Subscribed Notifications and Notify/Twilio

[Chris M3]

We're preparing to implement Twilio for SMS messaging that will hopefully be more reliable then the current mess that is email to SMS service.  One of our main use cases is allowing interested individuals to subscribe to P1 Notifications.  Maybe I'm missing something, but it doesn't appear that there is a notification channel dedicated to Twilio SMS?  Are there any solutions out there for subscribing to notifications, or adding filters, schedules, turning notifications on/off that would go through Twilio instead of email to SMS?

[deanproctor]

Hi Chris, 

Configure Notify to use the Twilio telephony service.

Before you begin

You must have an SID and authentication token for an active Twilio account (https://www.twilio.com/). You must have a separate contract with Twilio.

Important:Ensure that each instance on which you configure Notify uses a different Twilio account. Each account specifies a unique account SID, authentication token, telephone numbers, and endpoint. Using the same account across multiple instances may cause your Twilio service configuration to be overwritten.

Note: Account and sub-account are Twilio categorizations, and both act the same for a ServiceNow instance.

Role required: notify_admin

Procedure

1. Navigate to Notify > Administration > Twilio Direct Configuration.
2. On the Twilio Account Properties page, enter your Account SID.
3. Enter your Auth Token.
4. Click Connect.
   If the account is not associated with an instance and the connection is successful, a read-only list of E.164 and short code phone numbers associated with this Twilio account appears. This list displays the phone number, supported capabilities such as voice or SMS, the country for each Twilio number, and the Notify number group to which the number belongs.

   If the account is already associated with an instance, the system displays an error message. To connect to this account,

   • Disconnect the account from the instance.
   • Delete the TwiML apps in the Twilio account.

   Note: If you buy or release numbers on the Twilio account, open the configuration page again to refresh the list of numbers. Numbers removed from the Twilio service remain as Notify Number records, but with the Active field set to false. Use only active phone numbers for inbound or outbound communication.

What to do next

Phone numbers and short codes are provided by Twilio once the account is successfully connected and are stored on the Notify Phone Numbers [notify_number] table. Assign each number to a number group. Number groups allow you to control which workflows run when using the phone numbers in each number group.

• Twilio-Direct callback testing

  Make an outgoing call or send an SMS using Twilio and trigger callbacks to ServiceNow, to test whether Twilio can reach the instance. You can also view when the last callback test was run, its status, and the test logs.

For Advanced SMS features see the following:

Advanced configuration for SMS

Use the Twilio copilot features to improve SMS delivery with phone number like using multiple numbers to send high-volume messages and content intelligence to automatically format every message without writing custom code. Reach large lists of users with one API request.

Before you begin

Role required: notify_admin

About this task

The Twilio co-pilot features are enabled in your instance once configured. An example of a copilot feature is that you can configure which identity (phone number, shortcode, or alpha sender ID) to use to send a message. You can also spread the messaging traffic over several phone numbers or prioritize an alpha sender ID when sending messages to countries where alpha senders are commonly used. To know more about these features, visit https://www.twilio.com/copilot.

Reach customers over SMS and push notifications. Use the passthrough sendBulkSMS API to reach large number of users across using a single API request. For more information on these features visithttps://www.twilio.com/notify

Procedure

1. Navigate to Notify > Administration > Twilio Direct Configuration.
2. On the Twilio Account Properties page, enter your Account SID.
3. Enter your Auth Token.
4. Click Connect.
5. On the Advance SMS Features tab, check the Intelligent SMS Handling box.
6. On the Advance SMS Features tab, check the Twilio Notify Bulk SMS box.
   Note: This feature uses Twilio Notify feature and might have an associated cost. Contact Twilio Support for more details.

[Chris M3]

Thanks for the info, but that doesn't really answer the question.

I pictured Twillio as an additional notification channel that could be opted in by a user creating it.  Only a select notifications would be available for that channel type, added by default when the user creates the channel, but they could opt out of them by adjusting their notification preferences, or apply filters to them.

There may be a way using a new SMS Service Provider with an Advanced Script to get me some of this functionality it looks like, just not what I would expect.

[jnestore]

I'm curious if you ever determined the best way to handle this. I'm looking for the same thing!