UPDATED 01:06 EDT / MARCH 13 2018

INFRA

Twilio targets the contact center with its customizable Flex platform

Cloud communications platform-as-a-service company Twilio Inc. is flexing its muscle in the contact center market with the launch of a service called Twilio Flex.

The company said Flex is a platform for contact center operators that covers multiple communication channels, provides a customized user interface and enables functions such as routing and reporting.

Flex essentially combines Twilio’s existing back-end infrastructure with a sleek new user interface for enterprises that want either a ready-to-use contact center or a radical update to their current deployments. It’s a significant development because Twilio’s expertise lies in building application programming interfaces for communications, and it has never focused on creating a full user interface itself.

Twilio said Flex can scale up to 50,000 agents, which means it can be deployed by the biggest organizations. With Flex, Twilio seems to be taking the fight to traditional contact center infrastructure operators that sell a combination of on-premises hardware and software, in the hope of growing a business that has consistently impressed its Wall Street investors.

It’ll be a tough fight for Twilio in any case, since the contact center market infrastructure market is a competitive and crowded space, as Gartner Inc.’s Magic Quadrant for the industry shows:

call-center-gartner-magic-quadrant

“Twilio comes to the market from a tool perspective as they’re adding Software-as-a-Service to their Platform-as-a-Service,” said Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc. “That’s a great showcase of their PaaS capabilities as it gives customers access to the latest and greatest contact center capabilities. It also gives customers the ability to extend and build their own capabilities. So it’s a new kind of offering as there has been no “make the phones ring” PaaS platform like Twilio’s before. In the era of business uncertainty it may just be the right thing chief experience officers need for the call centers.”

Twilio said Flex will draw on the company’s best practices for rapid call center deployments. “With Flex, we are providing a contact center platform that has a point-of-view based on the best practices we’ve learned, offers options for those who want to get up and running quickly, and gives businesses unlimited flexibility as they design their customer experiences,” said Al Cook, head of the contact center business at Twilio.

That flexibility is plain to see in the long list of Flex’s capabilities, which include support for popular messaging channels such as Voice, video, text, Facebook Messenger, Line, WeChat and Twitter. Flex also supports cobrowsing and screen sharing, and it integrates with Twilio’s TaskRouter service so calls can be automatically routed to the most suitable agent.

In addition, Flex can integrate with popular customer relationship management tools such as Salesforce and Zendesk. Twilio Flex is currently available in preview, with general availability scheduled for the end of the year.

Image: Twilio

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