I think the problem here is the concept of “Conversation” as it relates to SMS Messages.
How can RingCentral (or anyone) know what conversation a particular message belongs to? With SMS it’s just one everlasting conversation.
Let’s just map this out for a second here…
Send SMS to user → “Please confirm you want to receive text messages from us reply Yes or No”
User does not respond within X minutes → Assume answer is “No”
User responds “No” within X minutes → Answer is “No”
User responds “Yes” within X minutes → Answer is “Yes”
User responds “nope” within X minutes → Invalid response. Ask again?
User responds “yep” within X minutes → Invalid response. Ask again?
etc…
User responds “No” or “Yes” or anything AFTER X minutes → Answer is already “No” since they didn’t respond within the set amount of time. This “No”, “Yes” or anything else is now the beginning of a new “conversation”. → How do you respond??
All of these cases need to be handled within Make, unless you can somehow filter them in RingCentral first.
Now, you know when you send your initial message to each number, so it’s very easy to calculate whether their response is within the X minutes time window, even if you don’t check the responses for a while.
The problem is if you don’t confirm their response immediately they may keep sending it which just makes life more difficult for you.
I think you’re best bet is to set up an event on the RingCentral side that calls a Make Webhook.
Check the content of the message, check your Airtable, respond accordingly.
This is 4 Ops per incoming SMS: Make Webhook → Router (free) → Airtable (to check when your last message was sent) → Airtable (mark if they are a “Yes” or “No”) → Webhook response or RingCentral Send SMS (if you need to send back a confirmation you received or don’t understand their message).
If you constantly exceed Ops / month or year depending on which plan you’re on, you’ll need to upgrade. If you occasionally exceed your limit, then you can sign up for Extra operations auto-purchasing