Cloud communications platform Twilio Inc. today announced major platform enhancements at its developer and customer virtual conference Signal 2020 that will assist enterprise businesses to communicate better with their customers.

Recent research by Twilio found that 97% of enterprises have begun to accelerate digital transformation efforts in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the need for increased work-from-home efforts and different communication strategies. As a result, most digital communication strategies have been sped up by an average of six years, it said.

At the same time, Twilio has seen increases in demand, powering nearly a trillion human interactions in the past year.

“Faced with an entirely new reality over the past six months, enterprises have been forced to accelerate their digital transformation plans to serve their customers,” said Jeff Lawson, chief executive and co-founder of Twilio, speaking during Signal. “Many are turning to Twilio because the platform delivers three things that have become immediately essential — digital engagement, software agility and cloud scale.”

To keep up with this acceleration of transformation Twilio is announcing several major updates to its platform, including a new Twilio video offering that will allow developers to experiment for free, an Event Streams application programming interface and the Twilio Frontline mobile app.

Nearly half of respondents surveyed in Twilio’s COVID-19 Digital Engagement Report said their organization dramatically increased their use of video due to the pandemic.

In response, Twilio is launching Twilio Video WebRTC Go, which provides developers and companies with a free toolkit to create and launch one-to-one video applications. With this software development kit, developers can rapidly prototype and launch more engaging customer experiences, the company said.

Event Streams is a single API that aggregates data from all Twilio-powered experiences – Voice, text messaging, Super SIM, TaskRouter and other services – enabling real-time monitoring and reporting across all communication channels.

Developers find themselves frequently tasked with trying to wrangle multiple modes of communication with customers, but this creates needless complexity on the backend. Event Streams aims to simplify this as much as possible by creating a single point of truth for customers in a single view of what’s happening without spreading it out across multiple interfaces or different formats.

Finally, the Twilio Frontline mobile app will power the future of agile work for DevOps teams, which depend heavily on mobile devices for inter-team and customer communication.

According to Twilio’s research, 80% of the global workforce is deskless, and employees often use their own devices for customer communications. As COVID-19 transforms businesses to adapt to a more agile and decentralized workforce, more message-based workforce relationships in use cases like retail, wealth management and logistics.

Frontline available now in private beta and routes incoming and outgoing customer conversations to and from WhatsApp. The objective is to provide worker with the ability to best control their communications so they don’t get overwhelmed by work relationships and better manage time and energy.

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