Al Cook (AC): Twilio’s Chief of Product was on a Podcast talking about the latest with Twilio Flex (their disruptive call center platform) and how Customer Contact Week 2018 was in Las Vegas: https://www.uctoday.com/podcasts/out-loud-nowhere-is-safe-fr…
Pretty quick, 12 minute listen, but here’s my notes:
AC: Launched Flex in March and have had “thousands and thousands of companies sign up and request access”
AC: “launched Flex with a different view on the contact center.”
It’s very hard to make changes in legacy contact centers which puts constraints on many enterprises. They built Flex to be adaptable to enterprise needs in order to improve the customer journey.
Flex focuses on 1k seats up to 40k seats as prime customer base.
Many people think of Twilio as an API platform that requires developers, coding etc. Flex is a bit different. It can be deployed out of the box without a single line of code (reminds me of SalesForce).
Out of the box it will give an agent - user interface that supports just about every channel you can imagine with supervisor, admin, agent level permissions. But it can be customized down to the smallest detail if an organization wants or needs to.
This is what differentiates it from the competition (according to Al Cook).
**Any web developer in an organization can make customization. It does not require specialized training.
Al Cook’s predictions for next 5 years on trends in the industry:
“Flex has huge amount of interest and there’s a lot more we can do with it. We’re building the foundation and you can do all kinds of things with AI on top of it.”
Flex’s approach can be applied to pretty much any part of enterprise software. Deliver something out of the box that’s finely tuned to give the best experience possible.
The Podcast closed with Al Cook saying they have really interesting software that’s very hard to replicate because it’s built on top of 10 years of R&D/ user experience and they’re really excited to see what they can do with it.
– My takeaway. Twilio is just getting started. The products they have now, as well as the years of experience, partnerships, etc are their moat. They are going to continue to leverage these resources and enter into different parts of enterprise software.