OK, first off, I think Saul is correct. Twilio overhyped Flex. I don’t think there’s any reasonable way to deny that. But given that, I’m not ready to abandon Twilio. And longer term I think Flex will be significant contributor to revenue.
I’m not sure Flex will be used to send everybody home. Different companies have different reasons for allowing or even forcing employees to work off site. They also have different motivations to keep people in the building so to speak. Where I worked, they went through a few gyrations on this with the IT staff. One executive tried to shrink the footprint of IT staff square footage. A few years later,a new executive walks through the building and muses, “Where are all the people?” Within months a lot of them were back in the building. The work didn’t change. The people doing the work didn’t change. One executive wanted to reduce overhead. The next one wanted to see butts in the chairs.
Anyway, I think that’s actually a bit off topic. The advantage of Flex, whether the people are on or off site is reduction in hardware, ease of implementation, ease of use, ease of maintenance and reliability. That’s off the top of my head, there are probably more. I don’t know enough about call center economics to compare a traditional call center with Flex holding all other variables constant. Maybe someone on the board could provide some insight on that. My guess is that Flex is the cheaper option, but that’s just a guess.
But I view Flex in a similar manner to Zscaler. Call centers are already up and running for those companies that most need them. In other words they already have sunk cost in an operation that is functioning and not necessarily crying out to be replaced. Flex will likely be a candidate when the next h/w refresh cycle rolls around or when the next call center needs to be implemented. And yeah, when some executive says how do I reduce my overhead? So we might be looking at lease expiry dates or corporate expansion that demands more physical space for employees that need to be in the office. Flex provides for the work at home option, a traditional call center does not.
But of this I’m certain, though the adoption rate may be lumpy, like Zscaler, it will be very sticky. Once a company adopts Flex, I can’t see anything that would motivate them to go back to a traditional style call center. Eventually, the gravitational pull of simplicity and flexibility will win.