What are the steps you would take to implement chat to video escalation? Let’s walk through an overview of what you need to do.
Prerequisites
Using the Twilio Flex Video Escalation plugin assumes you have the following baseline for your current agent-customer interaction tech stack:
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On the agent side, you currently use Twilio Flex 2.0 as the central contact center platform for your agents.
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On the customer side, you use a web-based chat application built on top of the Twilio Conversations API.
Introduction to Twilio Flex
Twilio Flex is a customer engagement platform that centralizes all customer interactions in a single place, regardless of the channels your customers use to engage with your company. Your agents can interact through chat—within a single interface—whether your customers are using SMS/MMS, WhatsApp, or a traditional web-based chat interface. Flex also accommodates inbound and outbound voice calling capabilities.
Although building a full-featured contact center with Flex may seem complicated, getting up and running is straightforward and fast. You can start by watching a video that walks you through how simple it is. Setting up your Twilio Flex instance will provision a new Twilio number for you. This number can accept voice calls and text messages.
Introduction to Twilio Conversations
While the agent-side of the interaction leverages Twilio Flex, your customers can chat within a traditional web-based chat client built on top of Twilio Conversations. Twilio Conversations is a set of APIs and SDKs used for building chat experiences using Twilio-supported channels. Developers can use the programming language of choice for building the client-side application, making calls to the Conversations API. Twilio also provides an SDK for building Android, iOS, and JavaScript-based applications.
You can refer to the following guides to quickly get up and running with Twilio Conversations:
Overview of the Flex Plugin
The chat to video escalation feature is implemented as a Flex Plugin built for Flex 2.0. Code for the plugin is publicly accessible in this GitHub repository.
What are Flex Plugins?
The Flex UI is a fully programmable platform that allows developers to build a custom user experience and behaviors within the Flex contact center. The standard method of implementing these customizations is through building Flex Plugins. Flex Plugins are built on Node.js with React and ReactDOM.
Plugins can access the frontend API for Flex, allowing developers to add or remove components, build custom handling for Flex actions and events, and manage notifications.
Twilio provides a Flex Plugins CLI for developers to build, test, and release plugins. Flex admins can manage their plugins through the Flex Plugins Dashboard. If you’re interested in trying out Flex Plugin development on your own, you can get started here.
User experience flow for agent and customer
When using the Chat to Video Escalation in Flex Plugin, the end user experience flow looks like this:
Agent side
After determining that the chat interaction should be escalated to video, the agent clicks on the video icon in the chat window:
A new tab is visible to the agent, who clicks on the button to Join Video Room.
After clicking the join button, the agent connects to the video room and can interact with the customer.
Now face-to-face, the agent can determine the root of the customer's problem, consider possible solutions, and work with the customer to fix their issue in real-time.
This allows your team to resolve user issues faster and more efficiently, while ensuring every customer service interaction meets (or exceeds) your users' expectations.
Customer side
Behind the scenes, Twilio creates a new video room and generates a unique code and URL for joining the video room. The Flex UI auto-sends a message to the customer:
When the customer clicks the link in the message they received, their browser opens a new tab with a button to Join Video Room.
After clicking the button, the customer connects to the video room and can interact with the agent.
