Introducing New Phone Numbers Management in the Twilio Account Portal

Introducing New Phone Numbers Management in the Twilio Account Portal

Programmable phone numbers for SMS, MMS and Voice are at the core of Twilio’s platform. For a new customer, the first interactions in the Account Portal are often the purchase and configuration of a phone number, while advanced users rely on powerful phone number management, through the portal and the Phone Number Search API, to efficiently deploy large-scale applications. Today, we are excited to introduce several changes to how numbers are managed in the Account Portal improving usability across products.

Let’s start with why we made the change. We’ve seen an evolution in the use and value of the humble phone number. Today, a phone number is an identity or a brand as much as it is the identifier of a communication endpoint. Consumers use their phone numbers as a means of authentication. Sharing economy businesses use Twilio Phone Numbers as a proxy to connect customers with service professionals without revealing either party’s personal phone number for privacy reasons. As the importance of phone numbers has grown, we have redesigned our UI to reflect this.

Starting today, all phone numbers associated with your account, as well as the ability to purchase new numbers, are accessible at the highest level in the Account Portal, by selecting Phone Numbers in the drop-down menu. Phone Numbers, as part of the Connectivity group of offerings, provides a comprehensive view of all numbers used across products.

Inside Voice, SMS & MMS, the Phone Numbers section shows all numbers used in conjunction with those services.

We are also introducing an improvement to the number purchasing flow: when buying a number within Voice, SMS & MMS, an overlay window appears to search and select the number, without losing the context from which it was invoked.

We hope you find these changes useful as you deploy your communications apps with Twilio. Please email us at help@twilio.com if you need any assistance.