Tremendous advancements in technology over the past several years have provided consumers with many options when it comes to engaging with and purchasing from businesses. We have grown accustomed to being able to interact with brands at our convenience. That flexibility is an important determining factor in customer loyalty.
Many businesses have started expanding their contact centers to offer additional channels to deliver the flexibility many customers expect. However, all contact centers aren’t at the same place technically, and a majority still operate with on-premises solutions and might be unprepared to migrate their entire solution to the cloud right away.
Though most businesses recognize the shift in consumer behaviors and expectations, they’re often unable to meet those demands on time. It’s not a simple task for on-premises contact centers to expand their capabilities, and adding more than just voice has traditionally been difficult. They weren’t designed to support the digital channels that consumers use in their daily lives.
Twilio has introduced Flex One, providing a single API to enable any digital channel and one view of the customer. Flex One aims to remove that complexity and quickly add digital channels—such as SMS, MMS, web-chat, and WhatsApp.
Legacy contact centers can add digital channels and also native email, enabling them to engage with their customers, all in one place. They will have one unified view of their customer that’s completely customizable for any team, such as sales, customer support, and marketing, to engage with customers one-on-one. Flex One helps customers do more with less and helps support customers no matter what channel they come in on.
At SIGNAL 2021, Lyft presented during a Flex Product announcements session, demonstrating how it uses native email as another Twilio digital channel to delight its customers all from within the Flex user interface. Andrew Reback, Director of Global Safety and Support Technology, Lyft, stated, “We now have chat, voice, and email all within Flex, so agents don’t have to open other applications to reply to customers that prefer to use email, to communicate with us.”
If businesses aren’t ready to build on their own, Twilio now offers what it calls Flextensions, pre-built partner plugins for faster Flex deployments. Our consulting partners, including Deloitte Digital and Waterfield Technologies, make this new category of plugins. For those who lack in-house developers, Flextensions provide ready-to-use solutions with out-of-the-box functionality while allowing for the customization that makes Twilio Flex truly powerful for your business needs.
