UPDATED 12:32 EDT / MAY 24 2017

APPS

Developers take control of customer communications with Twilio Proxy and Engagement Cloud

Twilio Inc., a cloud communications platform for developers, today announced the release of Twilio Proxy, a new application programming interface designed to manage private text and voice conversations between customers and mobile workers.

The company announced the release of the Proxy platform at its Signal developer conference taking place in San Francisco over the next two days. With Twilio Proxy, businesses can allow mobile workers using their own devices to connect to customers without the worker or customer needing to know or look up contact information. The Proxy platform also functions as a sort of privacy and security safeguard by connecting the two parties without revealing personal information.

One use case for this would be letting a customer rapidly contact a pizza delivery driver currently on the road without needing to go through the pizza shop or a switchboard. The Proxy platform, connected through the pizza company’s website or mobile app, could rapidly connect the customer and the driver without revealing the driver’s personal mobile number.

Remind Inc., formerly Remind101, uses Twilio to connect 23 million teachers, parents and students, allowing them to communicate privately without revealing personal contact information. Jason Fischl, vice president of engineering at Remind, said that Twilio’s Short Message Service, or SMS, privacy protocols represent a critical use for the company, which is used by 70 percent of K-12 schools across the U.S. “Twilio’s Proxy API abstracts away the complexity of private text and voice conversations, making them easy to build and scale,” Fischl said.

The new Twilio Proxy platform brings a large number of communication functions to Twilio customers.

The first function is that multi-channel masked communications, which allows developers to specify the two parties involved in a conversation and allows the platform to intelligently route all calls and messages between them. With this protocol, the platform itself acts as intermediary between participants and automatically connects them without revealing personal or contact information. Proxy supports two-way communications over voice, SMS and messaging services such as Facebook Messenger, Slack, WeChat, Twitter, Viber, Line, BlackBerry Messenger, HipChat and Kik.

Proxy also provides phone number management, the underlying logic that allows the platform to route calls without revealing contact information. Using this management system, Proxy automatically prioritizes the selection of the most appropriate numbers for contact, whether a customer is trying to contact an individual or a department or just wants to talk to a brand representative. It takes into account geographic considerations, time of day and availability for effective routing.

With content moderation, developers can use Proxy to filter text messages between two parties. Developers can configure rules for filtering and redacting messages sent over the platform – for example, to filter out profanity or redact personal information such as phone or credit card numbers sent.

Finally, time-bounded sessions allow developers to use Proxy to limit the amount of time a worker spends in active communication with a customer. This can be used to keep communications short as not to overwhelm workers and to allow for swapping one mobile worker for another due to a shift schedule or personnel change.

Proxy is part of a newly released product called Twilio Engagement Cloud, a new suite that uses what the company calls Declarative APIs that are embedded logic to enable common customer communication experiences. A Declarative API allows a developer to use Twilio’s already existing programmable interface and add business logic with less coding – for example, for deciding to whom calls and messages should be routed.

“Organizations should not have to reinvent the wheel to do these things,” Patrick Malatack, vice president of product and general manager of messaging, told SiliconANGLE. Proxy and the Engagement Cloud, he said, allows developers to answer the question of how to talk to a particular person at a specific point in time and in a certain context, but without having to write their own system to do it.

With Proxy and the Engagement Cloud, Twilio hopes to allow developers to quickly generate rules to enable business logic for customer communications.

Aside from Proxy, the Twilio Engagement Cloud also includes Twilio Notify, software for orchestrating automated notifications across messaging channels; Twilio TaskRouter, routing software to create smarter contact center workflows; and the Twilio Two-factor Authentication service for stronger account security.

Image: Pixabay

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