Global cloud communications platform, Twilio, has announced the general availability of its Flex Contact Center at Signal, its annual customer and developer conference.
The conference, being held in San Francisco over the 17th and 18th October, will see Twilio make a number of announcements, most notably the migration of Flex from beta to general availability.
Twilio Flex, the first fully programmable contact centre platform has rolled out to more than 3,000 contact centre agents including support and sales teams at Scorpion, Shopify, and U-Haul since its launch in March of this year.
“It’s been amazing to see the excitement Flex has created in the contact centre market since our launch in March.”
“Enterprises no longer have to make the choice of whether to build or buy because Flex deploys out of the box like a SaaS application, integrates like a premise-based solution, and iterates like a web platform. As of today, we will be rolling out Twilio Flex to the thousands of companies who signed up during beta. We can’t wait to see what they create,” explained Al Cook, General Manager of Twilio Flex.
Twilio Flex introduces an entirely new approach to the industry by delivering the first instantly deployable, cloud-based platform that allows businesses to programmatically customise every element of their contact centre experience from the core infrastructure to the user interface. Enterprises rely on Twilio Flex out of the box for features like adding new channels, transferring chats or moving between tasks, and can then focus their development resources on offering unique experiences for their customers and improving productivity for their agents.
“The exciting thing about Flex is it allows us to build customer experiences the way we want, without having to change our business,” said Chris Wilson, Director of Support Operations at Shopify. “So we can wrap Flex around our business instead of having to wrap the business around Flex.”
“When Twilio announced Flex in March 2018, it took the contact centre market by storm,” said Sheila McGee-Smith, President & Principal Analyst of McGee-Smith Analytics. “Why? Because over the past ten years, Twilio has built a community of 2 million+ happy developers and 50,000+ active customer accounts – ready to explore Twilio Flex as they search for the perfect cloud contact centre solution to replace aging, inflexible premises-based systems.”
Two new capabilities were also recently introduced to the Flex platform including monitoring, reporting, and speech analytics based on its acquisition of Ytica, the workforce optimisation provider. As such, enterprise users can:
- Deploy instantly and integrate quickly via a simple onboarding experience which allows businesses to get up and running within a few minutes. Businesses can easily integrate Flex into Salesforce using pre-built connectors or add additional capabilities such as phrase detection, call scoring and intelligent redaction of recordings using pre-integrated partner technologies in the Twilio Marketplace
- Deliver a true omnichannel experience with access to more than a dozen channels out of the box, including Voice, SMS, Video and WhatsApp. Developers can also integrate data from custom channels and CRM systems to add context to conversations — all in a single customisable interface
- Have complete visibility and control over interaction data as Flex gives supervisors and administrators the analytics and insights they need to manage performance, quality and customer experience. Flex comes with real-time event stream, supervisor desktop, and admin desktop plus native workforce optimisation
- Automate the known and escalate the unknown through using Autopilot, Twilio’s conversational AI platform. Businesses can rely on machine learning-powered bots that automate information gathering and respond to frequently asked questions and then transition the conversation to a human agent using Flex for more complex queries
- Enable agents to securely process payments through Twilio’s new API (Powered by Twilio <Pay>) for building payment experiences, contact centre agents can now securely accept credit card payments from customers over the phone
- Run their entire contact centre on Twilio’s cloud infrastructure with Twilio Flex’s new plugin framework that allows developers to make changes and retain control of their contact centre application, while still benefiting from continuous improvements made to the rest of the application by Twilio
The innovation isn’t just restricted to the technology with the Twilio Flex announcement, there have been some enterprising changes to the way in which customers can buy the solution. Customers can choose between between traditional per agent monthly pricing or an industry-first, flexible per agent hour model. Developers can get started for free with 5,000 active user hours, enabling them to get started easily, building out integrations and testing Flex’s capabilities before having to commit. Customers can then scale flexibly at either $1 per active agent hour or $150 per user per month. These prices include use of the features within Flex such as instant omnichannel capabilities, a customisable user interface, WFO, and real-time reporting. Advanced speech analytics is an additional $0.25/active user hour, or $40 per user per month. Carrier connectivity, phone numbers, PSTN connections, and SMS are charged at Twilio’s usage-based prices.
Read more contact center news stories here.
