Send text messages from Dynamics 365 using Power Automate

At Rand Group, we know that timely, automated communication is essential for keeping both your business running smoothly and your customers happy. Whether it’s sending internal alerts and approvals to your team, coordinating field service or logistics updates, or engaging customers with marketing and promotional messages, SMS ensures your messages are delivered quickly and reliably. Text messaging continues to outperform email in open and response rates, making it a powerful tool for organizations that want to act fast and keep everyone informed. If your business uses Microsoft Dynamics 365, integrating SMS with Power Automate lets you seamlessly send notifications, confirmations, and alerts directly from your core systems. This integration helps you streamline communication across every part of your operation. This blog provides a comprehensive view of the benefits of using Power Automate with Dynamics 365 for SMS communications and shows why partnering with Rand Group for system support and optimization sets you on a path for better business success and profitable growth.

Microsoft Power Automate, a core component of the Microsoft Power Platform, enables organizations to streamline and automate workflows across Dynamics 365 applications and hundreds of external systems, all without writing a single line of code. By integrating Dynamics 365 with communication channels such as SMS, email, Microsoft Teams, or other third-party messaging platforms, businesses can ensure critical updates are delivered automatically, reducing manual effort and improving responsiveness.

Power Automate connects seamlessly with the full Dynamics 365 suite, including:

• Dynamics 365 Sales – streamline lead follow-ups and deal progression.
• Dynamics 365 Customer Service – automate case updates, escalations, and SLA alerts.
• Dynamics 365 Field Service – notify technicians and customers about dispatches or schedule changes.
• Dynamics 365 Finance – automate payment reminders, invoice notifications, and approval workflows.
• Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management (SCM) – trigger alerts for inventory levels, shipment delays, or production updates.
• Dynamics 365 Business Central – streamline financial processes, purchase orders, and customer communications.
• Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – send personalized engagement messages based on customer behavior and data insights.
• Dynamics 365 Human Resources – notify employees about approvals, policy changes, or benefits enrollment deadlines.
• Dynamics 365 Project Operations – alert project teams to task updates, budget changes, or milestone completions.

Automation ensures real-time visibility and consistent communication across departments, whether managing sales, financials, operations, or customer engagement. Notifications and alerts can be triggered by key events or data changes within any Dynamics 365 application, ensuring that teams and customers receive timely, relevant information.

Common use cases for automated notifications include:

• Customer communication: Order confirmations, shipping updates, payment alerts, or appointment reminders.
• Field service coordination: Job assignments, estimated arrival times, and service completion notifications.
• Sales and service updates: New leads, follow-up reminders, and case escalations.
• Finance and operations: Payment approvals, budget alerts, and inventory updates.
• HR and internal processes: Time-off approvals, expense notifications, and policy updates.
• Marketing and engagement: Campaign messages, surveys, and event notifications.

Before you can send text messages from Microsoft Dynamics 365 using Power Automate, the first step is to connect to a trusted SMS provider. Power Automate supports integration with a wide range of messaging platforms through built-in connectors or custom APIs, enabling your organization to choose the provider that best fits your needs.

First Steps for Enabling SMS in Power Automate

1. Choose an SMS provider – Select a messaging provider that aligns with your organization’s requirements for scalability, regional coverage, compliance, and message types (e.g., one-way or two-way messaging).
2. Create an account – Register with the provider, verify your business identity, and confirm your messaging use case to ensure compliance with communication and privacy regulations.
3. Connect a phone number – Obtain or configure a phone number capable of sending and receiving SMS messages. Some providers also offer short codes or toll-free numbers for higher message throughput.
4. Link your account to Power Automate – Use the provider’s Power Automate connector or API credentials (such as Account SID, Auth Token, or API Key) to authenticate and establish the connection.
5. Test your setup – Send a test message to verify that your integration works as expected before automating workflows in Dynamics 365.

Selecting the right SMS provider for your business is a critical step in enabling text messaging from Power Automate and Dynamics 365. Providers vary in coverage, pricing, message volume capacity, and integration options, so it’s important to choose one that aligns with your unique needs.

Power Automate supports many SMS vendors through either native connectors or custom API integrations. The chart below highlights several leading options commonly used with Dynamics 365.

• The “SMS Provider” column lists vendors compatible with Power Automate’s native functionality, which allows users to manually send a text message from a Contact record in Dynamics 365 Sales. This blog is focused on automating text messages, not the native method. However, if you plan on using text messages in both ways it is helpful to understand which providers can do both. To learn more about the native functionality you can read more on Microsoft Learn. 
• The “Power Automate Connector” column shows those with prebuilt connectors in Power Automate, a key requirement for automated workflows like those demonstrated in this blog.

At Rand Group, we’ve implemented solutions using several different providers. We most often recommend Twilio and Azure Communication Services, as they are mature, widely used, and well-documented. Unless you send large volumes of international messages or have very specific pricing needs, these two are typically the best choices for reliability and ease of setup. If your organization sends messages at high volume, review each provider’s pricing tiers, even small per-message differences can add up over time.

After selecting an SMS provider, the next step is connecting it to Power Automate to start sending messages directly from your Dynamics 365 applications. Among the various providers that integrate with Power Automate, Twilio stands out as one of the most mature and developer-friendly platforms for business messaging. Its strong API capabilities, global reach, and native Power Automate connector make it a reliable choice for organizations seeking to automate communication efficiently across Dynamics 365 environments.

Why Twilio?

• Secure, scalable cloud infrastructure – Built for enterprise reliability and compliance.
• Global coverage with high delivery rates – Ensures consistent message delivery across regions.
• Native Power Automate connector – Simplifies setup with low-code integration.
• Two-way messaging support – Handles both outbound notifications and inbound customer replies.

Twilio’s flexibility makes it ideal for automating a wide range of scenarios within Dynamics 365, from sending order confirmations in Business Central, to case updates in Customer Service, or appointment reminders in Field Service. With Twilio and Power Automate, businesses can create event-driven workflows that deliver personalized, real-time communication without manual intervention.

Using Twilio with Power Automate enables a fully automated SMS workflow, allowing businesses to send and receive messages directly connected to Dynamics 365 data. This integration streamlines communication, reduces manual effort, and ensures critical updates reach the right people at the right time.

For example:

• Order confirmations: When a sales order is shipped in Dynamics 365 Business Central, Power Automate can automatically send a confirmation text with tracking details, keeping customers informed and reducing support inquiries.
• Appointment reminders: When a service appointment is scheduled, a text reminder can be sent to the customer with the date, time, and location information, helping to reduce missed appointments and improve customer satisfaction.
• Internal notifications: Teams can receive instant SMS alerts for approvals, workflow escalations, or status updates, ensuring important internal processes stay on track.
• Two-way communication: Customers can respond to SMS messages, allowing for confirmations, rescheduling, or queries. These responses can be captured and logged in Dynamics 365 automatically, keeping all records up to date.

By combining Twilio’s reliable messaging platform with Power Automate, your organization can maintain real-time, personalized communication without manual intervention, while ensuring all interactions are fully synchronized with Dynamics 365. This creates a seamless, efficient workflow that benefits both employees and customers.

Getting started with Twilio and Power Automate is straightforward. Below is a high-level overview of the setup process:

1. Create a Twilio account
   Sign up at twilio.com. Twilio often offers a free trial with $20 worth of credit.
2. Set up a Twilio phone number
   Purchase or configure a phone number capable of sending and receiving SMS messages.
3. Verify phone number
   You must provide your business identify (brand), use case for text messaging, message examples, and opt-in / opt-out process to ensure you are in compliance of anti-spam regulations.
4. Obtain API credentials
   From your Twilio console, locate your Account SID and Auth Token, these are required for authentication in Power Automate.

Once your Twilio connector is set up in Power Automate, you can begin creating a flow to send text messages from Dynamics 365. When first using Twilio in Power Automate, you’ll need to copy your Account SID and Auth Token from your Twilio account into the Power Automate connector. This authentication step only needs to be completed once per environment. After that, you can reuse the connection for any future flows.

Creating the flow is straightforward, it typically consists of a trigger and one or more actions. In production scenarios, you might pull data from multiple tables or records, but the core structure remains simple.

1. Set the trigger:
   Define what event starts the flow. This could be a business event such as posting an invoice, shipping an order, or updating a record. For example, you could trigger a message when a new customer record is created or when an expected shipment date changes.
2. Add actions:
   Add an action to retrieve the data you will use in the text message. At a minimum, you will need to retrieve the record that contains the phone number you need to message. Then, add the Twilio connector action, “Send text message (SMS)”, to send the message. You can use data from the retrieved record to personalize the message body (for example, including the customer’s name, order number, or delivery date). You can also add conditional logic and branching to the flow.
3. Test and validate:
   Once your flow is built, trigger it to confirm that messages are being sent successfully.

The example below illustrates sending a text message when a Sales Order is shipped in Business Central. In a real-world scenario, we would likely add additional actions to retrieve additional information such as expected delivery date or tracking information.

In the previous section, we covered how to send a text message in response to a trigger in Dynamics 365. Equally important is the ability to parse and respond to incoming text messages to create a complete communication workflow.

Why handle SMS responses?

• Part of a workflow
  Common use cases include confirming or canceling appointments, approving or rejecting purchase orders, and processing time or expense submissions and time-off requests. You can also build flows that automatically respond to customer questions — and even integrate with Copilot to add intelligent, agentic capabilities.
• Unsubscribe and opt-out
  It’s essential to give recipients the option to opt out of future messages. While Twilio automatically blocks future messages to numbers that reply with “STOP,” it’s a best practice to also update your internal database to ensure those contacts are excluded from future communications.

A separate Power Automate flow is required to manage incoming SMS responses.

This flow includes the following components:

• Trigger: HTTP Request
  Use the trigger “When an HTTP request is received.” When the Power Automate flow is saved, it generates a unique URL that you’ll copy and paste into Twilio’s Webhook to POST field. This connection between Power Automate and Twilio activates the flow whenever a response is received.
• Parse JSON
  Responses from Twilio are returned in JSON format and must be parsed into an array to easily access key details — such as the sender’s phone number and message body. The response includes over a dozen fields, which are detailed in our white paper linked below.
• Check for keywords
  Add a condition to look for specific keywords (for example, STOP, START, APPROVE, or REJECT) and create branches in the flow to handle each scenario appropriately.
• Update database
  Based on the identified keywords, perform the corresponding database updates — such as marking a contact as unsubscribed or recording an approval.

Adopting SMS automation requires both technical setup and thoughtful process design. To ensure reliability and compliance, consider these best practices:

• Maintain opt-in/opt-out compliance: Honor unsubscribe requests immediately and store consent records.
• Keep messages concise and relevant: SMS has a 160-character limit, focus on clarity and value.
• Secure your integrations: Validate incoming requests from Twilio and ensure all endpoints use HTTPS.
• Monitor and log activity: Track sent messages, timestamps, and delivery statuses for audit purposes.
• Centralize contact data: Keep phone numbers formatted consistently and updated in Dynamics 365.

Building a robust SMS integration between Dynamics 365 and Power Automate can be complex, from API configuration to compliance management. As a certified Microsoft partner, Rand Group helps organizations design, implement, and support end-to-end Power Platform solutions, including Power Automate, Power Apps, and Power BI, that extend the value of Dynamics 365.

Our team provides tailored support to ensure your systems are optimized, compliant, and fully aligned with your business processes.

• Twilio and Power Automate integration: Setup and configuration to automate SMS workflows and maintain real-time communication with customers.
• Feature enablement and training: Highlighting new Power Platform updates and features, training your users, and ensuring your team leverages the latest capabilities.
• System checks and optimization: Performing thorough system audits after each Microsoft release wave to confirm all modules are running efficiently and delivering maximum value.
• End-to-end strategy: Designing a full communication strategy that enhances operational efficiency, compliance, and customer engagement.

Connecting Dynamics 365 with Power Automate and Twilio allows your organization to automate text messaging, streamline workflows, and ensure customer satisfaction. From sending order updates to managing notifications, SMS automation brings your communication strategy into the modern era. Contact our Microsoft experts today to explore how integrating Power Automate with your Dynamics 365 environment can transform your customer and employee communication experience.