Is a software engineer on your team suggesting your team deploys webhooks, but you’re not quite sure what the benefits are and how they even work?
If someone’s proposing to use OpenPhone webhooks on your team, here’s what you need to know.
What are webhooks?
In a nutshell, webhooks can push information from OpenPhone to another destination when a specific event occurs. The information goes out in real time to any URL or app that can receive it.
Webhooks can be written and made available at a specific URL by someone on your team versed in creating software for the internet. Then anyone on your team can configure the webhook and specify which events you want to receive from OpenPhone (just keep in mind they’ll need to be an owner or admin user in your OpenPhone workspace).
Think of webhooks almost like a notification you can subscribe to. Want another app to know when a call is over in your OpenPhone workspace? You can. How about new text messages? Yep. Depending on the service, webhooks received from OpenPhone can be used to trigger workflows in apps or make high-level decisions.
Currently, you can create webhooks based on any of these events:
- Completed calls (this includes answered or unanswered calls; you can also forward the voicemail recording for each message left)
- Incoming calls
- Call recordings
- Incoming SMS and MMS
- Outgoing SMS and MMS
- Updated contacts (by you or your team)
- Deleted contacts (by you or your team)
Any of these notifications can be customized so you only receive updates based on specific phone numbers or teammates in your workspace.
Webhook examples
Other OpenPhone customers primarily use webhooks for notifications or data collection. Though webhooks are a recent addition to OpenPhone workspaces, here are a few specific ways other teams use webhooks now.
See how productive your team is
With webhooks, managers are able to easily review build out how many calls and messages specific teammates complete from shared numbers or unique numbers for each person that serve as a direct line. Keep in mind you can also monitor your teammates’ productivity in OpenPhone inside the analytics dashboard.
However, your team may decide to push that information into tables in a database and then enrich the data using other sources such as your CRM to create a custom dashboard from multiple sources. For example, you may find one salesperson has a higher close rate in your CRM than others and then decide to playback your call recordings in OpenPhone to unpack what they’re doing that is helping them perform well.
Assessing staffing levels
Some teams set up notifications on all incoming calls and messages to help them assess their incoming communication volume.
Let’s say your team wants notifications every time your team receives an incoming call and someone had to leave a message because no one picked up. You can set up a webhook that specifically notes each time a caller leaves a voicemail. You can also have a webhook that surfaces when someone doesn’t leave a message.
Logging your OpenPhone communication elsewhere
Your team may also want to automatically log all your phone conversations into your CRM. Webhooks let you push that information into your CRM to save your team time. However, if you’re using HubSpot, we already offer a direct HubSpot integration.
Some teams also save these logs as records in collaboration software like Airtable. You can even push call recordings into a spreadsheet so folks outside your workspace can easily access recordings. 💡
How to configure webhooks
As mentioned above, you’re not on the hook to get webhooks set up. A software engineer can help your team configure webhooks properly. Keep in mind they’ll need to be an admin or owner user in your team’s OpenPhone workspace. They can follow these technical guidelines on using webhooks in OpenPhone to get your team’s webhooks up and running.
It’s time to give your team more context
Though we’ve just reached dawn on what’s possible with webhooks, dawn is still the perfect time to start reeling additional information into where you wish.
Finding other effective ways to use webhooks? Tweet us @OpenPhone.
If you have any questions or feedback on how we can make the service, send a note to our support team via this form.
