Accessible and Frictionless Omni-channel Experiences

Accessible and Frictionless Omni-channel Experiences

Agility and control of your customer experience are critical for staying ahead of evolving customer expectations. Channels need to be added quickly to meet your customer’s preferences, but adding siloed solutions can leave employees switching between tabs to handle omni-channel interactions.

With the launch of Twilio Flex Conversations and Twilio Flex User Interface 2.0, you can add digital channels easily to your existing infrastructure or deploy a new omni-channel experience, while empowering your employees with contextual information in a single pane of glass.

Twilio Flex Conversations, a single API for SMS, MMS, Chat, and WhatsApp on the Flex platform, is now generally available (GA) to simplify the deployment of omni-channel experiences. This enables Flex users to easily orchestrate digital channel experiences that support their vision for differentiation while driving deeper personalization and happier customers.

We’re also excited to announce that a new version of the Flex User Interface (UI), version 2.0, is now generally available (GA). This user interface is optimized for accessibility and simplifies the addition of digital channels and your employee experience for handling omni-channel interactions.  

Frictionless omni-channel experiences

Many providers claim to be omni-channel, but actually deploying this experience is substantially more difficult, with only 24.5% of businesses claiming good or complete consistency across contact channels according to the 2020 Customer Experience Benchmarking Report.  

Now with a single API you’re able to easily build frictionless customer experiences that bridge any digital channel, without complicating your employee experience with siloed solutions. This drives employee satisfaction, helps lower acquisition costs, and can increase lifetime value (LTV).

Customers have come to expect personalization at every stage of their journey with a brand. They are ready to switch to other brands if their experiences fall short, and rightfully so. Recognizing this, brands in all industries around the world have been busy improving their digital customer engagement in order to build customer loyalty and grow their business.

Take Vacasa, a leading vacation rental management solution, that was using four siloed solutions across Sales, Service, and in-app communications. Vacasa was able to consolidate these siloed experiences into Flex to simplify their employee experience and drive a 3-10x increase in guest bookings.

Twilio’s 2022 State of Customer Engagement Report found customers expect investment in digital engagement to nearly double by 2025, so if you don’t provide a differentiated experience, someone else will.

A truly unified API for digital channels

With the launch of Flex Conversations, you only need one API for Twilio Flex, which brings SMS, MMS, Chat, and WhatsApp all on one platform.

This can shorten your time to market, simplify experimentation with new channels, and make it easier for you to build applications that draw on the same customer profiles when communicating with customers, regardless of channel.

For example, if someone starts a conversation in Chat, you can send a followup message by SMS to continue the interaction. Your app will enable your employees to see everything in one place, in context, across every channel. And as Twilio expands support to other digital channels in the future, customers leveraging Flex Conversations automatically gain access through that same API.

Because Twilio Flex, like all Twilio products, is based on deep programmability and integration, it goes far beyond basic CRM integrations. Using both Flex and Twilio Segment together, customers have already been able to capture, synthesize, and activate real-time customer data from any number of back-end applications. This can result in more deeply personalized customer interactions, greater customer loyalty, and ultimately lead to a higher LTV.

Improved user interface for accessibility and consistency

The updated Flex UI brings every channel, data source, and integration into a single view for your employees. For employees who are visually impaired, we’ve improved screen reader compatibility, button labeling, and keyboard navigation. We’ve adjusted colors, fonts, and margins to meet accessibility standards.

We’ve also incorporated Paste support into the Flex UI toolkit. Paste is the design system that Twilio created to support its own efforts to create consistent, inclusive, and delightful experiences. Now, Flex customers and partners can use the same component library as Twilio’s developers.

These tools improve the experiences you can deploy for customer-facing teams. Customer service agents that handle hundreds of interactions a day can now have threaded conversations across channels, with historical context transferring seamlessly.

Enable your outbound Sales team to manage multiple interactions through a variety of channels easily, including phone calls, with personalized outreach information in view. Would knowing your customers during outreach improve conversion?

Or what about your in-app experience? Launch a Concierge team to guide customers through discovery and provide assistance during purchasing. Reducing abandoned carts by using high-touch, personalized interactions like customers would experience in a store.

Deploy a frictionless experience today

Flex Conversations and the new User Interface (2.0) are now GA and can be deployed to drive customer engagement for any size company and across industries. Take control of your customer experience and ensure that your teams are empowered to meet evolving customer expectations across any channel.

Have an idea that you want to discuss with our team? Contact our sales team to learn how to achieve your vision.

Meera Vaidyanathan is a customer-obsessed and results-oriented product leader with 20+ years of progressive leadership experience in start-up, midsize, and Fortune 500 businesses. Meera joins Twilio after 8 years at Amazon/AWS, where she was Director of Product Management. Her most recent role was leading product, design, data, and customer engagement teams to develop the strategy and build a portfolio of low- and no-code products for AWS.