Using an existing Twilio number with ZenDesk Talk

Hey Andrew - 

It looks like you submitted a ticket and got an answer there. I did speak with a coworker, and it sounds like there are some possible workarounds, but we need more information on your use case. Can you provide more detail?

Hey Nicole!

My company is having this same issue. Is there a link or resource we can go to in order to find an answer?

Hi Alec - 

There's not really documentation on this since it's a rare occurrence. I'm going to check in with Product to see if any changes have been made to the Talk API, as they had been discussing some earlier in the year. 

In the meantime, here are  the primary points of the answer that Andrew received in his support ticket:

The way that Zendesk Text works is that we talk directly with the Twilio API via our main Twilio account/individual subaccounts like yours. In order to navigate that functionality, you'll need to move your current number over to your Zendesk Talk/Text subaccount under your Zendesk Support account. 

As of March, the only solution to use Text via the API is to leverage the Tickets endpoint in order to have certain tickets be text tickets with use of a unique tag, like sms_ticket, and triggers. This might have changed by now, but I don't know for certain and may not be able to find out until the Product Manager is back from the holiday. 

Your best solution for right now might be to have a Product text number that is used proactively in your app, and a Support text number used for answering Text tickets in Zendesk Support. 

Let me know if that helps at all. I'll check in with the PM when he's back and will get back to you re: whether there may be an update to the API functionality for sending text via Zendesk. 

Hello,

We looked into this with Twilio and it’s not currently possible to split the capabilities of a number and have the two capabilities live in separate hosts (as in one inside Talk and one outside Talk). Could you tell us a little bit more about your use case  and why this would be useful to you?

Thanks, Caroline

Hi there,

Any changes to this since the last update in January 2018? My company has had an existing Twilio outbound sms mechanism for some time. We are growing and the way we are splitting our clinics up we needed a new billing support phone number and sms number. I stood up ZD Talk/Text recently. Now, we can't figure out how to send these system notifications using the ZD text number, so that replies come into our ZD channel.

Hey Nicole / Caroline,

Twilio just released Twilio Pay, a PCI compliant way to take credit card information over the phone and protect user data.

Is there a way we can integrate this with our ZenDesk Talk line so we can safely take this information over the phone from customers?

I am interested in being able to maintain call recording while staying PCI compliant without crazy hoops to jump through, as outlined here:

https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/236299147-Is-Zendesk-Talk-PCI-DSS-compliant-

Twilio Pay info can be found at twilio.com/pay .

Without this, we will likely have to migrate to Twilio Flex for customer communications and leave Zen Desk behind.

We're in a similar boat. Our goal is to be able to use Zendesk Talk for voice and have a way to automate / manage inbound and outbound SMS on the same phone numbers. Some questions to see if there's a solution for us:

1. Is there a way for us to provide our Twilio API keys to power our Talk numbers?
2. Is there a way for us to receive the Twilio API keys for whatever sub-account y'all create?
3. Is there any API for initiating an outbound SMS? I checked the one referenced in the link above but couldn't figure out how to make it use SMS.

I thought that we could have our customer-facing numbers be in our own Twilio account, and have voice calls to those numbers forwarded to Zendesk numbers for use with Zendesk Talk, but then SMS messages sent from Zendesk chat  would have the Twilio number and not our customer-facing number.

We also need to send SMS from a phone number and handle responses in ZenDesk.  I was hoping that we could make this work by configuring our Twilio phone number's SMS webhook to send to ZenDesk's API, and then enter our Twilio API key and phone number into ZenDesk Text so support replies will come from the same phone number.

Michael

I'm trying to link the number that I have on Twilio on Zendesk so the I can see my customers replies as Tickets. I tried to register Twilio's number on Zendesk and Zendesk's number on Twilio but it didn't work... Does anyone know how can I send SMS through Twilio and receive the replies as tickets on ZenDesk?

Thanks for the response Brett, how about using a ZenDesk Talk number to send messages with Twilio platform, is that possible? I tried but wasn't able to find anything online.

Best,