Turn inbound SMS into Zendesk tickets with smart triage

By General Input

Every 15 minutes, an agent reads new inbound texts in Twilio, files clean Zendesk tickets, and pings Slack the moment something looks urgent.

Integrations

  • Twilio
  • Zendesk
  • Slack Bot

Type

Agentic Task

Categories

  • Customer Support
  • Operations

Build me an agent workflow that triages inbound SMS into Zendesk support tickets. It should run on a cron every 15 minutes.

On each run, the agent should call Twilio List Messages and filter to inbound messages received within the last 15 minutes (use DateSent>= with the start of the window, and the inbound direction filter so we never pick up outbound texts). Twilio does not have a poll trigger, so a cron schedule with this filter is the right shape.

For each inbound SMS, read the message body and the sender's phone number, then classify two things in plain language: (1) intent, one of billing, technical issue, sales question, opt-out, or spam, and (2) priority, either urgent or normal. Urgent should mean things like outages, billing errors with real money at stake, account lockouts, or clearly angry language. If the intent is spam or opt-out, skip the message entirely. Do not create a ticket and do not send a Slack alert.

For every other message, draft a short, descriptive ticket subject (think "Billing question about duplicate charge", not "SMS from +1...") and a one or two sentence summary of what the customer is asking. Then call Zendesk Create Ticket with: the drafted subject, the full original SMS body as the description, the inferred priority mapped to Zendesk's priority field (urgent maps to urgent or high, normal maps to normal), a tag for the inferred category (billing, technical, sales), and a tag like sms-intake so the support team can see where it came from. Include the sender's phone number in the ticket somewhere obvious, for example as the requester phone or in the description preamble.

If the message was classified urgent, also call Slack Bot Send a Message to a support escalations channel (let me pick the channel during setup). The Slack message should include the sender's phone number, the inferred category, a one-line summary of the issue, and a link to the newly created Zendesk ticket so the on-call agent can click straight through.

Important behaviour notes: never create a duplicate ticket for the same Twilio message SID within a run, keep the SMS body verbatim in the ticket description so we have the source of truth, and log a one line summary at the end of each run with how many texts were processed, how many tickets were created, and how many urgent alerts were sent.

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