Front and Twilio integrate to add SMS as a native channel inside the Front shared inbox, letting your team send and receive customer text messages alongside email, chat, and social conversations without leaving the Front interface. This integration is used by customer-facing teams that use Front as their primary inbox and want SMS handled with the same assignment rules, SLA tracking, reply templates, and reporting as their email conversations. Front supports SMS through its Custom Channel API, which allows Twilio to feed inbound messages into Front conversations and Front to route outbound replies back through your Twilio number.
What You Need Before You Start
You need a Front account at the Growth plan or higher to access the Custom Channels feature and the Front API, and an API token created from the Front settings under API and OAuth in your workspace profile settings. Your Front API base URL is https://api2.frontapp.com/ and requests require the Authorization header set to Bearer {apiToken} and the Content-Type header set to application/json. From Twilio, collect your Account SID, Auth Token, and an SMS-capable phone number, and configure a Custom Channel in Front by navigating to Settings, then Inboxes, then Add a Team Inbox and selecting Custom Channel, which provides you with a channel ID and webhook configuration where you specify your middleware inbound handler URL. Store the Front Custom Channel ID beginning with cha_ and the Inbox ID beginning with inb_ as you will need both when creating incoming messages through the Front API.
Step-by-Step Integration Guide
When an inbound Twilio SMS arrives at your middleware endpoint, parse the From, To, Body, and MessageSid from the Twilio POST payload and construct a Front inbound message by calling POST https://api2.frontapp.com/channels/{channelId}/inbound_messages with a JSON body containing sender.handle set to the From phone number in E.164 format, sender.name set to a placeholder like the phone number, body set to the SMS message text, and metadata.external_id set to the MessageSid to prevent duplicate message creation on Twilio retries. Front will create a new conversation in the linked inbox if no existing conversation with that sender handle is open, or add the message to an existing open thread from the same sender, replicating the threading behavior of email conversations. Configure Front to route agent replies back through your Twilio number by setting the Custom Channel outbound webhook URL in the Front channel settings to your middleware reply handler, which receives a POST from Front when an agent sends a reply containing the conversation ID, recipient handle (the customer phone), and body text, and dispatches the Twilio SMS using POST https://api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/Accounts/{AccountSid}/Messages.json with To set to the recipient handle and Body set to the reply body. Return HTTP 200 from your Twilio inbound handler along with an empty TwiML Response body to acknowledge the Twilio event and prevent delivery retries.
Common Issues and How to Fix Them
Front Custom Channel inbound message creation returns 409 Conflict when the same metadata.external_id value is submitted twice, which happens when Twilio retries the inbound webhook after your middleware returns a slow response the first time. Always return HTTP 200 immediately from your Twilio webhook handler before making any Front API calls, using an async queue to process the Front API call, and rely on Front's idempotency via the external_id field to safely deduplicate any concurrent submissions. Front outbound webhook to your reply handler fails silently and the customer never receives the SMS reply when the reply handler URL in the Front channel settings contains a typo or points to a non-existent route on your middleware. Test the outbound webhook by sending a test reply in Front after configuring the channel and monitoring your middleware logs for an incoming POST, and use a request inspection tool like Webhook.site temporarily to confirm the Front outbound payload structure before building the Twilio dispatch logic. The sender.handle field in Front is used to thread messages from the same customer into one conversation, and if you normalize the phone number differently on different inbound messages such as sometimes including a plus sign and sometimes not, Front creates separate conversations for the same person. Always normalize inbound phone numbers to E.164 format in your middleware before setting the sender.handle field, and keep a consistent normalization function used across all inbound and outbound message processing.
How to Get More from This Integration
Extend the integration to support MMS by checking the NumMedia field in the Twilio inbound payload and fetching the media URL from MediaUrl0 when NumMedia is greater than zero, then including the media URL as an attachment in the Front inbound message body so agents can see images sent by customers directly within the Front conversation. Build an automated first response by configuring a Front Rule under Settings, then Rules that fires when a new conversation arrives in the SMS inbox, sends an automated reply using a Front Reply template such as Thank you for contacting us, we will respond shortly, and tags the conversation with sms-first-response-sent to track first response rate by channel. Add contact enrichment by calling the Twilio Lookup API at GET https://lookups.twilio.com/v2/PhoneNumbers/{number}?Fields=caller_name after receiving an inbound SMS and using the caller_name result to update the Front sender name via POST https://api2.frontapp.com/contacts with the phone and enriched name, so agents see a real name rather than the raw phone number in the conversation. Track SMS conversation metrics in Front by using Front's tagging and inbox filtering features to segment SMS conversations, and export Front conversation analytics filtered to the SMS inbox to measure response times, resolution rates, and agent workload for the SMS channel separately from email.
Conclusion
Front and Twilio together create a unified support inbox where SMS conversations receive the same professional handling, assignment routing, and SLA tracking as your email conversations. Talk to our team at Telphi Consulting to configure and deploy this integration for your Front workspace.
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