Talkus Builds An SMS Helpdesk In Slack With Meteor JS and NodeJS

Talkus Builds An SMS Helpdesk In Slack With Meteor JS and NodeJS

There’s an iconic scene in Portlandia where Fred Armisen spirals downwards, trapped in a technology loop. The chime of a SMS alert takes Fred from his Netflix queue to his phone, which takes him to Facebook, until his email calls his attention. This probably sounds familiar. But, for customer service reps, this likely feels familiar. You bounce from one platform to another, tracking down pieces of the same pie in different places.

Talkus built a customer helpdesk platform using only two things – Twilio SMS and Slack. When a customer texts you, it opens a Slack conversation with all  the relevant information you need in one place: the customer’s name, location, previous chat history, and their message.

We talked with Talkus founder and engineer Vianney Lecroart about the need for simplicity in helpdesk software.

If you’ve got any questions for the Talkus team, shoot them a text. They’re using their own hack to reply 415 523 8899.

If you’re itching to build your own Slack hack, we’ve got some recipes for you. You can:

• Build An SMS Slackbot In Python
• Reply To SMS In Slack
• Build A Dad Joke Slackbot

Fitting An Entire Helpdesk Into Slack

What inspired you to build Talkus?

Chats is everywhere now. In our personal life we use smartphones to send text messages, use Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and every other message applications. In professional life we use chat within tools like Slack but also Facebook at Work, Microsoft Teams etc.

Chatting is the simplest way to communicate between people but also between people and companies.

We created Talkus to build an omnichannel contact centre between live chat on website, emails, phone and text messages (thanks to Twilio) in a single, increasingly popular place: Slack.

How’d you build Talkus?

Twilio enabled a new business model for Talkus; a business we knew existed but that was a bit too distant for us at the moment.

The Twilio the integration of SMS into Talkus was extremely simple. A few webhooks and API calls and that was it. In a few hours we had a proof of concept and then after a few days we were ready to launch this new feature.

Without Twilio, we wouldn’t even have considered integrating text messages. It would have been way too much work for our small team.

What Do your customer typically use the Slack + SMS combo for?

The most obvious case is for companies that want to help customers that are relying on mobile phones.

We have a client that services restaurants. For restaurant owners, the easiest way to contact the supplier is to send a text, they often don’t have a computer near them but they always have a phone.

With Twilio, customer support became so simple that restaurants just love Talkus. As for the supplier they are finding it pretty straightforward to handle requests right into Slack.

Some of our customers have surprised us with a usage that we had not imagined at first.

Take for example, Cleanio. They offer to come at your home, pick up your laundry and deliver your washed and ironed clothes back at your home. They use Talkus to liaise with their customers, primarily using email and live chat. But they also use Talkus to have two-way communication with their drivers via text messages. In both cases Cleanio handle everything inside Slack.

What languages and frameworks did you use to build the integration?

Talkus is 100% Javascript, Node.js and MeteorJS. Twilio is so simple to use that we didn’t even use the twilio-node helper library, just the old plain cool REST API.
Learn more about Talkus here.

The distance from an idea to a deploy is only a few webhooks. Talkus bridged that gap. You can do the same with the help of the docs.