Your company has settled on Plivo to handle its voice and messaging communications, and now it’s your job to start integrating Plivo into your company’s applications. Don’t worry — Plivo has an SDK to help you out. Let’s see how to make outbound calls and handle incoming calls through Plivo in a .NET Core application.

Install the Plivo SDK

We’ll presume you already have .NET Core and .NET CLI installed. Change to the directory into which you want to install the Plivo .NET Core SDK and run

$ dotnet new console
$ dotnet add package Plivo --version 5.3.0

Find your Auth ID and Auth Token

You have to have proper credentials before you can use the Plivo API. We provide an Auth ID and Auth Token in the Account section at the top of the overview page of the Plivo console.

Choose a phone number

You need an voice-enabled Plivo phone number if you want to receive incoming calls. Check the Numbers screen of the Plivo console to see what numbers you have available. You can also rent numbers from this screen.

Use PHLO to set up an outbound call

Now you can turn to PHLO, Plivo’s visual workflow design studio, to set up the workflow for an outbound call. Click on the PHLO icon on the left-side navigation bar, then on Create New PHLO. In the window that pops up, click Build My Own.

Let’s start with a very simple workflow. From the list of components on the left side, drag and drop the Initiate Call component onto the canvas, then connect the Start node to the Initiate Call node using the API Request trigger state.

Now you can add configuration information for the call in the right pane. Valid phone numbers begin with a plus sign and a country code. Add a caller ID number in the From field and a destination number in the To field, then click Validate to save the configuration.

PHLO lets you use variables for From and To values, but we’re keeping it simple for this example.

Now drag the Play Audio component onto the canvas. Connect the Initiate Call node to Play Audio using the Answered trigger state. In the Configuration panel, enter the text you want to play for the call recipient, then click Validate.

That’s all we’re going to do for now — we told you it was simple. Give the PHLO a name by clicking on the pencil icon in the upper left, then click the Save button in the upper right.

Run the PHLO to make a call

Now you can trigger the PHLO and test it out. Copy the PHLO ID from the end of the URL of the workflow you just created. You’re also going to need your Auth ID and Auth Token. Open the file Program.cs in the CS project and paste this code into it:

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using System;
using Plivo;

namespace test_PHLO
{
    class Program
    {
        public static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            var phloClient = new PhloApi("<auth_id>", "<auth_token>"); 
            var phloID = "<phlo_id>"; 
            var phlo = phloClient.Phlo.Get(phloID);   
            Console.WriteLine(phlo.Run());
        }
    }
}

Substitute actual values for <auth_id>, <auth_token>, and <PHLO_ID>. Save the file and run it with the commandBoom — you’ve made an outbound call.

$ dotnet run

Set up inbound calls

Of course outbound calls are only half of the equation. Plivo supports inbound calls as well. To see how, let’s create another PHLO and again specify Build My Own. This time, drag the Play Audio component onto the canvas and connect the Start node to it using the Incoming Call trigger state. In the Configuration panel, enter some text to speak to the caller when the call is answered, then click Validate to save the configuration. Give this PHLO a name, then click Save.

Before you can receive a call using this PHLO, you have to assign it to a Plivo number. Go back to the Plivo console and click on Phone Numbers on the left nav bar. From the list of Your Numbers, click on the number you want to use. On the next screen, from the Application Type dropdown, choose PHLO. From the PHLO Name dropdown, choose the PHLO you just created. Then click Update Number at the bottom of the screen.

Guess what? You’re done! You don’t have to run a program for this PHLO to work. Just call the Plivo number you specified and you should hear the message you configured read by Plivo’s text-to-speech processor.

Conclusion

And that’s all there is to sending and receiving voice calls using Plivo’s .NET SDK. Don’t use .NET? Don’t worry — we have SDKs for Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, .NET Core, .NET Framework, and Go.

Haven’t tried Plivo yet? Getting started takes only five minutes. Sign up today.

Sending an outbound message using the Plivo SMS platform is easy, but communication should be a two-way street. Customers should be able to text you, and you should acknowledge their messages and address their concerns. To do this, you can build a PHP Laravel application to receive and respond to incoming SMS messages on a Plivo phone number. In this post, we walk you through how to implement this.

Prerequisites

Before you get started, you’ll need:

• A Plivo account — sign up for one for free if you don’t have one already.
• An SMS-enabled Plivo phone number as you want to receive incoming SMS messages. To search for and buy an available number, go to Phone Numbers > Buy Numbers on the Plivo console.
• Laravel and Plivo PHP packages.
• ngrok — a utility that exposes your local development server to the internet over secure tunnels.

Create a Laravel application to receive SMS messages

First, you need to install Laravel if you haven’t installed it already. We suggest using Composer to install it. Add a new Laravel project with boilerplate code with the command composer create-project laravel/laravel receive_sms --prefer-dist. This will create a receive_sms directory with the necessary folders and files for development. Then change to the newly created “receive_sms” project directory and install the Plivo PHP package (composer require plivo/plivo-php).

Once you’ve installed Laravel and the Plivo PHP SDK, run php artisan make:controller SMSController to create a Laravel controller to handle incoming SMS messages on a Plivo number. Use this code:

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;
require '../vendor/autoload.php';
use Illuminate\Http\Request;

class SMSController extends Controller
{
    public function receivesms()
    {
         $from_number = $_REQUEST["From"];
         $to_number = $_REQUEST["To"];
         $text = $_REQUEST["Text"];
         echo("Message received - From $from_number, To: $to_number, Text: $text");
    }
}

Now, you need to add a route for the “receivesms” function in the SMSController class. Open the routes/web.php file and add this line at the end of the file:

Route::match(['get', 'post'], '/receivesms', 'App\Http\Controllers\SMSController@receivesms');

Return a Message XML document to reply to incoming messages

To reply to an incoming SMS message, you need to return an XML document from the URL configured as the message_url in the application assigned to the Plivo number. The PHP SDK can manage the XML document generation, and you can use the Message XML element to reply to incoming SMS messages. Use this code:

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;
require '../vendor/autoload.php';
use Plivo\RestClient;
use Plivo\XML\Response;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;

class SMSController extends Controller
{
    public function receivesms()
    {
         $from_number = $_REQUEST["From"];
         $to_number = $_REQUEST["To"];
         $text = $_REQUEST["Text"];
         echo("Message received - From $from_number, To: $to_number, Text: $text");
    }

    public function replysms()
    {
        $number = $_REQUEST["From"];
        $to = $_REQUEST["To"];
        $text = $_REQUEST["Text"];
        $response = new Response();
        $params = array(
            'src' => $to,
            'dst' => $number,
            'callbackUrl' => "https://www.foo.com/sms_status/",
            'callbackMethod' => "POST"
        );
        $message_body = "Thank you, we have received your request.";
        $response->addMessage($message_body, $params);

        Header('Content-type: text/xml');
        return $response->toXML();
    }
}

As we did earlier, we need to add a route for the “replysms” function in the SMSController class. Open the routes/web.php file and add this line at the end of the file:

Route::match(['get', 'post'], '/replysms', 'App\Http\Controllers\SMSController@replysms');

Note: We need to add the route of the app to the “except” array to disable CSRF verification - app/Http/Middleware/VerifyCsrfToken.php

<?php

namespace App\Http\Middleware;

use Illuminate\Foundation\Http\Middleware\VerifyCsrfToken as Middleware;

class VerifyCsrfToken extends Middleware
{
    /**
     * The URIs that should be excluded from CSRF verification.
     *
     * @var array
     */
    protected $except = [
        '/receivesms',
        '/replysms'
    ];
}

Test the code locally

Now the SMSController is ready to handle incoming SMS messages to your Plivo number using Laravel and Plivo PHP SDK. To run the code on the Laravel server, use the command

You should see your basic server application in action on http://127.0.0.1:8000/replysms.

Expose the local server to the internet using ngrok

Once you see the application working locally, the next step is to connect the application to the internet to receive and reply to messages. For that, we recommend using ngrok, which exposes local servers behind NATs and firewalls to the public internet over secure tunnels. Install it and run ngrok on the command line, specifying the port that hosts the application on which you want to receive messages (8000 in this case, as our local Laravel application is running there):

Ngrok will display a forwarding link that you can use as a webhook to access your local server over the public network.

Test the link by opening the ngrok URL(https://b82335d346bb.ngrok.io/replysms) in a browser. We used HTTPie to check the XML response from the ngrok URL.

Connect the Laravel application to a Plivo number

The final step is to configure the app as a Plivo messaging application and assign it to a Plivo number on which you want to receive SMS messages.

Go to the Plivo console and navigate to Messaging > Applications > XML, then click on the Add New Application button in the upper right.

Provide a friendly name for the app — we used “App-Incoming-SMS” — and configure the ngrok URL https://b82335d346bb.ngrok.io/replysms as the Message URL. Select the HTTP verb as POST, then click Create Application.

Now go to Phone Numbers > Your Numbers and click on the number to which you want to assign the application. From the Plivo Application drop-down, choose the message application you just created. Finally, click Update Number.

Test the application

Send an SMS to the Plivo number you selected. You should see that the Laravel application automatically sends a reply back to your mobile number.

And that’s how simple it is to receive and respond to incoming SMS messages using Plivo’s PHP SDK and a Laravel application.

Haven’t tried Plivo yet? Getting started is easy and only takes five minutes! Sign up today.

Making an outbound phone call using the Plivo Voice platform is easy, but communication should be a two-way street. Customers should be able to call you back, and you should answer the calls and address their concerns. This guide shows you how to receive incoming calls on Plivo numbers and manage the call flow once a call reaches the Plivo voice platform. To see how to do this, we’ll build a Ruby on Rails application to receive an incoming call and greet the caller with a text-to-speech (TTS) message.

Prerequisites

Before you get started, you’ll need:

• A Plivo account — sign up for one for free if you don’t have one already.
• A voice-enabled Plivo phone number if you want to receive incoming calls. To search for and buy a number, go to Phone Numbers > Buy Numbers on the Plivo console.
• Rails and Plivo Ruby packages.
• ngrok — a utility that exposes your local development server to the internet over secure tunnels.

Create a Rails application to receive incoming calls and play a TTS message

First, you need to install Rails if you haven’t installed it already. Use the command gem install rails, or use bundler or RVM to install it. Add a new Rails project with boilerplate code with the command rails new myrailsapp. This will create a myrailsapp directory with the necessary folders and files for development. Then add the Plivo Ruby gem (gem ‘plivo’, ‘~> 4.16.0’) as a dependency in the gemfile and use the command bundle install to install it.

Once you’ve installed Rails and the Plivo Ruby SDK, change to the newly created myrailsapp project directory and run rails generate controller Plivo receive_call to create a Rails controller to handle incoming calls on a Plivo number. To handle an incoming call, you need to return an XML document from the URL configured as the answer URL in the application assigned to the Plivo number. The Ruby SDK can manage the XML document generation, and you can use the Speak XML element to play a text-to-speech message to the caller. Use this code:

class PlivoController < ApplicationController
 def receive_call
   response = Plivo::XML::Response.new
   speak_body = 'Hello, you just received your first call'
   response.addSpeak(speak_body)

   xml = Plivo::XML::PlivoXML.new(response)
   render xml: xml.to_xml
 end
end

Test the code locally

To run the code on the rails server, use the command $ rails server. You should see your basic server application in action on http://127.0.0.1:3000/plivo/receive_call/.

Expose the local server to the internet using ngrok

Once you see the application working locally, the next step is to connect the application to the internet to return the XML document to process the incoming call. For that, we recommend using ngrok, which exposes local servers behind NATs and firewalls to the public internet over secure tunnels.

Install ngrok, but before you start the ngrok service, whitelist ngrok by adding it to the config.hosts list in the config/environments/development.rb file with this command. You’ll face a Blocked host error if you fail to add it.

# whitelist ngrok domain
config.hosts << /[a-z0-9]+\.ngrok\.io/

Now run ngrok on the command line, specifying the port that hosts the application on which you want to receive messages (3000 in this case, as our local Rails application runs there):

$ ./ngrok http 3000

Ngrok will display a forwarding link that you can use as a webhook to access your local server over the public network.

Test the link by opening the ngrok URL (https://d3498206694e.ngrok.io/plivo/receive_call/) in a browser. We used HTTPie to check the XML response from the ngrok URL.

Connect the Rails application to a Plivo number

The final step is to configure the application as a Plivo voice application and assign it to a Plivo number on which you want to receive incoming calls.

Go to the Plivo console and navigate to Voice > Applications > XML, then click on the Add New Application button in the upper right.

Provide a friendly name for the application — we used “App-Incoming-call” — and configure the ngrok URL https://d3498206694e.ngrok.io/plivo/receive_call/ as the Answer URL. Select the HTTP verb as POST, then click Create Application.

Now go to Phone Numbers > Your Numbers and click on the number to which you want to assign the application. From the Plivo Application drop-down, choose the voice application you just created. Finally, click Update Number.

Test the application

Make a phone call to the Plivo number you selected. You should see that the Rails application automatically greets the caller with the text-to-speech message configured in the app.

And that’s how simple it is to receive an incoming call on a Plivo number and handle it using XML documents using Plivo’s Ruby SDK and a Rails application. You can implement other use cases on the Plivo Voice platform, such as phone system IVR, call forwarding, and number masking, as your business requires.

Haven’t tried Plivo yet? Getting started is easy and only takes five minutes. Sign up today.

Automation helps businesses deliver richer customer experiences, and one of the best ways to achieve automation in a contact center is to deploy an interactive voice response (IVR) system.

We’re all familiar with that voice telling us to “press 0 for representative” — a voice menu system that uses speech recognition or Touch-Tone input to route callers to an appropriate agent. The concept is simple, but your company’s IVR system can be as sophisticated as you’d like, with customized greetings, messages, and prompts, so that when customers call you, they get a very personalized experience.

By leveraging IVR, your business can route callers to the most appropriate department or the agent most qualified to meet their needs, reducing costs and improving productivity. Among its many advantages, IVR can provide increased operational efficiency, stronger brand image, and better customer insights.

Benefits of IVR Systems in Contact Centers

IVR can automate simple tasks like account balance inquiries or bill payments, taking the burden of these administrative tasks off the plates of call center agents. This not only reduces wait times for complex problems but also allows agents to dedicate more time to resolving more complex issues, improving the overall quality of service. 

For contact centers, IVRs increase efficiency and lower operational costs, as fewer live agents are required to handle basic inquiries. Additionally, IVR systems can be designed to gather valuable customer data during interactions, which can be used for better routing, improved self-service options, and overall enhanced customer experiences.

1. Increased operational efficiency

Maximizing efficiency is essential in today’s competitive business environment. It’s not cost-effective to have agents handle every customer phone call. You shouldn’t need to pay employees to answer simple questions like “How late are you open?” or “What’s my account balance?” IVR provides an automated say to handle these simple questions, and lets you send callers to agents for more complicated interactions.

IVR also increases first contact resolution rates, because a good IVR system can direct callers to the department or even the specific agent who’s most capable of meeting their needs. It can lower the likelihood of having to transfer callers between agents, increasing customer service efficiency.

2. Stronger brand image

Like your logo or website design, the voice, music, scripts, and tone you choose for your IVR system convey your brand and business personality. Aligning your IVR menus to be consistent with your other brand elements builds a more powerful image for your customers. And well-configured call flows are a strong indication of your commitment to the best customer experience.

Speaking of brand image, you can add marketing messages to your IVR system for customers to listen to. Customers on hold are in a perfect position to absorb your marketing messages.

3. Better customer insights

You can deliver the best customer experience only if you understand how your customers interact with you. Marketers can leverage IVR systems to learn more about their customers through polls and surveys. IVR systems let marketers gather customer likes, interests, and demographics. With such rich customer data, businesses can conduct post-campaign analysis to determine which demographics responded most favorably, and adjust future messaging accordingly.

Tips for better IVR menus

Want to improve the effectiveness of your IVR systems? Follow these best practices:

• Keep your script short and sweet. Keep menu options minimal and make it easy for callers to resolve issues themselves, or speak to an agent who can.
• Offer a direct route to a supervisor where needed.
• Integrate the IVR system with your CRM system — this lets you personalize the interaction and prioritize high-value callers.
• Offer the option of a call-back when the call queue is long.
• Offer both speech recognition and Touch-Tone as options for callers.

‍

Build an IVR system with Plivo

Plivo’s Voice API puts you in control of your IVR system so you can create exceptional customer experiences while reducing operational costs. We provide your developers with the ability to easily integrate automatic speech recognition (ASR), so you can respond to customers however and whenever they want to connect with you.

Setting up an IVR phone tree with Plivo is simple. Configure one of your Plivo numbers to send a request to your web application when you receive a call. Your application should respond to the request with a top-level menu. Plivo plays the menu options and gathers input from the caller. When the caller makes a selection, Plivo uses the logic you’ve defined to route the call to the appropriate agent or the front desk. Phone numbers can be hard coded or read from a database, and endpoints can be hard or soft phones. To get a full breakdown of how it works, check out our product documentation.

IVR systems can not only enhance customer experience, but also improve agent success while reducing operational costs. To maximize the benefits of interactive voice response, choose a solution like Plivo to help you capture and leverage customer information to deliver a seamless, personalized experience.

Haven’t tried Plivo yet? Getting started is easy! Sign up today.

Businesses do more than just supply products or services. During the pandemic we saw that they also supply connections. To strengthen those connections, businesses are starting to open new channels of communication.

Retailers and ecommerce brands especially have begun finding creative ways of using mobile communication throughout the customer journey, so that their consumers’ interactions with their brand are more meaningful. They’re working on delivering personalized offers through mobile channels, providing timely communications during purchases, and measuring user satisfaction after customers begin using the product.

If MMS marketing wasn’t already top of mind for retailers before the pandemic cut into in-person shopping, it certainly is now. Retailers’ ability to leverage MMS to send personalized, targeted communication and provide rich mobile experiences results in higher response rates than phone calls or email.

Every brand today, no matter what space it’s in, should take advantage of consumers’ mobile capabilities. MMS can reach mobile customers and generate a high level of engagement.

Here are four ways retailers can leverage MMS for a better customer experience.

Coupons and promotions

Consumers redeem SMS-delivered coupons about 10 times more than other coupon types, and 50% of US consumers make a purchase after receiving an advertising text, a discount coupon, or a QR code.

Messaging with pictures and video puts a new spin on a format that already works. Retailers can use MMS to share scannable QR codes and coupon picture messages that customers can redeem in stores, and rich messaging features like GIFs, videos, and sound clips add to the experience. When you package pictures with your promotion you have a recipe for huge engagement, and you raise the potential that the promotion itself is shared.

Today’s consumers have an expectation of getting what they want when they want it, and time is of the essence. Sharing timely, targeted offers via MMS is the optimal way to meet that expectation and drive higher levels of purchases.

Personal shopping

Personal shopping is all about smoothing away shopping hassles by understanding customers’ personal styles and recognizing items they’ll like. People already use their smartphones for shopping; delivering assistance via MMS is a natural enhancement.

You can kick-start an interaction with automated SMS messaging, and if a customer wants to see what an item looks like, you can bring in MMS for the assist. Imagine how much easier a digital personal shopping experience is when consumers can quickly exchange product pictures with retail salespeople. Instead of describing a style verbally, sales staff can send a photo. The two-way, conversational nature of texting, paired with the visual benefits of MMS, allows retailers to go back and forth with customers easily, ask clarifying questions, and add a personal touch to ultimately make a sale. Think of it as a premium service for loyal customers when they need help putting together an outfit remotely.

Product registration

Product registration reminders are a powerful but often overlooked messaging interaction opportunity. If you sell a product with a warranty or offer post-purchase offers and support, you’ll want to get customers engaged straightaway. The trouble is, product registration can be a boring, manual process, and sometimes requires a phone call.

Instead, invite buyers to register their products the easy way: by sending you a photo of a bar code associated with the product. No hassle, no typos, just a convenient way to show interest in some after-sale engagement.

Branded messaging

SMS used to be a text-only experience. Now, when you use MMS, you can send a message that arrives complete with your brand logo. Images help you get noticed, and MMS gives your users a safe, verified messaging experience, without any kind of technical intervention needed on either side.

By messaging customers through their mobile devices, retailers can deliver highly targeted marketing communications to shoppers and open the door to new revenue opportunities and long-term engagement.

Picking an MMS provider

Since MMS is such a personal form of communication, we advise businesses to be thoughtful about when and how they use it. A messaging strategy loses its power if a business inundates consumers with irrelevant messages or sends messages too often or at inconvenient times, such as when they’re settling into bed for the night. You want an API solution that makes it easy for developers to programmatically send and receive messages, that also leverages the cloud for scalability, and that runs on a global carrier network to intelligently and cost-effectively route messages.

Plivo’s MMS API platform makes it easy to send and receive pictures on all US and Canadian phone number, with no wait times or upfront costs. Features include:

Multiple sender types: You can use long code and toll-free numbers to send and receive MMS messages across the US and Canada.

Multimedia formats: Plivo supports sending and receiving image (JPEG, GIF), audio (MP3 and WAV), and video (MP4) files of many types for a rich multimedia experience.

Multimedia storage: Plivo provides multimedia storage for both inbound and outbound MMS messages to enable easy access and reuse.

Message queuing: Plivo’s MMS API queues and retries your concurrent messaging requests to comply with carrier regulations and offer increased deliverability.

Plivo enables businesses of all types and sizes to create a unique, personalized experience for their customers by making use of MMS and its versatility and support for a wide range of media formats. Adding audio and visual components can enhance simple text, leading to higher engagement and increased responsiveness from your customers.

Learn all about sending and receiving MMS from our product documentation. Haven’t tried Plivo yet? Getting started is easy. Sign up today!

Sending an outbound message using the Plivo SMS platform is easy, but communication should be a two-way street. Customers should be able to text you, and you should acknowledge their messages and address their concerns. To do this, you can build a Ruby on Rails application to receive and respond to incoming SMS messages on a Plivo phone number. In this post, we walk you through how to implement this.

Prerequisites

Before you get started, you’ll need:

• A Plivo account — sign up for one for free if you don’t have one already.
• An SMS-enabled Plivo phone number, as you want to receive incoming SMS messages. To search for and buy an available number, go to Phone Numbers > Buy Numbers on the Plivo console.
• Rails and Plivo Ruby packages.
• ngrok — a utility that exposes your local development server to the internet over secure tunnels.

Create a Rails application to receive SMS messages

First, you need to install Rails if you haven’t installed it already. Use the command gem install rails, or use bundler or RVM to install it. Add a new Rails project with boilerplate code with the command rails new myrailsapp. This will create a myrailsapp directory with the necessary folders and files for development. Then add the Plivo Ruby gem (gem ‘plivo’, ‘~> 4.16.0’) as a dependency in the gemfile and use the command bundle install to install it.

Once you’ve installed Rails and the Plivo Ruby SDK, change to the newly created myrailsapp project directory and run rails generate controller Plivo sms to create a Rails controller to handle incoming SMS messages on a Plivo number. Use this code:

class PlivoController < ApplicationController
 def sms
   from_number = params[:From]
   to_number = params[:To]
   text = params[:Text]
   puts "Message received - From: #{from_number}, To: #{to_number}, Text: #{text}"
 end
end

Return a Message XML document to reply to incoming messages

To reply to an incoming SMS message, you need to return an XML document from the URL configured as the Message URL in the application assigned to the Plivo number. The Ruby SDK can manage the XML document generation, and you can use the Message XML element to reply to incoming SMS messages. Use this code:

class PlivoController < ApplicationController
 def sms
   from_number = params[:From]
   to_number = params[:To]
   text = params[:Text]
   puts "Message received - From: #{from_number}, To: #{to_number}, Text: #{text}"
 end
 def reply
   from_number = params[:From]
   to_number = params[:To]
   text = params[:Text]
   response = Plivo::XML::Response.new
   params = {
     src: to_number,
     dst: from_number,
   }
   message_body = "Thank you, we have received your request"
   response.addMessage(message_body, params)
   xml = Plivo::XML::PlivoXML.new(response)
   puts xml.to_xml
   render xml: xml.to_xml
 end
end

Now open the config/routes.rb file and add the route for this reply function. The routes would become:

Rails.application.routes.draw do
 get 'plivo/sms'
 get 'plivo/reply'
end

Test the code locally

To run the code on the rails server, use the command

$ rails server

You should see your basic server application in action on http://127.0.0.1:3000/plivo/reply/.

Expose the local server to the internet using ngrok

Once you see the application working locally, the next step is to connect the application to the internet to receive and reply to messages. For that, we recommend using ngrok, which exposes local servers behind NATs and firewalls to the public internet over secure tunnels.

Install ngrok, but before you start the ngrok service, whitelist ngrok by adding it to the config.hosts list in the config/environments/development.rb file with this command. You’ll face a Blocked host error if you fail to add it.

Now run ngrok on the command line, specifying the port that hosts the application on which you want to receive messages (3000 in this case, as our local Rails application runs there):

Ngrok will display a forwarding link that you can use as a webhook to access your local server over the public network.

Test the link by opening the ngrok URL (https://dd10ca394535.ngrok.io/plivo/reply/) in a browser. We used HTTPie to check the XML response from the ngrok URL.

Connect the Rails application to a Plivo number

The final step is to configure the application as a Plivo messaging application and assign it to a Plivo number on which you want to receive SMS messages.

Go to the Plivo console and navigate to Messaging > Applications > XML, then click on the Add New Application button in the upper right.

Provide a friendly name for the app — we used “App-Incoming-SMS” — and configure the ngrok URL https://dd10ca394535.ngrok.io/plivo/reply/ as the Message URL. Select the HTTP verb as POST, then click Create Application.

Now go to Phone Numbers > Your Numbers and click on the number to which you want to assign the application. From the Plivo Application drop-down, choose the message application you just created. Finally, click Update Number.

Test the application

Test the application by sending an SMS message to the Plivo number you selected. You should see that the Rails application automatically sends a reply back to your mobile number.

And that’s how simple it is to receive and respond to incoming SMS messages using Plivo’s Ruby SDK and a Rails application.

Haven’t tried Plivo yet? Getting started is easy and only takes five minutes! Sign up today.

Your company has settled on Plivo to handle its voice and messaging communications, and now it’s your job to start integrating Plivo into your company’s applications. Don’t worry — Plivo has an SDK to help you out. Let’s see how to send and receive MMS through Plivo in a Node.js application.

Install the Plivo SDK and Express.js Framework

We’ll presume you already have your Node.js environment set up. Change to the directory into which you want to install the Plivo Node.js SDK and run

$ npm i -S plivo express body-parser

Find your Auth ID and Auth Token

You have to have proper credentials before you can use the Plivo API. We provide an Auth ID and Auth Token in the Account section at the top of the overview page of the Plivo console.

Choose a phone number

You need an MMS-enabled Plivo phone number to send MMS to the US and Canada, the two countries where Plivo supports sending MMS. Check the Phone Numbers screen of your Plivo console to see what numbers you have available and which of them support MMS capabilities. You can also buy numbers from this screen.

Send an MMS message

Now you’re ready to start. Create a file called SendMMS.js and paste in this code:

let plivo = require('plivo');
let client = new plivo.Client('<auth_id>', '<auth_token>');
client.messages.create({
    src: "+14151234567", //from
    dst: "+14157654321", // to
    text: "Hello, from Nodejs", // text
    type: "mms",
    media_urls: ["https://media.giphy.com/media/26gscSULUcfKU7dHq/source.gif"],
    media_ids: ["801c2056-33ab-499c-80ef-58b574a462a2"]
}).then(function(message_created) {
    console.log(message_created)
}).catch(function(error) {
    console.log(error);
});

Replace the placeholders auth_id and auth_token with actual values from the Plivo console. Save the file and run it with the command

$ node SendMMS.js

Note: If you’re using a Plivo trial account, you can send messages only to phone numbers that have been verified with Plivo. You can verify a phone number using the Sandbox Numbers page of the console. Also, if you want to upload your media files to Plivo and use them, you can upload the file on the Messaging > MMS Media Upload page of the console.

Receive an MMS message

Of course, sending messages is only half of the equation. When someone sends an MMS message to your US or Canada Plivo phone number, you can receive it on your server by setting a Message URL in your Plivo application. Plivo will send the message along with other parameters, including the Media_URL(s), to your Message URL.

Use this code to start a local server:

Save this code in any file — we’ll call ours receive_mms.js. To run this file on the server, go to the folder where this file resides and issue the command

You should see your basic server app in action on http://localhost:3000/receive_mms/.

That’s fine for testing, but it’s not much good if you can’t connect to the internet to receive incoming messages and handle callbacks. For that, we recommend using ngrok, which exposes local servers behind NATs and firewalls to the public internet over secure tunnels. Install it and run ngrok on the command line, specifying the port that hosts the application on which you want to receive messages:

Ngrok will display a forwarding link that you can use as a webhook to access your local server using the public network.

Now you can create an application to receive MMS messages (follow our Quickstart guide for details).

Conclusion

And that’s all there is to sending and receiving MMS messages using Plivo’s Node.js SDK. Don’t use Node.js? Don’t worry — we have SDKs for Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, .NET Core, .NET Framework, and Go.

Haven’t tried Plivo yet? Getting started is easy and only takes five minutes. Sign up today.

What if you could reach your customers, whenever and wherever they are, with relevant information and get an immediate response? That’s the kind of power and measurability that appears in marketers’ dreams.

As it turns out, dreams do come true, and the answer has been in our collective pockets for decades.

Though it’s not new, SMS marketing has seen a surge in popularity recently. Companies like Disney and Amazon take advantage of its power and use it to connect with their customers in ways they never could before.

If you’re not already using SMS marketing to reach your customers, you should give it strong consideration. If you are using it, there’s always room for improvement. In either case, this guide gives you what you need to know to take your SMS marketing to the next level.

Why use SMS for marketing?

Why SMS? The simple answer is that it just works.

For proof, you need only to look at the 90% open rate SMS marketing enjoys and compare it to email marketing, which gets about a 20% open rate on the high end of the scale. SMS is so effective at reaching people because it’s immediate, ubiquitous, and mobile-first.

With SMS, you’re reaching consumers on a device that’s in their pockets and that buzzes to let them know when they receive a message. While smartphone notifications can also signal incoming email messages, people tend to put off reading email until later — but we’ve all been conditioned to view text messages as soon as they arrive.

Another feature that makes SMS unique is that in both iOS and Android devices, messages can be displayed over other apps, so even if someone is playing a game, reading news, or watching videos, they won’t miss your message.

But open rates are just the beginning of what makes SMS so powerful. It also allows you to be ultra-relevant to your customers, reaching specific people at specific moments. For example:

• You can send messages to conference attendees during a presentation to prompt them to sign up for a speaker’s newsletter or buy their book.
• After a consumer leaves a restaurant, you can send them a message thanking them for coming and offering them a coupon for their next visit.
• In ecommerce, you can send messages to customers who abandon their shopping carts, or, when their payment fails, help them complete their purchases.

These examples demonstrate the transactional power of SMS marketing to build an opt-in audience and facilitate purchases. But it’s even more versatile than that and can support a variety of marketing goals.

SMS marketing can help you build awareness of a brand or even an issue. By integrating SMS marketing with other marketing tools, including social media, events, email, and sales promotions, you can increase the effectiveness of your entire marketing program. We’ll share some examples of how some well-known companies have done that later in this article.

Most importantly, SMS marketing can give you a high return on investment, in part because the upfront creative and development costs are lower than most other marketing methods. SMS marketing doesn’t require video production, graphic design, actors, models, printing, web design, or photography.

And, depending on how you use it, SMS marketing can actually generate revenue. One ecommerce marketer saw an increase in revenue as high as 10% with their SMS marketing program.

Try these strategic tips for SMS marketing

As we said, SMS is one of the most effective tactics you can add to your marketing mix — but to get those benefits, you need to be smart and strategic. Here are some tips to get the most out of your SMS marketing program.

Look for trigger moments

The immediacy of text messages allows you to reach your customers, individually, at precise moments — something no other marketing channel can do. To maximize that power, you should look for trigger moments when customers will be most receptive to your messages.

One of the most obvious moments is right after a customer takes some kind of action, like opting in to receiving a newsletter or making a purchase. In those moments, you can use SMS messages to welcome customers into the community, thank them for their purchases, or give them updates on shipping.

Other trigger moments include birthdays and holidays, flash sales and promotions, and new product introductions. All of these present opportunities for you to connect with your customers and create a sense of urgency around taking some kind of action.

Segment your audience

Because SMS marketing is so simple, it’s tempting to just blast messages out to your entire list. But the power of text messaging is that you can use it to reach specific people — and that’s why segmentation is so critical.

How you segment your audience depends on your business and your customer base, but the options are many. Age, income level, and other demographics are obvious choices, but you can also sort them by where they are in the customer journey, what product or services they buy, or their hobbies, interests, and goals.

By segmenting your audience, you can be sure to serve relevant messages that spur action, and, equally importantly, minimize unsubscribes.

Follow the rules

As with email marketing, SMS marketing comes with certain rules and regulations. You’re contacting customers using their personal phone numbers, so you should be clear and transparent when they opt in to your program. You also need to protect private data and make it easy for customers to opt out.

Every country has its own set of laws and regulations that you’ll need to be aware of. But as important as following the regulations is maintaining customers’ trust. Running afoul of the rules is one thing, but if customers lose trust in you, they might never forgive you.

To maintain customers’ trust, be sure to be transparent about why you’re contacting them, have a clear opt-in process, and make it easy for them to opt out. And, above all, don’t wear out your welcome by spamming them with frequent messages.

Use your creativity

Because it’s so simple and versatile, SMS marketing can be used in almost limitless ways. If you have a need to reach your customers, and if your customers have phones (which describes pretty much everyone), you can likely create an SMS marketing program that will meet your needs.

Here are a few examples for inspiration:

• Fast-food chain Arby’s used SMS marketing to engage customers in their No Kid Hungry philanthropic campaign, raising brand awareness and building goodwill.
• Jim Beam ran a sweepstake by encouraging consumers to opt in to their SMS program, building their database and supporting a charity at the same time.
• The National Cancer Institute used SMS marketing to reach young people and guide them through the difficult process of quitting smoking.
• TULA Skincare reached out to its mobile-first customer base through SMS to build a community around important social issues.
• Few companies use SMS marketing more effectively thanStarbucks, which keeps customers engaged in the brand and aware of ongoing promotions and offers.

Understanding the technical side of SMS

Once you have a campaign up and running, SMS marketing can be a smooth, seamless experience that only needs occasional tweaking and maintenance.

But getting to that point can be a challenge, especially if you’re not familiar with all of the technical nuances. A lot can go wrong, and if you’re not prepared for it, your campaign may get derailed.

Sending messages overseas and to multiple countries can be especially challenging. It’s not unusual for messages to be delayed or go undelivered, lessening the impact on your customers. What’s more, reporting can be inaccurate, so you may not even know your delivery rate. The situation is further complicated by layers of regulations in different countries and regions.

And following those regulations is vital. The UK’s Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, for example, give people certain rights when being contacted by text message. Violating those regulations can result in your campaigns being shut down.

Also, when sending overseas, you may be dealing with local languages and special characters. Some countries allow, or even require, sender identification codes so customers know who is sending messages to them. Getting the technicalities right goes a long way toward building trust among your customers and maximizing your open rates.

A lot goes into setting up and maintaining SMS marketing campaigns. But you can make the task easier if you partner with an SMS API provider that can help ensure your campaigns are successful.

At Plivo, we’ve set up our APIs and services to ensure your SMS programs are reliable. We partner with only premium carriers in each country and use a redundant carrier network to ensure messages always get through. We also provide easy-to-manage sender IDs and special character support, helping ensure your messages are opened and read by your customers.

Finally, our SMS API includes accurate reporting, so you can evaluate campaigns in real time and make adjustments to optimize them for success.

SMS marketing is a great opportunity — if you do it well

We cited some examples of top brands that use SMS marketing well. Companies are catching on, and in 2020, 56% of US retailers planned to increase investment in SMS marketing.

If your industry haven’t caught on to SMS marketing yet, you can take a leadership position and get a jump on your competition. If your competitors are doing SMS well, you need to catch up.

Either way, SMS offers a unique marketing opportunity to reach your customers. To learn more about how SMS marketing can work for you, contact us.

Making an outbound phone call using the Plivo Voice platform is easy, but communication should be a two-way street. Customers should be able to call you back, and you should answer the calls and address their concerns. This guide shows you how to receive incoming calls on Plivo numbers and manage the call flow once a call reaches the Plivo voice platform. To see how to do this, we’ll build a Python Flask application to receive an incoming call and greet the caller with a text-to-speech (TTS) message.

Prerequisites

Before you get started, you’ll need:

• A Plivo account — sign up for one for free if you don’t have one already.
• A voice-enabled Plivo phone number if you want to receive incoming calls. To search for and buy a number, go to Phone Numbers > Buy Numbers on the Plivo console.
• Flask and Plivo Python packages — run pip3 install plivo flask to install them.
• ngrok — a utility that exposes your local development server to the internet over secure tunnels.

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Create a Flask application to receive incoming calls and play a TTS message

Once you’ve installed Flask and the Plivo Python SDK, create a simple Flask application to handle incoming calls on a Plivo number. To handle an incoming call, you need to return an XML document from the URL configured as the Answer URL in the application assigned to the Plivo number. The Python SDK can manage the XML document generation, and you can use the Speak XML element to play a text-to-speech message to the caller. Use this code:

from flask import Flask, request, make_response
from plivo import plivoxml

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/receive_call/', methods=['GET','POST'])
def speak_xml():
    # Generate a Speak XML with the details of the text to play on the call.
    response = (plivoxml.ResponseElement()
            .add(plivoxml.SpeakElement('Hello, you just received your first call')))
    return(response.to_string())

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run(host='0.0.0.0', debug=True)

Test the code locally

Save the code in any file — we named the file receive_call.py. To run the code on the server, go to the folder where the file resides and use the command

$ python receive_call.py

You should see your basic server application in action on http://localhost:5000/receive_call/.

Expose the local server to the internet using ngrok

Once you see the application working locally, the next step is to connect the application to the internet to return the XML document to process the incoming call. For that, we recommend using ngrok, which exposes local servers behind NATs and firewalls to the public internet over secure tunnels. Install it and run ngrok on the command line, specifying the port that hosts the application on which you want to handle incoming calls (5000 in this case, as our local Python application is running there):

$ ./ngrok http 5000

Ngrok will display a forwarding link that you can use as a webhook to access your local server over the public network.

Test the link by opening the ngrok URL (https://b51dbc9d904c.ngrok.io/receive_call/) in a browser. We used HTTPie to check the XML response from the ngrok URL.

Connect the Flask application to a Plivo number

The final step is to configure the application as a Plivo voice application and assign it to a Plivo number on which you want to receive incoming calls.

Go to the Plivo console and navigate to Voice > Applications > XML, then click on the Add New Application button in the upper right.

Provide a friendly name for the application — we used “App-Incoming-call” — and configure the ngrok URL https://b51dbc9d904c.ngrok.io/receive_call/ as the Answer URL. Select the HTTP verb as POST, then click Create Application.

Now go to Phone Numbers > Your Numbers and click on the number to which you want to assign the application. From the Plivo Application drop-down, choose the voice application you just created. Finally, click Update Number.

Test the application

Make a phone call to the Plivo number you selected. You should see that the Flask application automatically greets the caller with the text-to-speech message configured in the app.

And that’s how simple it is to receive an incoming call on a Plivo number and handle it using XML documents using Plivo’s Python SDK and a Flask application. You can implement other use cases on the Plivo Voice platform, such as phone system IVR, call forwarding, and number masking, as your business requires.

Haven’t tried Plivo yet? Getting started is easy and only takes five minutes. Sign up today.