17 Apr Save Money On Event Planning With Automated RSVPs

The process of finding out which of your invitees are attending an event you are organising is tedious and problematic. Yet, no shows are expensive if your venue is charging you on a per person rate. What if there was a way to automate all that, so you can have the real number of attendees that will be coming to your event?

In this blog post, we will show you how to build a simple RSVP solution with Restcomm. RSVP is an initialism derived from the French phrase Répondez s’il vous plaît meaning “Please respond”. This RSVP system will handle calling your attendees and recording their responses in a spreadsheet, so that there is no more social awkwardness in replying “no” (and having to explain yourself).

By using a dedicated number from Restcomm, your invitees can update their RSVP 24/7 since they know it’s an automated system and they won’t think twice about sending you their update even in the middle of your night

So, let’s move on to taking a look under the hood!

How it works

1. You provision a Number from Restcomm cloud that you share with invitees, so they can RSVP.
2. Invitee calls into the Number.
3. They are prompted to confirm if they are RSVPing for the number they are dialing from, or for a different number
   • If a different number, they are prompted to type in the number
4. They are asked about the number of guests they will bring along
5. Mobile Number + number of guests are stored into a Google Sheet

How to build

The system is composed of 4 parts:

• Number: You buy and link a number to a Restcomm Visual Designer application.
• RVD Application: The application provides an IVR system to handle interaction with invitee.
• Google Sheets account: in this example, we use one of the off-the-shelf Zapier integrations to store the data we receive from Restcomm Cloud into a Google Sheet. For that, you will need to create a new sheet where this data will be stored on your Google account. For more details, please check: https://zapier.com/help/google-sheets/ and the “Create Spreadsheet Row” action in particular.
• Zapier account: The data provided by the invitee is sent, through the use of the “External Service” feature, to Zapier, so that – using its Google Sheets integration – it can be stored in an online spreadsheet, where you can easily access it.

1. Number

Get yourself a number through the Console:

1. If you don’t have any Numbers yet, click on “Register Number”
2. Switch to “Provider Number” tab, so you can provision a real number
3. Select your country from the dropdown list. If applicable, select an Area Code as well.
4. Click the “Register Number” button on the right-hand side of the number you would like to register under your account.

2. Restcomm Visual Designer Application

The Restcomm Visual Designer application is available as a template, here:

Link to RVD template

Please note you will need to modify the Zapier hook URL, in the “Persist Data to External Service” module, as well as, of course, the provided texts to match the interaction you would like with your invitees.

Also, please keep a note of the names of the attributes you include in the body of your POST HTTP request, as you’ll need those for mapping them onto the corresponding Google Sheets columns in Zapier.

3. Google Sheets Account

For this part, you just need an active Google account, which is what you’ll link to Zapier

4. Zapier

1. Create an account (if you don’t have one) and sign in.
2. Create a Zap
3. Set up the Zap so that it is triggered by a Web Hook, and select “Catch Hook” as the type. The Restcomm cloud application will basically use this to pass the responses of your invitees into Zapier.
4. Now, add a “Create Spreadsheet Row” Action, which will be responsible for persisting your data into the specific Google Sheet you have created for this project.
5. Time to test it all out:
   • Ring the dedicated number
   • Follow the instructions and respond accordingly.
   • As soon as the final Text-To-Speech message is played back to you, you should see your responses coming up in the Google Sheet!

If you want to try this out for yourself, sign up for a trial account.