extremely low barrier to entry, and yet are reported as one of the most engaging channels for quick communication. Customers frequently ask us how our Support product can be used alongside a webservice like Twilio to apply support over SMS.

A simple workflow

Let's imagine a simple series of actions we want to neatly support:

• Customer sends in an SMS to our helpline number
• A user is automatically created in Intercom, and the phone number is stored
• A new conversation is created in Intercom
• Admin replies to that conversation get sent to the user over SMS

Using Twilio's webhooks, we can write a handler to accomplish the first 3 steps via the Intercom API:

# Handle incoming SMS from Twilio, using a Sinatra handler:
post '/incoming_from_twilio' do
  from = params[:From]
  body = params[:Body]

  # Create or update the user, setting user_id = phone_number
  user = INTERCOM.users.create(user_id: from)

  # Start a new conversation
  INTERCOM.messages.create(
    from: {
      type: 'user',
      id: user.id
    },
    body: body
  )

  "ok"
end

Now we'll suddenly start tracking these SMS users as Intercom users, and start logging their conversations in Intercom.

Handling Admin Replies

Once one of our teammates responds to the SMS via Intercom, we need to channel that response back to the end-user via Twilio. We can subscribe to the Reply from a Teammate and Conversation assigned to Teammate topics using Intercom's webhooks, and provide another handler that does the reverse process of turning Intercom replies into SMS messages:

post '/incoming_from_intercom' do
  request.body.rewind
  intercom_params = JSON.parse(request.body.read)

  # Extract the new message, and convert it to plaintext
  last_message_html = intercom_params['data']['item']['conversation_parts']['conversation_parts'][-1]['body']
  last_message = Nokogiri::HTML(last_message_html).text

  # Load the user who we will SMS
  user = INTERCOM.users.find(id: intercom_params['data']['item']['user']['id'])

  # Send the response to Twilio
  unless last_message.strip.empty?
    TWILIO.messages.create(
      from: ENV['TWILIO_NUMBER'],
      to: user.user_id,
      body: last_message
    )
  end
  "ok"
end

This constitutes a quick way to begin supporting your users over SMS. All of this code is available on GitHub. Please reach out if you have any questions or problems when integrating Intercom with your chosen support workflow.