Twilio's TaskRouter Quickstart

My team and I are exploring different services and technologies in the area of contact centres. We develop and maintain the tools for over 1000 support agents, with the number rapidly rising. Making smart, long-term business and technology decisions are paramount. One of the technologies we looked into was Twilio and its ecosystem – specifically TaskRouter.

Twilio’s TaskRouter provides a clean interface for building contact centres. Its goal is to take the tedious infrastructure and plumbing work out of building a custom contact centre, exposing the right APIs to implement domain logic. TaskRouter is a high-level service since it orchestrates voice, SMS, and other communication channels with the ability to assign incoming interactions across a workforce of agents ready to take those interactions.

Twilio-Ruby

To get a head start at understanding how TaskRouter works, I spent a day looking at Twilio’s Ruby quickstart guide for TaskRouter. Wow, was I in for a frustrating time.

The quickstart guide takes the reader through a number of steps, both inside of the Twilio Console as well as building a small Ruby Sinatra app. After completing the quickstart the reader should have a fully functioning call centre with an interactive voice response (IVR) to greet and queue any user that calls in.

Some of the things that made the quickstart harder to complete is that the Ruby code examples included throughout used an older version of the twilio-ruby gem. Because of this, the code examples didn’t work with the latest version. This was both a bad and good thing. Bad in that the existing code examples wouldn’t work out of the box, but good in the fact that I had to put in some extra effort into learning where the docs and other sources of help exist, and having a deeper understanding of how the Twilio API works.

I compiled a list of resources that would assist anyone going through the same or a similar situation. It certainly helped me complete the TaskRouter quickstart.

  • The README for the twilio-ruby gem provided a great overview of what functionality it provides and how the gem is to be used
  • The v4 to v5 upgrade guide for the twilio-ruby gem showed that there was some sense to this chaos by providing the rationale and examples for updating old versions of the twilio-ruby code to the latest (v5). This was where I had my moment of understanding for the quickstart code examples.
  • Using JWT tokens was part of the last section of the quickstart. Since twilio-ruby changed the way it uses tokens, its code examples had to be updated too. The main Twilio docs on JWT goes into intricacies around building policies contained within JWT tokens
  • My lead/manager was quite happy when I mentioned to him that the twilio-ruby gem no longer uses title case for situations where camel-case or snake-case would have been better to Ruby styling. TwiML was affected by this for a number of gem versions up until v5. Since TwiML is used frequently throughout the quickstart the docs for using TwiML in twilio-ruby helped during those times.
  • Lastly, if all else fails, feel free to reference my resulting code from the TaskRouter quickstart. It’s available here on GitHub.