The top 5 apps and software to integrate with your contact center

One of the most important functions of a contact center is to create a seamless experience for the customer. That’s true whether they connect with your business via phone, chat, email, or all of the above.

To create that seamless experience, contact center agents need the right tools to:

• Access customer data and context of previous interactions
• Communicate with customers and other team members on various channels
• Analyze past interactions and identify trends
• And more

Integrating the right apps and software into your cloud-based contact center helps you combine these tools in a single platform.

Not sure where to start? Let’s look at the top five contact center software integrations that could benefit your business. Plus, we’ll go over how to integrate these apps and software with Twilio Flex—our world-class cloud contact center solution.

1. Customer data platforms (CDPs)

Customer data is at the heart of an efficient contact center—it’s what allows you to know and understand your customers. And giving agents access to customer data in a centralized place allows for better personalization, which is key to creating a positive customer experience.

But while 46% of brands report providing excellent personalization, only 15% of customers agree. So what prevents businesses from providing personalized support? The answer is often data silos that make it challenging for agents to access the necessary context to achieve personalization.

That’s why it’s vital to integrate your contact center with a CDP. This facilitates the flow of customer data between your contact center and CDP, giving agents access to real-time data from a single platform.

With the context of a customer’s previous interactions, purchase history, and browsing history, agents can provide tailored support without asking the customer repetitive, time-consuming questions. This reduces friction and contributes to enhanced customer engagement.

Flex will soon have out-of-the-box CDP integration with Flex Unify, announced at SIGNAL and currently in private beta. This data management integration unifies back-end enterprise systems to build real-time “golden” customer profiles and generate predictive and inferred traits. Plus, it enables agents to tailor customer experiences and route customers efficiently.

2. AI tools

There are many ways to leverage AI tools to automate tasks in your contact center and improve personalization during virtual agent and live agent interactions. Powered by Twilio's CustomerAI, Flex Unify will provide agents with the necessary information to hyperpersonalize customer experiences. The AI capabilities include:

• Using real-time data from “golden” customer profiles to personalize virtual agent conversations
• Leveraging inferred and predictive traits to help live agents customize responses and product recommendations
• Analyzing customer sentiment and previous purchases to guide agents in cross-sell and upsell opportunities

Other ways to use AI include text-to-speech transcription and data analysis to identify trends and common topics. Off-loading some of these tasks from employees can improve contact center efficiency and provide valuable insight on how to serve customers better. Our partnership with Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI helps businesses integrate AI into a Flex contact center and tap into these opportunities for increased efficiency.

3. Messaging applications

An omnichannel contact center enables businesses to connect with customers on various integrated channels to create a consistent, seamless experience. This is key because many modern customers favor text-based support on messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Discord.

Messaging can be particularly effective for sales: 74% of customers report that messaging simplifies the purchase process, and 67% have purchased a product or service after messaging a business.

Integrating messaging apps into your contact center makes it more convenient for customers to reach you and creates a frictionless customer experience. Plus, it allows agents to swiftly switch between channels while maintaining the context of previous interactions.

Flex natively supports communication via email, voice, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and WebChat—all on one platform. This enables businesses to engage customers on their preferred apps, and agents don’t need to toggle between channels. You can also integrate Flex with messaging apps like Discord and add sentiment analysis capabilities.

4. Translation platforms

Offering support in the customer’s preferred language can take personalization to the next level, especially for global businesses. But it can be challenging for contact centers to offer multilingual support when few agents can speak multiple languages.

One solution is to integrate AI-powered translation into your digital, text-based channels. This allows agents to communicate with customers in their primary language and helps expand your contact center’s reach.

The Flex integration with Lionbridge Language Cloud enables multilanguage support for chat, SMS, and WhatsApp. This integration uses real-time, AI-based neural machine translation that allows the agent and customer to communicate across languages in real time.

5. Workflow automation platforms

Many businesses use workflow automation platforms like ServiceNow to handle IT tickets, escalations, alerts for outages, and other incidents. But sometimes customers need to communicate with an agent in real time instead of waiting for a ticket resolution. Integrating a platform like ServiceNow with your contact center can help.

With this integration, customers can connect with a live agent directly from the ServiceNow platform when they need additional support. Plus, agents can access previous incidents or escalations to get the full context to support customers in a more personalized experience.

Using Twilio Studio and Flex, you can integrate ServiceNow with your contact center so customers can reach an agent directly from ServiceNow with the push of a button.

Integrate your existing apps with Twilio Flex

Twilio Flex is a flexible contact center that empowers your business to deliver personalized customer experiences across various channels from a single powerful platform. Plus, you can integrate Flex with the apps and software you already use and work with our trusted partners to extend your contact center’s functionality.

The contact center integrations mentioned in this post are just the beginning. Check out Twilio’s integration partners to discover everything you can integrate with Flex, including analytics tools, workforce management, payment clouds, and more.

Ready to give it a try? Contact our Sales team to learn more about what you can build with Flex.