Building Better Customer Connections

Text-based chat is the expected norm for business-to-customer communication today. Modern consumers are tech-savvy, and businesses report an average top-line revenue increase of 70% after investing in digital customer engagement over the last two years. However, while chat brings the benefits of convenience and speed, Twilio’s State of Customer Engagement Report 2022 revealed that more than a third of people experience digital fatigue:

Companies need to be sensitive about not overloading consumers with interactions, and should engage with them in an appropriate, human, and responsible way.

In seeking to support their current customers and sell to their prospective customers, companies are looking for ways to leverage digital communication while still building deep connections and avoiding digital fatigue. For this, they are turning to video. Studies have shown that video increases empathy. With the COVID-19 pandemic came the normalization of video—for business, healthcare, education, and social engagement. Even now, the adoption of video communication as a part of everyday life continues and is unlikely to change as long as people go online for work, shopping, and services.      

To build deeper human connection into their digital customer service and sales interactions, companies can adopt chat to video escalation. In this interaction model, agent-customer communication begins as a text-based chat, but the agent can escalate the interaction to a full video session. The two parties can quickly and seamlessly transition to a video room to continue their interaction.

In this guide, we’ll walk through how this is possible by introducing you to the new Video Escalation plugin for Twilio Flex, a cloud contact center platform used by businesses around the world to centralize customer service agent operations and communication. We’ll cover the following: