Missed Call Text Back (Universal)

Any local service business that takes inbound phone calls and loses leads to voicemail. Especially powerful for businesses where the owner runs the phone (one-person operations) or where staff are frequently away from the desk (field crews, in-treatment, dining service). Plumbers, roofers, electricians, HVAC, salons, dentists, restaurants, lawyers, realtors.

Every business that owns a phone number can use this.

A Twilio number gets pointed at the business's real line. When a call comes in, Twilio attempts to dial through. If nobody answers in 25 seconds (or it goes to voicemail), Twilio fires a webhook to a Base44 backend function which immediately sends an SMS to the caller.

The SMS is custom to the business's vertical and qualifies the lead with smart questions. Customer replies are captured in a real-time dashboard. The business owner gets a phone notification for every reply.

This recovers leads that would otherwise be lost to whoever the caller dials next.

This build is mechanically simpler than the vision-based tools, no image generation, no complex AI rendering, no large database seeding. But it has one major moving piece that trips up most non-technical operators: Twilio's webhook configuration happens OUTSIDE Base44, in the Twilio console.

Expect Base44 to finish building in 8-12 minutes. The first build will create the entities, the three backend functions, the admin dashboard, and the auto-reply logic. Likely follow-up prompts you'll need to send:

If the SMS isn't firing after a missed call: "The handleMissedCall function isn't sending the SMS reply. Check: (1) the function is correctly parsing the Twilio webhook params (From, To, CallStatus, CallSid), (2) the Twilio Connector is sending SMS using the correct From number from Settings, (3) the function is logging the outbound SMS to the SmsLog entity. Add console.log statements at each step so I can debug from the function logs panel."

If the dedup isn't working (duplicate SMS replies): "The CallSid deduplication isn't preventing duplicate SMS sends. Twilio fires the Status Callback multiple times for some call states. Add a strict check: before sending any SMS, query the MissedCall entity for an existing record with this exact CallSid.

If found, return early without sending. Use call_sid as a unique index on the MissedCall entity."

If inbound SMS replies aren't appearing in the dashboard: "The handleInboundSms function isn't linking replies to the original MissedCall. Adjust the linkage logic: when an inbound SMS arrives, query MissedCall for the most recent record where caller_phone matches the SMS From number AND created_at is within the last 48 hours. If found, link this reply to that record.

If not found, create a new sms_only record."

If the owner isn't getting their notification SMS: "The owner notification isn't firing. Verify the Settings entity has owner_personal_phone populated. The handleMissedCall function should send a second outbound SMS via Twilio API to that number after sending the customer auto-reply.

Use a distinct message format so the owner can distinguish customer texts from system notifications."

The biggest gotcha: the Twilio webhook configuration. This isn't a Base44 problem, it's a Twilio console step the operator does AFTER the Base44 app is built. The Phase 1 playbook walks through it step by step.

If the operator skips that step, nothing fires at all (no errors, just no activity). Make sure they complete every step in 1.5 through 1.7.