Frontline Integration Service Example

NOTE: Effective February 9, 2023, Twilio Frontline is limited to existing Frontline accounts only. New and existing Twilio customers without previous access to Frontline will not be able to get Frontline through Twilio's Console nor access developer documentation. For more information, please check out the Twilio Frontline Support documentation.

This repository contains an example server-side web application that is required to use Twilio Frontline.

It creates the following routes that you will then need to add to your Twilio Frontline Console:

• /callbacks/crm
• /callbacks/outgoing-conversation
• /callbacks/templates
• /callbacks/routing
• /callbacks/twilio-conversations

Detailed information can be found in the Node.js Quickstart.

Prerequisites

• A Twilio Account. Don't have one? Sign up for free!
• Follow the quickstart tutorial.
• NodeJS (latest or LTS)
• Yarn

How to start development service

# install dependencies
yarn

# copy environment variables
cp .env.example .env

# run service
yarn run start

Environment variables

# Service variables
PORT # default 5001

# Twilio account variables
TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID=ACXXX...
TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN

# Variables for chat configuration
TWILIO_SMS_NUMBER # Twilio number for incoming/outgoing SMS
TWILIO_WHATSAPP_NUMBER # Twilio number for incoming/outgoing Whatsapp

Setting up customers and mapping

The customer data can be configured in src/providers/customers.js.

Map between customer address + worker identity pair.

For inbound routing: Used to determine to which worker a new conversation with a particular customer should be routed to.

{
    customerAddress: workerIdentity
}

Example:

const customersToWorkersMap = {
    'whatsapp:+87654321': 'john@example.com'
}

Customers list

In the CRM callback reponse, each customer object should look like this:

Example:

const customers = [
    {
        customer_id: 98, // required
        display_name: 'Bobby Shaftoe', // required
        worker: 'joe@example.com', // required
        channels: [
            { type: 'email', value: 'bobby@example.com' },
            { type: 'sms', value: '+123456789' },
            { type: 'whatsapp', value: 'whatsapp:+123456789' }
        ],
        links: [
            { type: 'Facebook', value: 'https://facebook.com', display_name: 'Social Media Profile' }
        ],
    },
    //... more customer objects
];

Response format:

objects: {
    customers: customers
}

Troubleshooting

Port issues

If you experience issues running the Node.js server on port 5001, you can use any other free port.

You can add PORT=xxxx to the .env.

Alternatively, you can edit it here. Note that the one from the .env file will override the one on src/config.js.