Flex contact platform announced by Twilio

Twilio announced Flex, a contact center platform that gives businesses complete control of their contact center experience. With Twilio Flex, companies can instantly deploy an omnichannel contact center platform and also programmatically customize every element of the experience including the interface, communication channels, agent routing, and reporting to meet the unique needs of the business. With the launch of Flex, Twilio introduces a new type of platform for applications which has the potential to disrupt traditional monolithic application vendors in the same way API platforms disrupted traditional infrastructure services for communications, compute and payments.

A company’s contact center is critical to building and maintaining relationships with customers. However, as customer expectations shift with the availability of new communication channels, companies struggle to keep pace because of the difficulties and cost of upgrading the on-premises, hardware-based solutions that have dominated the contact center market for decades. Many companies have outgrown the one-size-fits-all applications and are demanding the ability to create an experience for their customers and agents customized to their unique needs.

“Hundreds of companies including ING Bank, Zillow, Simply Business and National Debt Relief have built customized contact center solutions using Twilio’s communication APIs,” said Al Cook, head of the contact center business at Twilio. “With Flex, we are providing a contact center platform that has a point-of-view based on the best practices we’ve learned, offers options for those who want to get up and running quickly, and gives businesses unlimited flexibility as they design their customer experiences.'

Twilio Flex features include:

• Instantly support an omnichannel experience: Flex allows businesses to instantly deploy agent, administration and supervisor desktops and begin engaging with customers via channels including voice, SMS, email, chat, video, Facebook Messenger and any other channel, either natively or through an integration.
  
  
• Programmatically customize any user interface: While Flex user interfaces work out of the box, they are designed to be customized at every point of the contact center journey. Businesses can customize customer-facing components like click-to-call or click-to-chat, add entirely new channels or integrate reporting dashboards to display agent performance or customer satisfaction.
  
  
• Bring contextual intelligence to every interaction: Flex empowers developers with machine learning to improve agent, supervisor and operator productivity and uses Twilio’s powerful TaskRouter to apply attribute-based routing logic across all communication channels.
  
  
• Build applications with drag-and-drop ease: Twilio Studio, a visual application builder, makes it easy to customize everything from IVRs and chatbots to SMS-based appointment reminders or surveys.
  
  
• Integrate any application: Flex can integrate with any third-party applications that are critical to the business including customer relationship management (CRM) from Salesforce or Zendesk, workforce management (WFM), workforce optimization (WFO), reporting, analytics and data store.