Home Brew Customer Phone Support

This is the technical part of a longer piece on “Automating Customer Service at a Startup” 

DIY Phone Support

We implemented a home-brew customer service phone line in a few hours with a basic Sinatra app on Heroku, using the Twilio-ruby gem to generate TwiML (saving us the pain of writing raw XML) and a simple Campfire gem called Tinder.

require 'twilio-ruby'
require 'tinder'
require 'net/http'
require 'uri'

The idea was to query our private Campfire room to see which agents are available, then render the relevant TwiML to get Twilio to forward any inbound customer calls to the phone number associated with that agent. If the agent doesn’t pick up the call with 15 seconds, it should try the next available agent, until all agents are exhausted, at which point it should record a voicemail.

known_agents = {
"Tom Blomfield"   => "+4477XXXXXXXX",
"Jim Beam"        => "+4477XXXXXXXX",
"Fred Flintstone" => "+4477XXXXXXXX",
# etc
}

campfire = Tinder::Campfire.new 'gocardless', :token => CAMPFIRE_TOKEN
room = campfire.find_room_by_id CAMPFIRE_ROOM

get '/start' do
  # Alert Campfire users that there's an incoming call
  room.speak "Incoming call from #{request["From"]}"
    
  response = Twilio::TwiML::Response.new do |r|
    r.Play "Welcome to GoCardless"
    r.Play "Please wait while we find someone to answer your call"
    r.Redirect "/call?user=0"
  end
  # Render the TwiML
  response.text
end

post '/call' do
  user_id = @params["user"].to_i

  # Query Campfire for available agents
  available_agents = known_agents.select do |name, phone| 
    room.users.map(&:name).include? name 
  end

  # Agent we're going to call
  agent_name   = available_agents.keys[user_id]
  agent_number = available_agents[agent_name]

  response = Twilio::TwiML::Response.new do |r|
    if agent_name
      r.Say "We're connecting you to #{agent_name}"
        
      # Alert Campfire users that we're calling someone
      room.speak "Calling #{agent_name} on #{agent_number}"

      # Tell Twilio to try to call the agent
      r.Dial agent_number, :callerId => '+44XXXXXXXXX', :timeout => 10

      # Fallback action if the agent doesn't answer
      r.Redirect "/call?user=#{user_id+1}"
    else
      # No agents left, redirect to voicemail
      r.Redirect "/voicemail"
    end
  end
  # Render the TwiML
  response.text
end 

One gotcha to be aware of is that Sinatra will evaluate the entire script when the server boots up; any variables you assign (eg, who’s in our Campfire room) will be set once, and used like constants. On the other hand, each “controller” method (eg get ’/start’) takes a block; this block is evaluated every time Sinatra serves a page. That’s why we ask for room.users inside the post ’/call’ block - it will make sure that the list of available agents is up to date.

In reality, we tweaked the above script a little; looping through 5 or 6 different agents could get a little irritating for a customer, so we limited it to 1 re-try before diverting to voicemail.

The voicemail script is pretty simple:

post '/voicemail' do
  # Tell Campfire
  room.speak "No-one answered call from #{request["From"]}!"

  response = Twilio::TwiML::Response.new do |r|
    r.Say "Unfortunately no one is around to take your call"
    r.Say "Please leave a message and we'll get back to you"
    r.Record :action => "/goodbye", :timeout => 10
    r.Redirect "/goodbye" # if no message is left
  end
  response.text
end

post '/goodbye' do
  # Tell campfire
  room.speak "Voicemail from #{request["From"]}.
    #{@params["RecordingUrl"]}.mp3"

  response = Twilio::TwiML::Response.new do |r|
    r.Say "Thanks for your message"
    r.Say "We'll get back to you as soon as we can. Goodbye"
  end
  response.text
end

This records an voicemail that’s stored at on Twilio’s servers, and we output a link to the recording in Campfire. But to be certain that someone deals with the voicemail, we wanted to log it as a ticket in Zendesk:

# Insert this into your "goodbye" block.

# Create a zendesk ticket
zendesk from: request["From"], recording: @params["RecordingUrl"]

The “zendesk” method is just a simple http post to the ZenDesk API using ‘net/http’, which creates a new Zendesk ticket. There is a Zendesk ruby gem, but it wasn’t well supported at the time of writing.

def zendesk(args)
  from = args[:from]
  recording = args[:recording]

  url = URI.parse "http://help.gocardless.com/tickets.json"
  req = Net::HTTP::Post.new(url.request_uri)
  req.body = {
    :ticket => {
      :subject => "New Voicemail from #{from}",
      :description => "New recording at #{recording}.mp3",
      :ticket_type_id => 33, # Zendesk code for voicemail!
    }
  }.to_json
  req.basic_auth ZENDESK_USERNAME, ZENDESK_PASSWORD
  req["Content-Type"]= "application/json"
  connection = Net::HTTP.new(url.host, url.port)
  response = connection.start do |http|
    timeout(5) { http.request(req) }
  end
end

That’s it!

One thing to note - all the Campfire and Zendesk API calls are performed synchronously, which increases response time and can leave the caller waiting around. At the moment, it’s usually imperceptible, but we’ll eventually move the API calls to asynchronous methods, probably using Redis.

To find out more about GoCardless, check out our site. If you’re a developer and want to play with Twilio & Campfire APIs at work, apply for a job!