Twilio Announces Mobile App for CCaaS, “Personalized IVR” and More

Twilio has announced a mobile app for Flex – its CCaaS platform – as one of several major announcements in its Q2 2024 release.

The Flex Mobile app is pre-built for iOS and Android, requiring no development effort for deployment.

In fact, users can access all the information and features that the company has already configured in Twilio Flex.

All they need to do is download Flex Mobile from their App Store or Google Play, log in via single sign-on, and start participating in conversations across all digital and voice channels.

Meanwhile, Flex Mobile will operate with the same users, phone numbers, routing, queues and customer data as the desktop version.

Moreover, as Philip Borden, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Twilio Flexadded:

Flex Mobile will also be part of the Flex roadmap, so new features available on the Flex product, app, and desktop will now be available on tablets and mobile devices.

Now available in public beta, Flex users can download the app at no additional cost, while additional Flex-only mobile licenses can be purchased at a discounted rate.

This award underscores Twilio’s overall ambition for Flex Mobile: leveraging the application to extend CCaaS solutions across the enterprise.

Currently, most providers require customers to pay full price for an additional agent seat.

However, through the app, Twilio puts more cost-effective CCaaS into the hands of external subject matter experts (SMEs), from sales and marketing teams to store associates, field service personnel and beyond.

This not only allows companies to extend their contact management strategy beyond the confines of customer service, but also to equip other departments with new technologies. This could prove significant.

Consider a utility customer who has a plumbing problem. After contacting customer service, they are directed to an SME located in a store 500 miles away.

With Flex Mobile, that employee could help recommend the best product to fix the installation, complete a purchase, and schedule a pickup at the local store closest to the customer’s home. All thanks to Flex Mobile.

After sharing similar examples during an introductory webinar, Borden noted:

As a business, you are able to track every interaction, take every data point from the interactions that occur and use it to improve your understanding of the customer over time and how you should interact with them in the future.

Finally, it’s worth noting how the app can empower conventional contact center agents who spend their days tied to their desks.

With the app, they can leave their desk to grab a coffee or run a quick errand without logging out or putting the customer on hold.

In doing so, the contact center can meet the modern expectations of employees who want to communicate on any device, wherever they are.

Twilio Launches Personalized IVR in Private Beta

Alongside Flex Mobile, Twilio released a “custom IVR” in a private beta.

IVR combines static CRM data with real-time behavioral insights to intelligently route contacts and, where possible, deliver one-to-one self-service interactions.

By offering self-service, the solution balances both “out-of-the-box” conversational and generative AI, enabling a more dynamic experience.

Sharing more, an enthusiasm Jason Spulak, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Twiliodeclared:

Imagine being able to deploy a customer-centric IVR powered by conversational AI in a matter of hours. That’s the reality of personalized IVR.

Additionally, when conversations are routed to a human agent, the solution provides enterprise connectors to ensure they can access the “latest customer insights.” This helps them further personalize and contextualize the experience.

After suggesting that the innovation marks “a significant leap forward into the future of interactions,” Spulak summarized:

“Welcome to the dawn of a new era of customer engagement: the era of personalized IVR.”

Twilio Launches New Speech Analytics Solution

One of Twilio’s notable strengths in CCaaS is how the vendor has leveraged its Magic Quadrant-leading CPaaS portfolio on the backend. This enables greater composability for Flex customers.

To enhance this portfolio, Twilio also announced the general availability of a voice analytics offering: Twilio Voice Intelligence.

Twilio promises the solution will “revolutionize” customer interactions and how businesses learn about their customers, products and brand.

As Spulak said, “Powered by cutting-edge AI technology, this release brings a broad suite of capabilities designed to improve communication, generate actionable insights, and empower businesses with unmatched capabilities.

Voice intelligence enables customers to analyze every customer interaction using advanced AI and machine learning, providing deep insights and actionable data.

Since Twilio first introduced the solution, it has launched new language operators to simplify extracting key information from conversations, introduced sentiment analysis to understand deeper meanings in calls, and added call summarization to capture the most meaningful parts of conversations.

Now that Twilio is available to the general public, it is announcing several new features intended to further strengthen Voice Intelligence. These include multilingual transcriptions and API improvements.

The latter provides developers with tools to integrate and customize language operators, providing additional flexibility for custom tools that scale with the business.

However, this solution could prove more powerful within Flex, as it could soon allow Twilio to bolster its native conversational intelligence solution Flex Insights.

Other highlights of Twilio’s T2 release

Another big announcement for Flex customers is Twilio Unified Profiles.

Launched earlier this year, Unified Profiles puts a data layer on top of Flex, powered by Segment, Twilio’s customer data platform (CDP).

The data ingests interaction, CRM, warehouse, web activity and application activity data and generates a unique customer profile.

Now, Twilio has enhanced these profiles to include predictive characteristics like churn propensity and lifetime value out of the box.

Calculated characteristics, such as which channels a customer likes to communicate on and how many times they have interacted, are also available.

This gives Flex and Flex Mobile users access to a more complete view of the customer.

Elsewhere, Twilio announced several enhancements to Segment after highlighting the recent addition of Linked Audiences, an intuitive audience creation tool.

The most eye-catching include two additions to its CustomerAI product, which leverages GenAI and NLP to extract insights from customer conversations and funnel them into their segment profile.

The first feature is CustomerAI Recommendations. It offers personalized recommendations to targeted audiences to improve conversions.

Then there’s CustomerAI Generative Audiences, which simplifies audience creation with text prompts and, in doing so, reduces the time it takes to launch campaigns.

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