Twilio has announced a mobile app for Flex – its CCaaS platform – as one of several significant announcements within its Q2 2024 release.
The Flex Mobile app is pre-built for iOS and Android, requiring zero developer effort to deploy.
Indeed, users may access all the information and functionality the business has already configured within Twilio Flex.
All they need to do is download Flex Mobile from their app store or Google Play, sign in via the single sign-on, and start engaging in conversations across all digital channels and voice.
Meanwhile, Flex Mobile will work with the same users, phone numbers, routing, queues, and customer data as the desktop version.
Moreover, as Philip Borden, Principal Product Marketing Manager of Twilio Flex, added:
Flex Mobile will also become part of the Flex roadmap. As such, new features available on the Flex product, application, and desktop are now going to be available on tablet and mobile devices.
Now available in a 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.
That discount underlines Twilio’s overarching ambition for Flex Mobile: to leverage the app to extend CCaaS solutions across the enterprise.
Currently, most providers require customers to pay full price for an additional agent seat.
Yet, via the app, Twilio puts more cost-efficient CCaaS in the hands of external subject matter experts (SMEs), from sales and marketing teams to store associates, field services personnel, and beyond.
That not only allows businesses to expand their contact handling strategy beyond the confines of customer service but also empowers other departments with new tech. That could be significant.
Consider an example of a utilities customer who has a plumbing issue. After contacting customer service, they route to an SME in a store 500 miles away.
Using Flex Mobile, that employee could help recommend the best-placed product to fix the installation, complete a purchase, and schedule a pick up at the local store close to the customer’s home address. That’s all through Flex Mobile.
After sharing similar examples in an introductory webinar, Borden stressed:
As a business, you’re able to track every interaction, take every data point from the interactions that are happening, and use this to improve your understanding of the customer over time and how you should interact with them moving forward.
Finally, it’s worth noting how the app may empower conventional contact center agents who spend their days tied to their desks.
With the app, they can step away from their desks to grab a cup of coffee or run a quick errand without going offline or putting the customer on hold.
In doing so, the contact center can keep up with modern employee expectations to communicate on any device, wherever they are.
Twilio Launches a Personalized IVR In Private Beta
Alongside Flex Mobile, Twilio released a “Personalized IVR” in a private beta.
The IVR combines static CRM data with real-time behavioral insights to intelligently route contacts and – where possible – deliver individualized self-service interactions.
In delivering self-service, the solution balances both conversational and generative AI “right out-of-the-box” enabling a more dynamic experience.
Sharing more, an enthusiastic Jason Spulak, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Twilio, stated:
Picture being able to deploy a customer-centric, conversational-AI-enabled IVR in hours. That’s the reality the Personalized IVR offers.
Also, when conversations route through 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 to the future of interactions,” Spulak summarized:
“Welcome to the dawn of a new era of customer engagement: the era of Personalized IVR.”
Twilio Releases a New Speech Analytics Solution
A notable strength of Twilio in CCaaS is how the vendor has leveraged its Magic-Quadrant-leading CPaaS portfolio on the back end. That enables greater composability for Flex customers.
To enhance that portfolio, Twilio also announced the general availability of a speech analytics offering: Twilio Voice Intelligence.
Twilio promises that the solution will “revolutionize” customer interactions and how businesses learn about their customers, products, and brand.
As Spulak stated: “With state-of-the-art AI technology, this release brings an extensive suite of features designed to enhance communication, drive actionable insights, and empower businesses with unparalleled capabilities.
Voice intelligence empowers customers to analyze every customer interaction using advanced AI and machine learning, providing deep insights and actionable data.
Since Twilio first teased the solution, it has launched new language operators to simplify extracting key insights from conversations, introduced sentiment analysis to understand deeper meanings behind calls, and added call summarization to capture the most meaningful parts of conversations.
Yet, now it’s reaching general availability, Twilio is announcing several new features to bolster Voice Intelligence further. These include multi-language transcriptions and API enhancements.
The latter offers developers tools to integrate and customize language operators, providing extra flexibility for bespoke tools that scale with the business.
However, this solution may prove most powerful within Flex, as it may soon allow Twilio to bolster its native Flex Insights conversational intelligence solution.
Other Highlights from Twilio’s Q2 Release
Another significant announcement for Flex customers relates to Twilio Unified Profiles.
Launched earlier this year, Unified Profiles places a data layer over Flex, powered by Segment, Twilio’s customer data platform (CDP).
The data ingests interaction, CRM, warehouse, web activity, and app activity data and spits out a single customer profile.
Now, Twilio has bolstered those profiles to include predictive traits like propensity to churn and lifetime value out-of-the-box.
Computed traits – like the channels a customer likes to communicate on and the number of times they’ve interacted – are also available.
As a result, Flex and Flex Mobile users can access a more comprehensive view of the customer.
Elsewhere, Twilio announced several enhancements to Segment after spotlighting the recent addition of Linked Audiences, an intuitive audience-building 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 those into their Segment profile.
First is a CustomerAI Recommendations feature. This serves personalized recommendations to targeted audiences for improved conversions.
Then, there is CustomerAI Generative Audiences, which simplifies audience building with text prompts and – in doing so – reduces the time it takes to launch campaigns.
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