The Twilio Flex Contact Centre of 2024 (and beyond)

This year will be all about Twilio CustomerAI, which couples the power of large language models (LLMs) with real-time customer data flowing through the Flex contact centre platform.

Organisations will gain a much better understanding of their customers as a result. The combination of customer data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will provide greater visibility into overall contact centre trends.

By Q4, GenAI Agent Assist will enter private beta providing agents with concise AI generated summaries of customers’ histories, along with suggested responses. This will make for more tailored customer service at scale.

Leveraging data that customers are already sharing

Making use of the information that customers are already sharing via their phone, text and chatbot interactions will be the order of the day.

Twilio’s CustomerAI Perception Engine will eventually integrate with Flex, allowing organisations to extract data from any customer conversation to build in-depth (‘golden’) customer profiles.

Transforming customer calls into business intelligence will be a big part of this. Twilio’s Voice Intelligence beta is already identifying and extracting important signals from unstructured voice call data. Agent summaries of interactions will be supported by AI powered insights derived from highly accurate call transcriptions.

As organisations adopt this technology, we’ll see a whole new era of conversational intelligence to inform exceptional customer contact.

Chatbots on the phone

Twilio has made it possible for organisations to build AI-powered Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems in volume. This means that conversational experiences (aka chatbots) can now talk to customers via the phone through Twilio Prorgammable Voice.

This is possible via Twilio Virtual Agent with Google Dialogflow CX. The close integration means organisations of all sizes will be able to launch AI-based virtual agents. 2024 will ultimately see more natural and fluid IVR experiences.

Flexibility on the move

Information that customers share in person is rarely captured and leveraged to its full potential, which is a big missed opportunity. Agents and representatives on the move often end up using their personal phones to talk to prospects and customers, again resulting in little visibility or insight to power and improve future interactions.

Flex Mobile will close these gaps. The app (also currently in beta) will help capture in-person interactions and connect field sales with branch employees and contact centre agents. Plus, it will surface important contextual insight to those on the move.

Flex Unify, which pulls together real-time data from multiple enterprise systems to give agents important contextual insights on customers, will be available via the mobile interface. This will enable deeper personalisation in use cases across retail, field services and mobile support.

Imagine a shop assistant pulling up a customers preferences and purchase history to provide assistance, or a service team member accessing relevant information to personalise in-person service.

The full lifecylce of customer communications

Every interaction should deepen an organisation's understanding of the customer. 2024 will be about supporting the full lifecylce of customer communications.

The contact centre will appropriately be at the 'centre' of this. Most of today's contact centres were never built to leverage real-time customer data. Twilio is creating, at pace, the stepping stones organisations need to move from the old to the new without having to rip and replace.

If you’d like help planning your journey or need assistance in reaching your destination, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.