How do you (or can you) use Twilio Studio's Make Outgoing Call widget when using Whatsapp?

Question

Context

• We're building an appointment confirmation and connection app in Twilio, currently using the Studio.
• It talks to a user via WhatsApp - and then dials them via normal voice carrier service when they are ready for their appointment, and then connects their call with a call center agent.

Problem

• We've built a message flow in Studio that uses the Make_Outgoing_Call widget.
• When tested using SMS, the system behaves exactly as desired. The user opts in for the call, the system dials them, dials the agent, connects the 2 calls - happy path.
• When we connect the studio flow as an endpoint for the Whatapp sandbox, (rather than using it for SMS), the conversational parts of the flow work fine, and as per the SMS flow.
• The make outgoing call however gives an error (an 11200 HTTP retrieval failure in the debugger)

Question

Do we need to use a function to make the call rather than a studio widget when moving from WA channel to voice channel? The outgoing call widget is hardcoded to dial the channel address (Ie the inbound users number) so I'm wondering if the number is handled differently for WA traffic.

Many thanks for any suggestions!

Answer 1

H Peter, I was able to reproduce the behavior. I agree with you, it seems an alternate approach, given "Number to Call" in the Make Outgoing Call Widget V2 is hardcoded to contact.channel.address is to use a Run Function Widget or HTTP Request Widget to kick off a new flow via the REST API Trigger Widget path.

You can report this behavior to help@twilio.com, and see what advice they have. The error's are basically:

Failure connecting call: 'The phone number you are attempting to call, whatsapp:+1xxxxxxxxxx, is not valid.'

You get a similar same error from the From, Failure connecting call:

'From is not a valid phone number: whatsapp:+1xxxxxxxxxx'

but you can modify that from the default "Number to Make Call From", flow.channel.address to get past that first error.