How to allow staff to easily turn off or on connect to call widget in twilio studio flow?

Question

Our call system is built through a Studio Flow in Twilio. Within that flow we have a connect to call widget that relays the incoming call to staff members' personal cell phones. Presently it is two staff members including my own personal cell.

In the interest of setting good boundaries for my staff, I would like to find a way to have staff easily turn off or on their number to the connect to call widget on their phone.

It seems after some crude testing that simply blocking the number on our personal cell phones disables the entire flow and we lose the incoming call. Nor am I comfortable with staff being able to login to the Twilio console and change the connect to call widget themselves without breaking something.

I know how to change the studio flow assigned to a phone number programmatically using API. Controlling it this way would be unworkable... because there are so many different real world combinations of various staff members having call forwarding turned off or on making the number of studio flows for each possible combination nearly infinite for even a smaller staff of 6 to 8 people.

I am also open to other solutions that deny call forwarding based off of day of week (Sunday for example) and time of day.

How do we create the functionality for staff members to easily turn off or on their personal cell number in the connect to call widget?

Answer 1

I think the solution you need here is an interface that your staff can access to enable or disable their number. And then a way for your Studio Flow to determine currently active numbers and only direct calls to them.

The simplest thing that comes to mind would be a Google Sheet that your staff do have access to and can update their current status. Then, in your Studio Flow you can call off to a Twilio Function that looks up the sheet and returns the currently active numbers. Then you would only use numbers from that list for forwarding the calls.

I've not really gone into detail about how to build this as there wasn't a lot of detail in your question about what you might want to use to achieve this. If you do have further details, like what your current Studio Flow looks like or what you are comfortable developing with, I could go into more detail.