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Our call system is built through a Studio Flow in Twilio. Within that flow we have a connect to call widget that relays the incoming call to staff members' personal cell phones. Presently it is two staff members including my own personal cell.

In the interest of setting good boundaries for my staff, I would like to find a way to have staff easily turn off or on their number to the connect to call widget on their phone.

It seems after some crude testing that simply blocking the number on our personal cell phones disables the entire flow and we lose the incoming call. Nor am I comfortable with staff being able to login to the Twilio console and change the connect to call widget themselves without breaking something.

I know how to change the studio flow assigned to a phone number programmatically using API. Controlling it this way would be unworkable... because there are so many different real world combinations of various staff members having call forwarding turned off or on making the number of studio flows for each possible combination nearly infinite for even a smaller staff of 6 to 8 people.

I am also open to other solutions that deny call forwarding based off of day of week (Sunday for example) and time of day.

How do we create the functionality for staff members to easily turn off or on their personal cell number in the connect to call widget?

ccumminskc
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I think the solution you need here is an interface that your staff can access to enable or disable their number. And then a way for your Studio Flow to determine currently active numbers and only direct calls to them.

The simplest thing that comes to mind would be a Google Sheet that your staff do have access to and can update their current status. Then, in your Studio Flow you can call off to a Twilio Function that looks up the sheet and returns the currently active numbers. Then you would only use numbers from that list for forwarding the calls.

I've not really gone into detail about how to build this as there wasn't a lot of detail in your question about what you might want to use to achieve this. If you do have further details, like what your current Studio Flow looks like or what you are comfortable developing with, I could go into more detail.

philnash
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  • YES. Playing with this earlier today i was arriving at the same conclusion. I feel like the trick is to somehow update the multiple numbers that are in the connect to call widget using a flow variable which would be populated by only active numbers from a google sheet. I attempted to build this out using webhooks by zapier but ran into some issues. But I’m not familiar with Twilio functions at all except for one I copied and pasted for emailing voicemails. My development skills are almost all using Twilio Studio flows, some Twiml, FileMaker Pro, postman, curl, and zapier. – ccumminskc May 27 '22 at 02:24
  • Are you using simulring in the Connect Call To widget for this? I think I could build out an example of this using a Google Sheet, a Twilio Function and Studio. Would that help? – philnash May 27 '22 at 04:13
  • THAT WOULD BE AMAZING. Yes we are using simulring. – ccumminskc May 27 '22 at 13:19
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    Have a go with this: https://github.com/philnash/simulring-control. Sorry there's a lot of instructions to set it up. Let me know if it helps at all. – philnash May 30 '22 at 07:48
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    IT WORKS! Thank you so much philnash!!! That is awesome. An important note... 1) after my initial setup Twilio error logs were showing a 403 error from Google telling me that the google sheets api was not enabled. I went into the project in Google Cloud Platform and enabled the google sheets api and it worked like a charm. 2) Also be sure to create a new project and not try and attach it to any previous projects you have created. – ccumminskc Jun 02 '22 at 13:47
  • Awesome, glad it helped and thanks for adding the extra corrections! – philnash Jun 02 '22 at 23:21