Twilio today introduced Twilio Flex, a fully programmable cloud contact center platform that aims to give companies complete control of their contact center experience. Flex enables companies to instantly deploy an omnichannel contact center platform and programmatically customize elements, such as the interface, communication channels, agent routing, and reporting.
"Flex is what we are calling an application platform, which is an entirely new approach that Twilio believes will change the way enterprises consume software," says Patrick Kolencherry, contact center specialist at Twilio. "With Flex, we are applying the application platform approach to contact centers, but we have built the architecture so that it could be applied to other industries in the future."
Flex allows companies to do five key things: (1) instantly support an omnichannel experience, (2) programmatically customize any user interface, (3) bring contextual intelligence to every interaction, (4) build applications with drag-and-drop functionality, and (5) integrate any application.
First, it enables companies to instantly deploy agent, administration, and supervisor desktops and immediately begin engaging with customers via voice, SMS, email, chat, video, Facebook Messenger, and other channels.
Second, Flex provides user interfaces that, while they work out of the box, are designed to be customized: Companies can customize click-to-call and click-to-chat components, add new channels, or integrate reporting dashboards.
Third, Flex leverages machine learning to improve agent, supervisor, and operator productivity, and it uses Twilio's TaskRouter omnichannel routing feature to bring attribute-based routing logic to all channels.
Fourth, Flex includes the Twilio Studio visual application builder, which allows for the customization of IVRs, chatbots, and more.
And fifth, Flex can integrate with a variety of third-party applications, including Salesforce.com and Zendesk.
"Every company has a need to communicate with their customers. However, if a company wants to build a contact center right now, they have to make a compromise between selecting an on-premises-based approach that is extremely expensive and slow to deploy or a cloud-based solution that can be up and running quickly but cannot scale or be customized to fit their unique needs," Kolencherry says. "Twilio Flex brings an entirely new approach to the industry, delivering the first instantly deployable, cloud-based contact center platform that allows businesses to programmatically customize every element of their contact center experience."