Twilio Wants to Change Contact Centers With New Flex Platform

Twilio has been a big name in communications for over a decade. Fifty-fifty if you lot're unfamiliar with the San Francisco-based company, y'all've probably used their technology, which has been implemented by Airbnb, Lyft, Netflix, and many other companies. When we spoke with Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson last year, he told usa that his team's mission was to fuel the time to come of communications with their telecom software services. During the visitor'southward initial public offering (IPO) in 2022, information technology was valued at $ii billion.

The best way to call up of the company's offerings would exist as building blocks that other companies can utilize to build out their solutions. Rather than spending the time and resources on building out systems for video, voice, or text messaging capabilities, developers can use its unlike awarding programming interfaces (APIs). They can leverage the APIs and use Twilio's tech to bring communication features into their products and services.

Last calendar week at the Enterprise Connect communication engineering conference in Orlando, the company announced a new initiative, namely Twilio Flex. Instead of a mere building cake, Twilio Flex is the company's play at a full-featured, cloud-based, standalone contact center platform. The company said that Flex will be extremely customizable, letting customers configure everything from the look of the user interface (UI) to integration with customer human relationship management (CRM) tools. The launch of Twilio Flex marks an interesting alter of footstep for the company in the sense that Twilio promises Flex will be set to utilise without any coding knowledge from its customers. That ways that in some cases, Twilio's new product volition compete straight with some of its customers.

A Focus on Flexibility

Co-ordinate to Al Cook, Director of Product Management and Engineering at Twilio, the inspiration for Twilio Flex came out of a desire to build a more configurable platform for the market. "We saw a need in the space for a fast and powerful platform that customers could get upwards and running easily," said Cook. "We've built Flex with a point of view based on everything we've learned over the years."

Flex is both a standalone platform and a vast sandbox for developers. "We looked at the contact center in a different way: we recall of it as an application platform or a programmable application," said Melt. "With that said, if you want to, you lot tin deploy it out of the box. With one click, you can deploy the solution without whatever lawmaking any—and it supports phonation, video, screen sharing, and pretty much anything else you'd want."

Withal, what makes Flex unique is its, well, flexibility. Customers who want total control over how the app looks, feels, and works tin can completely configure Flex to suit their needs. Not simply tin can you change superficial things well-nigh the platform, such as colors or branding, only you tin can alter well-nigh anything else, besides. "The UI is built out of what we call micro-components," said Cook. "For developers, we've congenital information technology on React and Redux, so you tin choose to modify it at anything y'all want." The implications of being able to utilize React architecture means that, in basic terms, every piece of an application'southward interface is considered its own component and can be changed without affecting the residual of the application.

For example, if you lot want to change what happens when you lot click a specific button, you are gratis to do and then. You lot could too modify the name of the push button, where the push button is, or y'all could remove the button entirely. If there's an aspect of the UI you lot'd like to modify, there's a very good chance information technology'south possible with Flex's React architecture. Your developers could also build components. Say you wanted a feature for the contact center that would display your visitor's client service Twitter feed. Once i of these components is built, it can be added to your unique UI

This means that you can add or remove features as you please and very piddling most Twilio Flex is across irresolute—every bit long as you have capable developers, of course. The nature of the Twilio Flex platform gives it vast possibilities if put in the right hands. Cook mentioned that developers tin even implement their ain motorcar learning (ML) models if they want to.

Twilio Flex is currently in Preview mode and is expected to be widely released toward the end of 2022. Concrete pricing information is not available at this time but information technology is expected to be priced per user per month.

Direct Competition

Perchance most interesting well-nigh this announcement is that, with the launch of Flex, Twilio has essentially thrown downwardly the gauntlet confronting a lot of the companies it considers customers. For case, Talkdesk is a contact center developer that uses Twilio's tech equally its master communication provider. Another company, NewVoiceMedia, also uses Twilio for public switched telephone network (PSTN) connectivity. It remains to be seen how the relationships between Twilio and companies like these who employ its infrastructure will proceed in calorie-free of the Flex announcement. When asked about information technology, Cook did not shy away from the possibility of Flex being a threat to some of Twilio'due south customers. With that in heed, he also shared his hopes that his current customers would actually exist able to benefit from the functionality of the platform.

Some of Twilio'due south customers-turned-competitors have shared their opinions on the matter. Ryan Nichols, General Manager of Zendesk Talk, published a blog postal service last calendar week in which he discussed the implications of Flex. Rather than seeing it as an enemy, folks similar Nichols come across the customizability of Flex every bit a potential boon.

"Imagine being able to use pieces of Twilio Flex to extend Zendesk Talk," wrote Nichols. "You could go upward and running with fully integrated, omnichannel phone support in minutes, completely out of the box. You could so gyre up your sleeves to extend that customer experience and make information technology unique. This is possible today by combining building blocks from Twilio and Zendesk, and we're working to make information technology even easier."