We are living in the era of constant digital bombardment –– social media alerts, push notifications, messages, unsolicited emails, robocalls, and bubble chats coming from all sorts of apps and websites. One study found that users receive on average over 63 notifications per day. Trying to keep up with all this information is causing a wave of communication burnout.
Hence, consumers seek out more personalized, real, and authentic conversations. Consumers expect businesses to meet them where they are, whether it is through the front office or the storefront, the website or the customer service line, over text, email, or social media. Companies need to know how their customers engage to provide a consistent and agile experience. This engagement consists of all the touchpoints that organizations define with their customers, from marketing and sales to service and support.
However, some of these touchpoints come from departments typically not considered part of the contact center. These include field service, concierge assistance, and contactless delivery services, among others. The need to assist more than the traditional contact centers use cases is forcing the technology to evolve. As you cannot solve a dynamic business problem with a static solution, it is evident that contact centers of the future need to be flexible enough to continuously evolve as customer habits and preferences change.
For years, contact center vendors have controlled the customer service with stagnant solutions that limit integrations and take years to bring impactful services that matter to your specific business. Software is redefining the landscape of modern organizations, and it is not coming from pre-packaged applications. The common engine to get this into the cloud is the application program interface (API).
APIs are leading the next generation of contact centers platforms, as the easiest and fastest path to deeply integrate the contact center operation with the rest of the organization. This is the reason why Twilio created Flex, a programmable contact center platform.
Flex’s programmability allows business to:
- Innovate by modifying and extending the behavior, user experience, and the framework of the contact center
- Define their unique rules
- Control their own roadmap
- Specify the exact customer experience that they need
- Create their own competitive differentiators
- Iterate on service changes as their business needs evolve.
- Be agile in delivering new services at their own pace
Companies such as Allianz, Nike, Lyft, Airbnb, and TripActions have built exceptional customer engagement using Flex. By adopting Flex, contact center leaders are finding out that their business is not just thriving within their industry, but completely innovating the way customer engagement is delivered, no matter if the interaction starts with a phone conversation, a message, or at the store curbside pickup.
Ben Aneesh, co-founder at Cover Financial, describes the value as such: “We were looking to modify every aspect of our contact center to be the right fit for our business and our customers. And, Flex enables us to write our own custom rules, directly pulling in business logic into the routing itself, making sure that the agents have all the information they need on the screen.”
Watch our demo to see the programmability power of Twilio Flex in action.
