A New Era of Contact Center Software is Here: Twilio Flex Now Generally Available 🎉

A New Era of Contact Center Software is Here: Twilio Flex Now Generally Available 🎉

• Twilio Flex: The fully programmable contact center platform is now generally available.
• What’s New: Easy onboarding, Salesforce and Zendesk connectors, a plugin framework, and more.
• Pricing: We’re introducing flexible pricing options to fit your needs, starting at just $1 per active user hour.
• Get started with Twilio Flex for free!

Since we announced Twilio Flex in March, thousands of you have requested access to the Flex preview program, across industries including financial services, retail, healthcare, travel, media, and technology. We’ve onboarded hundreds of companies into the program and thanks to the close collaboration with, and feedback from, these early users, Flex has evolved into a tried and tested platform that we’re excited to open up to you now.

Today, I couldn’t be more thrilled to announce that Twilio Flex, the first fully programmable contact center platform, is now generally available.

In the past few months, Flex has rolled out to thousands of contact center agents including support and sales teams at Lyft, Scorpion, Shopify, and U-Haul. And as we continue to expand the Flex ecosystem, more than 145 consulting and technology partners such as Perficient and Cognizant are supporting Flex through the Twilio Build program.

Though we’re just getting started, Aragon Research has already named Twilio Flex a 2018 Hot Vendor in Intelligent Contact Center, and 451 Research has awarded Twilio Flex a 2018 Firestarter award for Disruption and Innovation. 🔥

And while Flex is new, customers have been building their contact centers on Twilio for years. In fact, we’ve been named the 3rd largest contact center provider in DMG’s 2017-2018 Cloud-Based Contact Center Infrastructure Market Report.

A Radically New Approach to the Contact Center

We built Flex to give you the ability to deploy what we think is the best possible omnichannel contact center right out of the box, with best practices we’ve learned over the years baked right in.

But we could be wrong. And so, we built something that gives you the best starting point for your contact center—with the ability to change absolutely anything, at any layer of the stack. As a product manager, I don’t want any decision that I make to ever constrain you. So this has been our guiding philosophy from day one: How do we build something that allows you to disagree with every decision we’ve ever made?

Flex is a programmable application platform that works out of the box so you don't have to worry about making every single decision for your contact center—just the decisions that are unique and critical to your business. And if you want a feature that doesn't exist, you don't have to wait for our roadmap; you can simply add it yourself.

So is Flex an application or a platform? The answer is yes. It’s both. You’re buying the contact center you need, and building the exact experiences you want. An application platform deploys like SaaS and integrates like a premise-based system into your proprietary back-end databases and CRMs. And it iterates like a web platform.

What’s New

With Flex, you can now:

• Deploy instantly, integrate quickly: A simple onboarding experience lets you get up and running in minutes. Integrate Flex into Salesforce and Zendesk using pre-built connectors, and add capabilities like phrase detection, call scoring, and intelligent redaction using pre-integrated partner technologies in the Twilio Marketplace.
• Deliver a true omnichannel experience: Access more than a dozen channels out of the box including Voice, SMS, Video, and WhatsApp, and integrate custom channels and CRM systems to add context to conversations—all in a single customizable interface.
• Gain complete visibility and control over interaction data: Provide supervisors and administrators the analytics and insights they need to manage performance, quality, and customer experience. Flex comes with real-time event stream, customizable desktops for supervisors and admins, plus native workforce optimization.
• Run your entire contact center on Twilio's cloud infrastructure: Unlike traditional cloud deployments, Flex’s new plugin framework allows you to make changes and retain control of your contact center application, while benefiting from continuous improvements made to the rest of the application by Twilio.

As a customer told us recently, with Flex, it's as if you've acquired a whole new development team just to focus on the stability and innovation of your contact center. Anytime that anything in the Twilio platform gets better, Flex gets better.

And today, with two exciting new products we’ve also just launched, now you can:

• Automate the known, escalate the unknown: Using Autopilot, Twilio’s conversational AI platform, you can integrate machine learning-powered bots to automate information gathering and respond to common questions, and transition more complex queries to a human agent using Flex.
• Enable agents to securely process payments: Powered by <Pay>, Twilio’s new API for building PCI-compliant payment experiences, contact center agents can now securely accept credit card payments from customers over the phone.

Pricing

We’re introducing two pricing options that give you the flexibility and transparency you need to suit the way your business operates:

$1 / Active User Hour

 or 

$150 / Named User Per Month

And so you can easily get started building prototypes with Flex to see if it’s right for your business, we’re offering:

5000 Active User Hours FREE

With active user hour pricing, you pay only for the time your agents, supervisors, or administrators are active. This elastic pricing model is an entirely new approach that scales with you, freeing you from paying for what you don’t use and allowing you to staff as needed.

For businesses with greater predictability, named user pricing provides one flat rate for agents, supervisors, and administrators—no additional maintenance fees. And you can adjust the number of users you pay for on a month-to-month basis.

Subject to our fair usage policy. PSTN voice connectivity and SMS connectivity are charged at Twilio’s regular usage-based prices.

Get Started

Ready to start exploring what Twilio Flex can do for your contact center?

• Request a demo from one of our Flex experts.
• Get started and deploy a prototype within minutes, no payment required.

We can’t wait to see what you create!