Customer-Experience

Many businesses are feeling the pinch right now. With rising inflation having a range of knock-on effects from increased operational costs to reduced consumer spending, profit margins are taking a hit. To try and rectify this, it’s time for businesses to think outside the box. So, beyond ‘sell more products’, how can they find ways to boost profits? Taking it back to basics, it’s all about listening better. Because conversations between customers and agents are happening all the time. And they’re full of valuable insights. It makes sense for businesses to dive into this untapped data source – that they can easily access – to build their customer strategy and search for ways to increase margins. Building on this approach, voice solutions can offer a much needed helping hand. Because customer conversations are happening anyway, implementing a solution that helps you analyze and extract valuable insights is a sure-fire way to glean value from an existing resource. Here are two strategies to use voice solutions to get the most out of what you already have. Time to get automating As the old adage goes, time is money. So by helping agents cut their response times, you’re also cutting down on costs, protecting your bottom line as a result. And one way to go about this is through automation. Automation is reshaping the way that organizations increase operational efficiency. In fact, Gartner predicts conversational AI deployments within contact centers will have a significant impact on costs by 2026. But how can voice help? A modern interactive voice response, or IVR, helps customers find what they’re looking for faster, reducing both caller frustration and operational costs. Part of this service includes automating self-service tasks using virtual agents. This allows businesses to easily add conversational interactions and integrate virtual agents to handle conversations through speech recognition. IVR should be flexible enough to match the movements of customer preferences, giving you the tools to add new features, tweak existing ones, and iterate your settings easily. With simpler queries dealt with by automated bots, your agent time can be better spent elsewhere. Typically, this means resolving more complicated issues, and delivering the type of exceptional customer service that can encourage future spending. Look for upsell opportunities The more you know about your customers, the easier it is to make them happy. And as we all know: happy customers = healthier profit margins. Businesses should look for ways to drive both Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and revenue – because the former tends to lead to the latter. The power of personalization is becoming ubiquitous, to the point where customers now often expect experiences to be tailored to their needs. This is where voice intelligence solutions come in. Through transcribing and analyzing call recordings at scale, there is a wealth of actionable insights to be found, from customer preferences to competitor information. Through detecting key words and phrases, the software uncovers customer pain points and reoccurring discussions. You can then use this information to both personalize your service and adapt your customer experience (CX). Essentially, you’re using voice to find out what your customers want, so that you can make that happen. And even more crucially, you can also use this data to unearth upsell opportunities. Customer not happy with their order? Voice software can give you instant intel into their order history, allowing you to offer up an alternative product more suited to their needs. Customer wanting to cancel their subscription in favor of a competitor? Thankfully, the software flags previous mentions, giving you prior knowledge and allowing you to quickly provide a counteroffer. Listen better to boost your profits Twilio Voice gives you the tools you need to build bespoke voice experiences that meet and exceed customer expectations. Using our AI solutions, you can spend more time delivering memorable customer experiences, and less time building those experiences from scratch. Interested in the power of voice? Check out our product tour or contact our sales team.

Quality self-service is a vital part of a comprehensive customer service strategy. It empowers customers to find solutions, creates a positive experience, and reduces the workload for contact center agents. But to gain all these benefits, businesses must implement effective self-service tools and resources that meet customers’ needs. So where do you begin? In this post, we’ll explore what customer self-service is, its advantages, most common types, and best practices to provide top-notch self-service. What is customer self-service? Customer self-service refers to customers solving their issues or questions with the resources your business provides—without contacting a customer support agent. Self-service tools include FAQ pages, help centers, AI-powered assistants, and more. (We’ll dive deeper into each type below.) But first, let’s start with the benefits of self-service customer support. What are the advantages of customer self-service? Customer self-service has advantages for customers and businesses alike, including: It improves the customer experience. Self-service tools allow you to meet the needs of customers who prefer not to contact support—and there are many of them. In fact, 36% of consumers admit they’d rather lose their internet for a day, go through airport security, or shave their head than contact support. It provides faster resolution. Self-service resources allow customers to find answers without having to wait in the call queue for a call center agent or a live chat response. This enables them to reach a resolution faster, contributing to a positive experience. It’s always available. Self-service tools are available 24/7, meaning customers can resolve their inquiries regardless of the day or time. This can save customers the frustration of having to wait until your contact center’s operating hours to get a resolution. It frees up customer service agents’ time. Self-service allows customers to find answers or perform straightforward actions without a human agent’s help. This means agents have more time to help customers with complex issues. It reduces call center costs. Self-service can help your contact center incur lower usage costs by reducing the amount of calls agents have to take to answer common questions. It can also help you keep staffing costs low—less calls require fewer agents to answer them. It can be a useful resource for agents. Self-service resources, like knowledge bases, can help agents find answers to customers’ questions quickly. And if your call center uses AI-powered agent assistance, like Google Cloud Contact Center AI, it can recommend resources from your knowledge base to agents based on customers’ input in real time. It’s part of a successful customer onboarding process. Self-service tools give new customers a starting point to learn about your product or service. Recommend relevant tutorials and FAQ pages throughout the onboarding process to anticipate customers’ common questions and set them up for success. Types of self-service The type of self-service that suits your customers’ needs depends on your product or industry. For example, retail businesses often require FAQ pages and chatbots to help customers with purchase questions, while software businesses might need to provide in-depth tutorials and documentation. Let’s take a look at the most common types of self-service. FAQ page Customers with basic questions often start with a business’s FAQ page. This is where they expect to find answers to questions like: What are your business hours? What’s your return policy? Is there accessible seating at your venue? What does your membership program offer? An organized, searchable FAQ page enables customers to find their answers quickly and reduces calls to your contact center. (We’ll dive deeper into user-friendly organization in the best practices section below.) Knowledge base or help center A knowledge base or help center provides customers with answers to more in-depth questions than an FAQ page can cover. These are often repositories for resources like: Product tutorials Step-by-step instructions Troubleshooting tips Guides and reports Developer documentation Community forum Community forums provide a space for customers to support each other, like sharing their solutions to common issues or pro tips to make the most of your product features. Loyal customers know your product well, making them a great resource for creative solutions and use cases. Hosting a forum helps you create a sense of community, gives you insight into product bugs and issues, and allows you to set guidelines for the discussion. The most effective community forums typically include search functionality where customers can input specific keywords or questions and an organized page structure with categories for specific products or use cases. IVR menu An interactive voice response (IVR) menu allows customers calling your call center to get fast resolution without a live agent. For example, callers can get a prescription refill by inputting their data into the IVR system, which routes the request automatically. Chatbot A rules-based chatbot can offer customers text-based support for straightforward inquiries without a live agent, similar to an IVR. For example, a customer can initiate a return for a purchase via a chatbot by providing basic information, like an order number and mailing or email address. AI-powered IVA Intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) can provide more robust support than rules-based IVR menus and chatbots because these can understand complex customer requests and respond in a natural, conversational manner. This is thanks to natural language processing and generative AI, which allow IVAs to interpret customer input and craft a tailored response. Customer self-service best practices (with examples) Now, let’s look at eight best practices, along with examples of effective customer self-service. 1. Make it accessible Make your self-service tools accessible to customers by: Including resources, like your FAQ page and help center, in your main website navigation and footer Placing a chatbot button on every page of your website or app Following IVR best practices to ensure customers can find the right option quickly without navigating through a long menu Using clear calls to action to direct users to self-service resources For example, on the Chime website, users can navigate to the Learn tab in the main navigation and find self-service options, like the blog, help center, and FAQs. 2. Make it user-friendly Ensure your self-service tools are user-friendly, meaning there’s a clear path for customers to find the information they need. This includes: A well-organized navigation menu with categories that help the customer find the right page. For example, on an FAQ page for a concert venue, menu categories could include: Tickets Seating chart Accessibility Parking Food and beverage A search bar (with a robust search functionality) that allows customers to input keywords to find specific pages or solutions. For example, the Lyft help center gives customers multiple ways to find answers, including a search bar, the most popular articles, and broad categories that allow users to narrow their search. Plus, when signed into their account, a user can find tailored support related to their rides and fares. (More on personalization later.) 3. Make it mobile-friendly Ensure customers can navigate your resources on any device by designing responsive pages that adapt accordingly. Many customers will access your self-service resources on their phones, and without optimized pages for mobile, this will create a negative customer experience. 4. Use multimedia content Create different types of content depending on the topic and amount of detail it requires. For example, text works well for FAQ pages that require basic answers, while videos work best for in-depth product tutorials. For example, the Shopify help center offers video tutorials for topics like an introduction to the platform and how to migrate to Shopify. 5. Leverage AI Implement AI tools to provide more comprehensive service, such as routing customers to the appropriate resources and enhancing automated voice and text support. Generative AI tools can also help you improve your existing self-service resources, create new ones, and analyze customer sentiment to improve your support strategy. Read more about How to use AI to improve customer service. 6. Personalize interactions Leverage customer data to personalize customer interactions with self-service tools like chatbots and IVAs. For example, a chatbot integrated with your customer data platform (CDP) can expedite a customer’s return request by referencing their last purchase and mailing address. This saves the customer the time it takes to provide this information and creates a more seamless experience. 7. Iterate and improve Gather customer feedback through surveys and reviews to measure the effectiveness of your self-service resources and identify areas for improvement. For example, at the bottom of a knowledge base page, ask customers if it answered their question. With a yes or no response, customers can provide immediate feedback that helps you improve your process. This is what Stripe implements on its help pages, as you can see below. Plus, this article provides customers with a direct link to contact support if they still have unresolved issues, which we’ll discuss next. 8. Provide a clear path to contact support Give customers a clear path to contact a human agent when self-service doesn’t suffice. For example, include a live chat button in your knowledge base for customers to initiate a conversation if they don’t find their answer. Or include the option to dial 0 to speak to a representative at the end of every IVR menu. Serve customers better with Twilio Flex Customer self-service is only one piece of a larger customer experience strategy. For a comprehensive customer service experience, businesses must also provide personalized support on customers’ preferred channels. Twilio Flex enables you to do just that. Flex is an omnichannel contact center platform that integrates with your existing systems to create a seamless customer experience across channels. Like its name suggests, it’s a flexible, customizable platform that enables you to build a new contact center or augment your existing solution with digital channels. Not sure if you need a contact center just yet? Twilio has various customer experience solutions to help you deliver a personalized experience, including: IVR: Build a modern IVR solution that helps customers find the support they need quickly and helps you reduce operational costs. CDP: Unify your customer data and build customer profiles that allow you to deliver personalization at scale. Messaging: Support customers on their preferred messaging platform, including SMS, MMS, WhatsApp, and webchat. Discover everything you can build with Twilio and start creating a better customer experience today.

At SIGNAL 2022, Duolingo shared how they deployed Twilio's Verify application to authenticate users and connect them with their friends. Furthering our relationship, Twilio invited Duolingo and Nico Sacher, Principal Product Manager, to run an experiment in select countries using WhatsApp as a primary verification channel with SMS as a fallback for One-time Passcodes (OTPs). This blog post will describe the results of that experiment. Duolingo saw the following results from sending OTPs with WhatsApp and SMS as a fallback channel: Improved OTP verification conversion/success rate Lower OTP costs No code implementation Our research shows that the experimental WhatsApp with SMS fallback treatment performed better than the SMS-only control treatment, demonstrating a 12% improvement in verification success rate while reducing cost by 87%*. Twilio and Duolingo saw that it took fewer OTP messages to verify a phone number going through WhatsApp with SMS fallback treatment. * Based on internal testing data. Experiment design detailed below. Using WhatsApp as an OTP channel What's the best channel to send One-time Passcodes to your end users? Email? SMS? An Over-the-top (OTT) messaging application like WhatsApp? The answer can sometimes be more complex, with varying customer preferences and regional nuances. What if your OTPs for multi-factor authentication were delivered to users based on the most cost-effective channel or the channel most likely to convert? While SMS verification is commonly used for OTPs, SMS costs vary by country, and not all users have reliable cellular coverage. WhatsApp is one of the most popular messaging apps, with over 2 billion users across 180 countries. WhatsApp usage is prevalent in some countries and can be much less expensive for businesses than sending an SMS (up to 90%). On the other hand, consumers are less accustomed to receiving OTPs from WhatsApp, and some don't have the app. “For those in the US, it's often hard to imagine an SMS OTP wouldn't arrive immediately, but it's common in many other geographies. I've experienced the frustration of trying multiple times to get an OTP in Latin America, so it's not shocking that WhatsApp is a much better experience for many users.” -Nico Sacheri, Duolingo Principal Product Manager At Twilio, we wanted to explore using WhatsApp as an OTP delivery channel with SMS as a fallback to improve conversion rates and decrease customer costs. Experiment design During the experiment, we enabled a new Twilio Verify feature called “WhatsApp with SMS Fallback” for OTP message delivery in select countries. When Duolingo made the Verify API call to send an OTP via SMS, Verify attempted to send an OTP via WhatsApp instead. Verify identified if the WhatsApp message attempt resulted in delivery to the end user's handset or a failure. If the WhatsApp OTP failed because the recipient didn’t have a WhatsApp account, Verify automatically sent an SMS in under 3 seconds (P99). The end-user received the same code from WhatsApp or SMS to input into Duolingo’s existing UI. If Duolingo made another Verify API call to send an OTP via SMS to the same mobile number (end-user) in the same verification session (ten-minute window), Verify sent the OTP via SMS and did not attempt a send via WhatsApp. “Initially, we were concerned the WhatsApp UI was not as integrated with the device OS to pull OTPs from a message. However, we quickly learned that the increased delivery rate significantly outweighed any drop due to additional friction.” -Nico Sacheri, Duolingo Principal Product Manager WhatsApp with SMS Fallback Experiment results The A/B experiment ran for two weeks, where 50% of Duolingo’s verification volume used the feature, and 50% was unaffected. In that time, Duolingo saw improved OTP conversion rates and lower costs per OTP. Improved verification conversion rates: Out of 12 countries tested, nine countries showed higher success rates and lower costs when WhatsApp was used, compared to SMS-only “We're excited to see how we can continue to use failover OTP channels to improve user experience and our costs.” -Nico Sacheri, Duolingo Principal Product Manager Conclusions We saw improved OTP conversion in some markets where WhatsApp is a preferred communication channel We saw decreased OTP costs by sending via WhatsApp instead of SMS in some markets We recommend implementing an omnichannel fallback system Along with Duolingo, Twilio Verify has conducted similar experiments across other customers, countries, end-user platforms, and messaging channels, powering an algorithm to predict which channel is optimal for OTP delivery. Cross-channel fallback is also useful when one channel has an outage. Twilio Verify offers omnichannel user verification across a growing selection of channels. Stay tuned for more from the Twilio Verify team on intelligently sending OTPs to your end-users on their preferred channels. Learn more about Twilio’s Verify WhatsApp and contact Sales to enable the feature.

Every day, companies are taking the plunge and diving into the world of AI. After all, AI could revolutionize your customer service operations and bring exciting new opportunities for businesses. But one big question remains: how will you address the issues surrounding data privacy and trust? Companies are keen to tap into AI’s potential. Yet, they must also navigate the complex terrain of ethical and secure data usage. Rest assured that these aren’t insurmountable challenges—they just require thought and consideration. In this post, we'll explore what AI data privacy entails. We’ll look at some of the associated risks, then propose some best practices that will give you a leg up when integrating AI into your operations. Let’s start with a brief primer on AI data privacy. What is AI data privacy? AI data privacy concerns how you handle personal and sensitive data when using AI algorithms. Are your practices secure? Ethical? Ensuring that AI systems respect individual privacy rights means adopting practices like data anonymization, secure data storage, and transparent data usage policies. Many companies overlook these details—or shoehorn them in as an afterthought—and this can come back to haunt them. If we’re talking about customer operations, we know that AI commonly handles tasks like chatbot interactions, predictive analytics, and personalized recommendations. Certainly, these applications can radically enhance your customer experience. But to be effective, the applications also require you to collect and process massive amounts of data. Naturally, this raises some questions: How is this data stored? How is the data being used? Who has access to this data? How organizations answer these questions has a legal bearing. Industries and regulators have requirements regarding sensitive data, and noncompliance can lead to legal and financial repercussions. For example, GDPR violations can lead to fines in the range of millions of dollars. In addition, how you deal with AI data privacy has a huge effect on customer trust. According to Twilio’s 2023 State of Customer Engagement Report, 98% of consumers want brands to do more to guarantee the privacy of their data and be more transparent about how their data is used. With that in mind, let’s look at some of the specific risks that using AI may introduce. What are the privacy risks of using AI? Integrating AI into your customer service operations offers many benefits and several privacy risks. Of particular concern are the risks when dealing with sensitive customer data. Privacy The collection, analysis, and storage of customers’ personal information may be essential to the effectiveness of your AI algorithms. However, dealing with sensitive data like this introduces significant risk. After all, mishandling sensitive data may lead to unauthorized disclosures. For example, what if a bug in your code causes a chatbot to display a user’s order history to a different user during a live chat? This is a serious breach of privacy. Bias AI systems are trained on massive amounts of data and used to make predictions. The predictions may guide customer interactions or inform recommendations to customers. What would happen if the data used to train your AI algorithms contained biases? How might that skew or bias the resulting system? Imagine a customer service AI chatbot designed to handle product inquiries and trained predominantly on data from customers who have purchased high-end, expensive products. When a customer inquires about a low-cost, budget-friendly product, the chatbot provides less-detailed responses or redirects them to a product page rather than offering personalized assistance. In the above example, the chatbot shows a bias toward high-end product purchasers, giving them more attention and personalized service. This kind of bias negatively affects your customer experience. But more importantly, this chatbot behavior would also reveal that it treats customers better or worse based on their purchasing history. Security Finally, we have the most unmistakable data privacy risk: basic security. What if your stored customer data isn’t encrypted? Or you haven’t enforced access control to that data? A compromised AI system can be a gold mine of customer data for hackers. We can only imagine the devastating consequences of having sensitive customer data stolen, then held for ransom or published online. It’s no wonder that 42% of brands say their top customer engagement challenge in 2023 is finding a balance between security and customer experience. How might we navigate these risks? Let’s consider some best practices that would help us to build a more secure and trustworthy AI-driven customer service operation. How do you ensure data privacy and transparency with AI? Here are some best practices to significantly mitigate the data privacy risks associated with using AI in customer service. 1. Anonymize your data Data anonymization involves removing or modifying personal identifiers in your datasets. This prohibits identifying or associating individuals with data. When you use this data AI model training, you have useful data without the risk of compromising customer privacy. Even if there’s a breach, there’s no way to trace the leaked data back to specific customers. 2. Involve human oversight This means incorporating human judgment into your AI decision-making processes. A human supervisor should review and validate the decisions made by your AI systems, providing a crucial layer of oversight. Practicing human oversight helps you catch errors or biases that the AI might overlook. 3. Implement data retention policies You probably don’t need to keep your customer data forever. In fact, you should keep it only for as long as you need it in your processes, then delete it once it’s no longer necessary. By limiting how long you keep your customer data, you reduce the risks of unauthorized access or data breaches. Data retention policies dictate how long to store data and when to delete it. Establish these policies, then enforce them. This not only enhances privacy but also ensures compliance with various data protection laws—such as GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, and more. 4. Be transparent with your customers Transparency with your customers is essential to building their trust. Your customers have the right to know how you use their data. One way to do this is by using Twilio’s AI Nutrition Facts labels. These labels offer a clear and concise overview of how an AI model uses data, along with its level of data privacy. Because so much of modern AI usage is opaque, providing a high level of transparency to your customers will be a welcomed change and foster a tremendous amount of trust. Build AI you can trust with Twilio Using AI in customer service applications will likely bring your organization some huge gains over the long term. However, the requisite handling of sensitive customer data means you also need a strong focus on data privacy. Mishandled data, model bias, or insecure practices can damage your business reputation—or worse, you might incur legal or financial repercussions. By adopting the key best practices we’ve outlined, you’ll be well on your way as you navigate this tricky landscape. Twilio's CustomerAI is a reliable and trustworthy AI solution to help you in your customer engagement processes. By combining your customer engagement data with Twilio’s predictive AI capabilities, you’ll gain AI-powered insights that help you understand and serve your customers better. Because of the robust privacy framework from CustomerAI, you can rest assured that your AI implementations are effective and ethical. In addition, Twilio’s AI Nutrition Facts labels will help you make informed decisions about the AI capabilities your organization should adopt, plus help you be transparent with your customers about how you use their data. Want to see how AI integrates with your existing communication platforms? Check out how to integrate AI into your contact center with Twilio Flex. When you’re ready to begin building AI into your customer operations—responsibly and securely, of course—contact us or sign up for free today.

As technology aimed at supporting customer engagement has evolved, each new development has promised greater intimacy and warmth—like a corner store where the proprietor knows your name. However, these tools often create greater distance and coldness instead. In fact, “customer centricity,” as promised by many software vendors, is a fallacy. Although companies are well-intentioned, technology has only allowed them to look at customers in generic ways. It is difficult to offer true personalization if your approach is based on “personas” and “audiences,” which aggregate large numbers of individuals into amorphous clumps. This approach leaves businesses vulnerable. Customers feel unseen and are more likely to defect to other brands that deliver a more personal touch—or maybe just lower prices to compensate for the transactional nature of the relationship. How to turn every customer interaction into a unique customer experience Discover four easy steps your marketing team can take to build personalized customer experiences using AI. Read more. Missing connections with customers Companies are aware of the need to put the customer at the heart of their business, and they look to personalization as the key to delivering on that promise. According to Twilio’s recent State of Customer Engagement Report, 91% of companies say that they always or often personalize engagements with consumers. But consumers don’t agree. Just 56% of consumers report that their interactions with brands are always or often personalized. Siloed data is often the culprit. As customers move through their journey with a company, each department that interacts with them collects the data that’s most relevant to achieving its objectives. Then, sales data is often stored in a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, marketing data is stored in a variety of marketing platforms, customer support data in a contact center application, etc. Not only is this data siloed, but it’s also often in completely different formats, with different fields and incompatible customer IDs. A company in this situation will struggle to connect the dots for its customers, leading to frustrating experiences. The problems are not just theoretical. Overall customer satisfaction has been dropping since 2018—despite increased business spending on customer experiences—due to data silos and poorly implemented customer experience solutions, as well as rising consumer expectations. It’s no wonder that 47% of marketers say that data silos are their biggest problem. 10 essential steps to build an AI-ready organization Explore the foundations of a successful AI strategy and learn how to unlock the true potential of AI for your business. Download now. AI renaissance: Delivering true personalization You might think that AI is just another turn of that wheel, promising personalization but delivering only frustration. But this new era of AI is different. With its conversational capabilities, generative AI is capable of human-like dialogue. Predictive AI can anticipate customers’ needs and next actions, allowing brands to tailor their engagement better. Taken together, AI enables companies to respond to each customer as a true individual, not just a member of a cohort. In the analog world, it would be impossible to hire a customer success agent for every individual customer. But in the digital AI world, individualized engagement at scale is possible for the first time. AI can help with customer interactions in several ways: Tailored customer journeys: AI can help create the most relevant customer journey for each individual, tailoring the next offer and outreach based on a nuanced understanding of that person’s past interactions, their preferences, and their likelihood of connecting with each offer. Customer predictions: AI can predict what a customer is likely to do next and what they are most likely to respond to. Predictive AI can estimate, with great accuracy, someone’s likelihood to make a purchase or to churn, their likelihood to add a product to a cart or to use a promo code, or even their predicted lifetime value (LTV). This is immensely valuable data for marketers. Content creation and optimization: Generative AI can help marketers who need to create content from scratch. For example, marketers can enter simple text prompts that turn ideas into fully formed emails in seconds, including recommended subject lines and message copy that’s optimized to convert. 7 ways to ‘ai-mplify’ your marketing strategy using AI Explore key methods for using ever-evolving AI to improve, safeguard, and personalize your marketing campaigns. Learn how. Box, a leader in cloud content management, is a prime example of how to do this right. They’re leveraging Predictions in Twilio Segment to forecast customer behavior, such as their likelihood to: Purchase or expand their use of Box Attend in-person field events Experience BoxWorks, the company’s annual customer and developer conference From here, Box tailors marketing content and campaigns to better meet customer needs. This forward-thinking brand is very much at the forefront of using AI to enhance the customer experience and, in turn, drive business results. Rekindling long-term customer loyalty It may seem like the capabilities we’ve talked about should already exist. The reality is, they should. But only the biggest brands can deliver personalization with this kind of back-end efficiency right now. AI can now make all brands more human. But making this work requires investment in integrating data across silos. The most ambitious AI strategy may stumble if it’s not built on a strong foundation of consistent, well-managed data. Getting the data integrated is an important first step for companies that want to reap the rewards of the AI renaissance. Brands also need to make an investment in training and continuous improvement. Humans need to learn how to use AI effectively, whether they are developers writing code with an AI assist or support staff solving problems with natural language understanding. Additionally, your AI needs to be trained on relevant, proprietary, first-party data to deliver results that are truly personalized to your customers and your business. Amid the evolving landscape of customer experience, AI has emerged as a powerful catalyst for transformation. By addressing data silos and harnessing AI’s capabilities, brands can finally deliver, digitally, the kind of experience offered by a local store. Through strategic deployment of AI, companies can rekindle the spark and help their customers fall in love with them all over again. Learn how your marketing team can leverage Twilio’s CustomerAI technology to drive unique customer experiences.

Like any relationship, the early stages of your customer relationships are crucial. As they get to know your business, customers will look for green flags—actions that demonstrate you care about their experience and build trust. (On the flip side, they’ll also notice red flags that show the opposite.) These early interactions can determine whether the customer continues their relationship with your business or churns. This is why customer onboarding is a vital step of the customer journey. An intentional onboarding process can make the difference in nurturing loyal customers. In this post, we’ll walk through why customer onboarding matters, its stages, examples, and best practices (or green flags) to show customers why they should stick around. What is customer onboarding? It’s the process of welcoming new customers to your business and guiding them as they discover the value of your products or services. The goal of new customer onboarding is to get customers acquainted with your product or service and encourage them to adopt it quickly as a part of their life or work. Effective customer onboarding also helps convert trial customers into subscribers. Why is a good customer onboarding process important? The onboarding process sets the tone for your relationship with customers. It’s your first impression, so make it count. A comprehensive, supportive onboarding process will help you: Provide a positive customer experience. Build strong relationships with customers. Improve customer retention (and reduce churn). Create brand advocates. Increase revenue. So how can onboarding achieve all this? Consider these customer experience-related statistics: Customer retention: Retaining existing customers is about 5x less expensive than gaining new ones Customer acquisition costs: Spending to acquire new customers has increased by over 50% in recent years Customer experience: Frustrating customer experiences can cause 56% of consumers to discontinue business with a company Revenue: Paying more for great customer experiences is increasingly likely, according 59% of customers Customer onboarding stages The new customer onboarding process looks different for different types of businesses. Some might need to provide more training up front, while others might focus on marketing and cross-selling. Here are the common stages of an onboarding flow, along with examples and best practices—or the green flags customers will look for. 1. Sign-up page Green flag: Seamless sign-up process As customers begin their relationship with your business, their first action is typically filling out a sign-up form or making a purchase. Make a good first impression with a seamless sign-up process for the customer while capturing the necessary data to connect with them and personalize their experience. This means keeping sign-up forms short and requiring only vital information, such as their name and email address. For example, Typeform allows new customers to sign up with just one click if they select the Sign up with Google or Sign up with Microsoft options. If customers prefer to sign up with email, they only need to fill out two fields: email and password. This welcoming sign-up page gets new customers up and running in under a minute. If your product or service requires you to gather more information, like shipping and billing information, split up the sign-up form into multiple screens or steps so it doesn’t feel as long. A long form with increasingly personal questions can raise a red flag for the customer and cause them to abandon the sign-up process—ending your relationship before it even begins. 2. Welcome email Green flag: Quick, engaging wins Once the customer provides their contact information in the sign-up stage, you can connect with them more directly. A welcome email is a great place to start. Your first email to a new customer is your opportunity to: Remind them why they signed up to receive communications from your business. Set the tone for the relationship ahead. Invite them to engage with your product or service by taking a specific action. By encouraging the customer to start engaging with your product, they can see its value and start building habits around it. For example, you can invite them to complete their profile or set up a dashboard. Then, give the customer a quick win that showcases how to use your product. This will get them excited to keep experimenting and break down mental barriers, like thinking it’s too daunting to get started. For example, this welcome email from Miro offers the customer a quick win: creating their first idea board. With the option to use a template and the promise of getting started in less than a minute, this email encourages the customer to get started immediately. Follow your welcome email with a nurture series that shares more advanced tips and keeps customers engaged over time. 5 Tried-and-True Onboarding Campaigns + Templates Download our Segment guide to see how we outline 5 tried-and-true onboarding campaigns that have a track record of success–and how you can implement them, step by step. 3. Dashboard or app welcome flow Green flag: Brief introduction that helps the customer get comfortable If your product is an application or software, new customers will need to get acquainted and comfortable with the interface. When they can’t figure out how to get around on the first try (red flag), the customer could churn quickly or decide not to convert from a trial to a subscription. In fact, 8 in 10 users admit to deleting an app because they didn’t know how to use it. So help customers get comfortable with a welcome flow within your dashboard or app. This can take the form of pop-up messages with useful hints or a quick tour of where to find key features and functionality. This will assist customers in learning to navigate the interface and keep them from getting stuck when they can’t find a vital function. Give customers the option to engage with the pop-ups, skip them, or find them again later. For example, when new users navigate Loom for the first time, they can click on this pop-up box to connect with other team members. And if the user isn’t ready to connect with team members, they can dismiss the pop-up and keep exploring. 4. Tutorials Green flag: Short video tutorials that help customers uplevel their product usage Some products or services require more in-depth training for customers to fully adopt them. Without the proper tutorials, customers might churn—55% of customers report returning a product because they didn’t understand how to use it. This is where tutorials come in handy. Short video tutorials are a great way to get new customers acquainted with everything they can do with your product and help them uplevel their skills. In fact, videos are customers’ onboarding medium of choice: 91% of people report having watched a video to understand how to use a physical product 74% of people say they’ve watched a video to learn how to use a new app or website You can share video tutorials as part of your welcome email series, in a knowledge base (which we’ll discuss later), or within the product dashboard or app. Whether through animations, screen recordings, or on-screen instructors, ensure your video tutorials provide clear explanations and focus on one feature at a time. This will help viewers digest the information and apply their knowledge immediately. For example, Loops Earplugs provides short videos showing users how to insert the earplugs, change the ear tips, clean the earplugs, and more on the getting started page. These videos answer new customers’ most common questions and set them up for success. 5. Integrations Green flag: Straightforward path to integration If you offer a software solution that integrates with other platforms, make integration straightforward for customers. This will help encourage product adoption by teaching customers how to use your solution with their existing tools. As part of your welcome flow or tutorials, direct new customers to your integrations page and show them how to filter the options and find the right integrations for them. And since the idea of integration can seem daunting at first, supporting customers throughout the process will add to their positive experience with your business. Plus, helping customers integrate your product with their tech stack will get them up and running quickly and show them everything they can achieve with your solution, putting them on the path to customer loyalty brand advocacy. 6. Knowledge base Green flag: User-friendly knowledge where customers can self-serve Once customers are up and running with your product or service, they'll likely have more in-depth questions or run into issues they need to troubleshoot. A knowledge base or help center is a great repository for documentation, FAQs, tutorials, and other resources to help customers self-serve. Make your knowledge base intuitive to navigate by including a search function or a chatbot that can point customers to the right resource or answer basic questions. For example, Asana’s help center offers customers multiple ways to engage, like typing a question in the search bar, selecting one of the most common searches, or jumping into the recommended resources for new users. Self-service helps ensure that customers can navigate your product confidently and don’t get frustrated with a lack of resources (red flag). This then builds trust in your business and furthers your relationship with the customer. It can even inspire them to recommend your business to friends or colleagues—becoming brand advocates like we mentioned earlier. 7. Customer service access Green flag: Direct access to customer service on any channel Customer service is a pillar of successful customer relationships, and making it accessible is vital to your onboarding flow. If it takes customers multiple steps to connect with a customer service agent, this can quickly lead to frustration with your business. So make connecting with customer service accessible from your dashboard, app, website, and anywhere else customers interact with your business. The same applies to phone support: follow interactive voice response menu best practices to ensure customers get help when they need it. For complex products like software, it’s valuable to give customers the option to connect with an expert for advanced questions. This can include someone who can help them build a solution with your product, set up their dashboard, or provide one-on-one training. 8. Community forums Green flag: Engaged user community Your existing customers can be your biggest advocates, and they can help each other troubleshoot issues or learn advanced functionality for your product. Creating a space for your customers to interact and build community strengthens your relationship and expands your support resources. This can also take some of the burden off your customer service teams by encouraging customers to share their solutions and tips. In the final stages of your onboarding process, direct customers to your forums, social media groups, code exchanges, and other community spaces where they can find assistance and share ideas. For example, Microsoft community is an active forum where users can search for common questions or issues that other users have already solved. Users can type their questions in the search bar or browse by product to find common questions and answers. Connect with customers along the onboarding process with Twilio Flex At every touchpoint along the customer onboarding journey, it’s vital to provide personalized communication that makes customers feel supported and engaged. An omnichannel contact center integrated with customer data makes this possible. That’s where we come in. Twilio Flex equips your team—from customer service agents to product experts—to give customers tailored support along the onboarding process. With access to customer profiles and every communication channel from a single user interface, your team can create a positive onboarding experience, building relationships that last. Already have a call center? With Flex, you can augment your existing solutions, adding new channels that integrate with your existing systems to create frictionless customer engagement. You can then tailor every layer of Flex to scale with your business needs and adapt to changing customer demands with agility. Try an interactive demo to see what you can build with Flex.

Intelligent virtual assistants (IVA) are incredibly sophisticated applications with the potential to revolutionize the way modern businesses service customers. In this post, we'll dive into IVAs, exploring the various types and highlighting the benefits, especially within the context of customer engagement. We'll also touch on the integration of IVAs with contact center platforms like Twilio Flex. What is an intelligent virtual assistant (IVA)? An IVA is an AI-powered application that can understand user requests and converse with users in a natural way. Historically, basic virtual assistants could follow predefined scripts and perform straightforward tasks based on user input. These assistants could even answer frequently asked questions (FAQs) based on the detection of certain keywords. The IVA, on the other hand, comes from innovations made by AI and machine learning (ML). Far beyond executing basic tasks, IVAs can understand context, learn from interactions, and engage in complex conversations with intuitive responses. What does this mean for businesses? IVAs enable businesses to offer a dynamic and ultrapersonalized user experience to customers. Let’s start with an examination of the core technological concepts. How do intelligent virtual assistants work? Advanced and sophisticated, IVA capabilities center on key foundational technologies related to AI/ML. Understanding these foundations helps to demystify the seemingly complex nature of IVAs. Natural language processing (NLP) Critical to the effectiveness of an IVA is its ability to understand and interpret human language. NLP is what enables IVAs to comprehend user queries and understand context. Because of NLP, interactions with an IVA feel natural and intuitive. Predictive AI and adaptive learning Using historical data, predictive AI forecasts outcomes and makes recommendations. It’s what enables IVAs to anticipate user needs. Through predictive AI and adaptive learning, an IVA can learn from user interactions and adapt over time. It not only understands what you ask it but can also anticipate what you might ask next. The more you interact with an IVA, the better it becomes at assisting you. Generative AI The use of generative AI in IVAs is somewhat secondary, but it still plays a role in creating more natural-sounding responses or generating solutions to complex queries. By replying with more than just generic or templated responses, IVAs can offer more dynamic user experiences. Before we go on to explore the types of IVAs, let’s first clarify the differences between IVAs and chatbots. Intelligent virtual assistants vs. chatbots IVAs and chatbots each play pivotal roles in customer interaction. However, several distinctions set them apart. Depth of interaction: IVAs can engage in nuanced and context-aware conversations, understanding user intent. In contrast, chatbots can only engage in basic conversations confined to specific topics. Learning capabilities: IVAs can learn from past interactions with a user and adapt over time, unlike chatbots. This learning capability enables IVAs to deliver increasingly personalized experiences to users. Integration and scalability: IVAs and chatbots can both integrate into your business operations, but IVAs scale better, especially when handling complex tasks. Now that we’ve clarified the differences between IVAs versus chatbots, let’s explore some common types of IVAs. Types of virtual assistants Because different IVAs might have some overlapping capabilities or use cases, the categories aren’t rigid. However, all IVAs have commonalities in technology and usage. The following are some common types of IVAs: Text-based: This is interaction primarily through text. Examples include ChatGPT or Bard. Voice-based: This is interaction primarily through voice commands. Examples include Siri or Alexa. Multimodal: This is interaction through a combination of text and voice, providing a more comprehensive user experience. Examples include Google Assistant, which users can interact with by voice or by text through a handheld device. Domain-specific or specialized: This is interaction fine-tuned for performance within specific industries or tasks. Examples include healthcare and finance. Setting aside the broad range of IVA types available, what is common across all types is the ability to bring tangible benefits to businesses that use them, especially in the realm of customer service. Benefits of using intelligent virtual assistants for customer service As businesses seek to enhance customer service, IVAs have become an indispensable tool, bringing significant transformations to how companies engage with customers. 24/7 availability: IVAs provide personalized support to customers around the clock, eliminating the constraints of traditional business hours while continuing to keep your human staff needs low. Cost-efficiency: IVAs help businesses off-load a significant portion of customer interactions and can reduce the overhead associated with large customer service teams. Consistent responses: IVAs ensure a consistent brand experience by guaranteeing that every customer receives accurate and uniform information. Scalability: IVAs can handle increased query volume as your business grows, without any degradation of interaction quality. With these benefits in mind, how might your business effectively integrate IVAs into its operations? How your business can use AI virtual assistants Your business may have one or several entry points where an IVA can enhance customer interactions and satisfaction. Here are some practical ways: Embedded in your website or app: Embed an IVA directly into your digital platforms with a chat-style interface to provide real-time support for visitors. Behind social media channels: Deploy an IVA on social media platforms, such as Meta (Facebook) or X (Twitter), for automated handling customer inquiries or support requests. Supporting internal operations: Use an IVA to streamline internal processes, perhaps by assisting employees with tech issues or human resource queries. As demonstrated, businesses can integrate IVAs into various facets of operations. Now, let’s look more concretely at one example of IVAs in business: working alongside a digital engagement center like Twilio Flex. IVAs and Twilio Flex Integrating IVAs into your customer engagement approach may seem daunting at first. But it’s quite straightforward and can be a game changer for your business. Twilio Flex is a cloud contact center that helps businesses centralize and customize customer support and communications. Flex facilitates your support team’s ability to engage customers across multiple channels—including voice, chat, and social media. Additional features like contact center automation and CustomerAI help businesses reduce response times while leveraging AI-driven insights to enhance customer experiences. Because Flex is fully programmable, you can build plug-ins that integrate IVAs. Whether your IVAs handle customer queries directly or assist your human agents as they engage with your customers, Flex’s adaptability means your IVA-leveraging solutions can scale as your business grows. Additionally, fusing IVAs with a platform like Flex represents the future of customer service. So if your business wants to stay ahead of the curve by offering always-on and globally scalable experiences that delight your customers, this is a strategic approach worth pursuing. Check out a Flex demo to see for yourself. IVA FAQs What does an AI virtual assistant do? Is an intelligent virtual assistant the same as an AI assistant? Is an intelligent virtual assistant part of AI? The terms AI virtual assistant and intelligent virtual assistant are essentially synonymous. Therefore, an AI virtual assistant is an AI-powered application that can understand user requests and respond with natural language. This makes IVAs ideal for tasks such as customer support, scheduling, and information retrieval. Yes. Often used interchangeably, intelligent virtual assistant and AI assistant both refer to AI-powered software applications that offer enhanced interactions that take inputs and produce output into natural language. AI is the driving force behind many of the advanced capabilities found in an IVA. AI is what enables IVAs to understand context, process massive amounts of information, and generate relevant responses in natural language. IVAs particularly depend on fundamental AI/ML aspects such as predictive AI, adaptive learning, NLP, and (to a lesser degree) generative AI.

Understanding how your customers move through the sales funnel is integral for improving your customer acquisition and retention efforts.  However, before you can conceptualize how potential leads become paying customers (and eventually, brand advocates), you need to understand each sales funnel stage.  Let’s explore the three stages of the funnel, including sales funnel examples that help increase conversions and improve revenue.  What is a sales funnel? A sales funnel is an illustrative model of the most straightforward journey a potential customer could take to conversion. It’s referred to as a funnel because it describes the shape of the customer journey.  Picture an actual funnel. It’s widest at the top and narrowest at the bottom. Now, think about the customer journey. Your organization sources the most leads at the start of the customer journey, which is why the top of the sales funnel is the widest. As your sales process becomes more focused—and potential leads narrow down their options—the body of the sales funnel begins to narrow as well. The more the sales funnel narrows, the more targeted sales efforts become.  The funnel consists of three stages, which best conceptualize how a narrowing in the sales funnel represents a shift further along the customer journey:  Top of the funnel (TOFU) Middle of the funnel (MOFU) Bottom of the funnel (BOFU) Once you understand how your customers interact with the various sales funnel steps, you can hyperpersonalize your sales efforts to target leads based on their sales funnel stage. Here’s how to laser-focus on each funnel step.  Sales funnel stages To ramp up your customer acquisition and retention rates, it’s vital to understand what leads think, search, and read at each of the sales funnel stages. This knowledge allows you to craft purposeful campaigns on the sales channels with the highest propensity to convert.  1. Top of funnel The top of the funnel is the start of the customer journey. Potential leads at this sales funnel stage are likely aware of a problem, meaning they’ve recognized something in their work or personal life that requires a solution. However, these leads typically have low brand awareness.  Prospects with low brand awareness have either never heard of your company and the products or services you sell or are familiar with your business name but have no idea what problems you solve (or how it’s relevant to them).  If you picture this sales funnel step on a linear customer journey, it would resemble the stages between initial awareness and discovery. In other words, leads at the top of the sales funnel are at the beginning of the sales process. This means two things: The top of the sales funnel has the most leads. The leads at the top of the funnel are not all qualified. For sales and marketing teams, the top of the funnel is the time to spread awareness about who your brand is and the problems you solve to position your solution as the top contender. It’s also the time to eliminate unqualified leads.  By understanding how prospects land at the top of your sales funnel and assessing the types of resources they access, you can fine-tune your messaging to target qualified, ready-to-buy leads.  What customer intent at the top of the funnel looks like Customer intent refers to the purpose behind an action that a prospect takes along the path to purchase. In the sales funnel, the prospects at the top of the funnel likely landed there because of informational intent. These prospects have just begun the customer journey and typically want to learn more.  What consumer searches at the top of the funnel look like Because most prospects at the top of the funnel have informational intent, you can assume they conduct research with more general keywords. Top-of-the-funnel searches typically include discovery questions, basic definitions, and broad queries.  For instance, TOFU searches for prospects first researching an SMS solution might look like: What is SMS? What are the benefits of SMS? What is an SMS solution?  What content marketing for the top of the funnel looks like The top of the sales funnel is ideal for educating prospects and positioning your brand as a primary solution. When done correctly, you can intercept the customer journey before the prospect researches an alternative solution. How do you position your brand as a top contender? With engaging content that answers common TOFU search queries and assembles an informational foundation for prospects to understand the relevancy and product fit of your solution.  Content to generate and retain leads at the top of the sales funnel can include: Detailed product or service pages Informative blog posts Paid social media posts Captivating infographics Relevant search engine ads And more  2. Middle of funnel The middle of the funnel represents prospects who have embarked on the interest and engagement steps of the customer journey. At this point of the sales process, customers have begun to gain interest in your product or service, leading them to actively engage with your content. Engagement at the middle of the funnel can include interacting with paid ads or contacting your sales team. Now that you’ve captured their attention, it’s time to nurture your leads. This means increasing your educational content. Craft materials that focus on product benefits unique to each prospective customer and their use case. Incorporate defined buyer personas or ideal customer profiles to better tailor your marketing messages.  Better yet, meet your customers where they are to hyperpersonalize your campaigns. With contextual interactions powered by Twilio Flex, you can create click-to-message entry points on ads and paid search results that directly connect prospects with live support. From here, you can analyze elements like MOFU intent and frequent searches to drive home a sale without ever needing to take a hard-sell approach.  What customer intent at the middle of the funnel looks like Middle-of-the-funnel leads have flowed from the top of the sales funnel and, in that time, have defined their problem and identified potential solutions. At this point, they begin to compare brands using two types of customer intent: navigational and commercial. They want to learn more about specific solutions directly from vendors or brands.  Prospects at the middle of the funnel intend to make a purchase but require a bit more confidence before making a conversion.  What consumer searches at the middle of the funnel look like Because prospects at the middle of the funnel have an idea of what they want, their search queries are typically more targeted. Prospect searches at this funnel step are likely to be more product- or service-driven and might include specific brand names.  Continuing with the above SMS example, MOFU prospects might search for terms like:  SMS or MMS for business Top SMS provider Twilio Messaging What content marketing for the middle of the funnel looks like Middle-of-the-funnel content marketing should help create a better customer journey. What we mean by this is that your MOFU content should highlight your product differentiators and explain your use cases so well that prospects don’t need to keep researching—they have the confidence to complete the purchase. Content to give MOFU leads the confidence they need to convert includes:  Frequently asked question pages  Vendor or product comparison articles Interactive webinars and workshops  E-books and white papers Knowledge bases or libraries And more 3. Bottom of funnel The bottom of the funnel represents prospects who have entered the decision and purchase stages of the customer journey. Leads who stick around until the bottom of the funnel have a clear interest in your brand. All you have to do is win their business, eliminating any of their barriers to purchase. For some customers, product price may be a barrier. Others may be concerned about product features.  Segment your BOFU leads by online behavior and buying habits to discern what stands in the way of a purchase. Then, create content or relevant offers to eliminate those hurdles.  But remember, your work isn’t over once a prospect makes a purchase. When prospects convert, they remain at the bottom of the funnel—but this time, the goal is customer retention and brand advocacy. For these reasons, the bottom of the funnel is arguably the most important of the three sales funnel steps.  What customer intent at the bottom of the funnel looks like Leads who land at the bottom of the funnel are close to making a buying decision and actively comparing the solutions that best fit their pain points, objectives, and budget. These prospects have begun researching with commercial and transactional intent.  In other words, they are ready to purchase a specific product or service. What consumer searches at the bottom of the funnel look like Searches at the bottom of the funnel are more targeted than MOFU searches. You can anticipate prospects seeking specific product pages or content that offers incentives.  Rounding out the above SMS example, BOFU search terms may include:  SMS free trials Twilio pricing Twilio free demo  What content marketing for the bottom of the funnel looks like As you can tell by the above search queries, prospects at the bottom of the funnel are ready to make a purchase. These ready-to-buy leads are in search of something extra to finally purchase, whether extra confidence in your brand, extra cost savings, or extra urgency to make a decision.  Content that gives BOFU prospects the little bit of extra they want typically includes: Case studies and testimonials Custom service estimates Online savings calculators Individualized sales calls Video demonstrations  In the case of current customers, BOFU content can also help measure the customer experience, such as satisfaction surveys. Sales funnel examples Below are sales funnel examples from various industries to show you how organizations worldwide activate and maximize the sales funnel.  TOFU: Zoho paid ads Zoho is a cloud software provider that specializes in customer and lead relationship management and content marketing.  In the above example, you can see how Zoho taps into top-of-the-funnel search traffic with paid ads for queries like “lead management software.” This is a broad query you can likely expect from prospects just beginning the customer journey. By appearing at the top of search engine results pages for this query, Zoho helps to boost brand awareness and build consumer confidence with copy like, “the #1 CRM for SMBs.” To do more with this ad, Zoho could include click-to-message functionality directly from the SERP. With a tool like Twilio Flex, it could offer live assistance as soon as a prospect clicked on the Zoho ad or placement in search results.  MOFU: QuickBooks comparison page  Most of us are familiar with both QuickBooks and Xero, two of the top accounting software solutions. An example of effective middle-of-the-funnel content is the QuickBooks product comparison page. The page stacks QuickBooks features directly against Xero features, alongside positive user testimonials that build consumer confidence in QuickBooks. Not to mention the page is chock-full of calls to action like “Buy now & save” to help encourage middle-of-the-funnel leads to enter the bottom stage. BOFU: Visionworks email marketing Visionworks is a national eyewear retailer. The sales and marketing teams at Visionworks often serve double duty, attracting new leads and retaining past customers. One great example of how Visionworks retains customers is this bottom-of-the-funnel email marketing campaign. The subject line (“Hurry! Your special offer ends soon") has the extra urgency some customers need, and it pairs with not one, not two, but three promotions. The benefits of booking an appointment are crystal clear.  To help fortify its retention efforts, Visionworks could use a tool like Twilio Flex to enable frictionless outreach. Flex Conversations allow enterprises to connect with prospects where they are—whether by phone, text message, or chat—without ever switching apps.   Engage customers along the sales funnel with Twilio Flex Now that you've read everything you need to know about sales funnel 101, including the three sales funnel steps, it's time to act. Twilio Flex helps you nurture customers along the sales funnel, no matter their current stage. Plus, you can add Twilio click-to-call or click-to-text features to your current lead management system and personalize sales efforts from the start. With Twilio Flex, engaging customers along the sales funnel can become a staple in your sales cycle. View an interactive demo today to learn more. Get started today for free.

AI innovations have the potential to revolutionize how businesses operate. That’s because these tools can automate processes that take a long time to complete manually, helping employees work more efficiently. While AI has uses in many industries, it’s particularly beneficial for contact centers, thanks to its natural language processing (NLP) capabilities. But how can you use AI to improve customer service? Let’s take a look at 10 ways, plus examples of AI in customer service. What is AI in customer service? Customer service AI refers to using AI capabilities, like NLP and machine learning, to improve the customer experience. With its many contact center use cases, AI can help: Customer service agents work more efficiently Customers reach resolutions faster Customer service supervisors/managers improve internal processes Read more about the basics of AI for businesses for an overview of how this technology works and the most relevant terminology. Benefits of using AI in customer service Implementing AI in your contact center has many benefits for customer service, including: Increased efficiency: AI tools can help customer service agents work more efficiently by automating previously manual processes. For example, it can transcribe and summarize calls so agents don’t need to take notes. Faster service and better customer experiences: AI increases efficiency, as mentioned above, allowing agents to give customers faster resolutions. For example, AI-powered agent assistants can surface resources to help agents troubleshoot customers’ issues, which is faster than agents trying to find the right resource or answer manually. This faster service creates a better customer experience. Cost savings: AI-powered virtual assistants have more capabilities than traditional chatbots and interactive voice response (IVR) menus, resolving more customer inquiries without a live agent. This helps the live agents focus on complex tasks while keeping contact centers costs low by resolving more customer interactions without growing personnel. Better agent experiences: AI tools can help off-load manual tasks from live agents and equip them to serve customers more effectively, leading to less agent burnout. That’s because live agents can spend more time doing what they do best—supporting customers—and less time on repetitive tasks. 10 ways to use AI in customer service Now that you know the benefits of AI, how do you integrate it into your contact center? Here are 10 ways your business can use AI for customer service: 1. Personalize chatbot interactions Chatbots are traditionally rules-based, having predetermined answers to specific questions. For example, if the customer asks “What are your hours?” the chatbot answers “9 a.m. to 5 p.m.” This automated assistance can help customers find answers to basic questions but is lackluster in personalization. And personalization is crucial for businesses: 66% of consumers admit they’ll quit a brand that doesn’t offer a personalized experience. So how can you make chat-based support more personalized? Virtual agents powered by conversational AI can do more than traditional chatbots, like analyzing real-time customer data to personalize responses. This means your business can provide more tailored support without a live agent. For example, say a customer initiates a chat to ask about processing a return. The virtual agent pulls up the customer’s last purchase from their profile and asks if this is the order they need help with. The customer replies that it is, and the virtual agent initiates the return. This saves the customer time because they don’t have to search through their inbox to find the order number, creating a more seamless exchange. Plus, these conversational chatbots meet the customer’s personalization expectations, contributing to a positive customer experience. 2. Enhance voice assistance Similar to chatbots, IVR menus are also rules-based. But AI can make IVR menus smarter than before, turning them into a dynamic tool that uses customer data to tailor the experience. For example, say a customer tries to log into their bank account but can’t remember their password. After three failed login attempts, they get locked out of their account and have to call customer service. The dynamic self-service menu recognizes the customer’s number and has the context of their browsing history. So when the customer calls customer service, the first menu option they hear is the password reset option. This means the customer doesn’t have to sit through a long IVR menu to find the help they need and can reset their password quickly. This dynamic support creates a positive customer experience and can help improve customer retention. 3. Route customers efficiently As we hinted at above, AI tools can analyze customer data to help route callers to the right agent or resource more efficiently. For example, say a customer browses their bank’s website looking for information about international ATM withdrawal fees. Then, the customer starts a live chat and asks to speak to a live agent. AI-powered data analysis infers from the customer’s browsing history that they have additional questions on this topic. So it routes the customer to a live agent knowledgeable about international banking. This ensures the customer talks to an agent equipped to answer their questions and won't need to speak with another agent, creating a faster and more seamless experience. 4. Assist agents with recommended responses Even the most experienced agents sometimes need to look through their business’ knowledge base to find the answer to a customer’s question or the path to resolution. When this information is difficult to find, it can result in long calls and longer queues. AI-powered agent assistance can help customer support agents reach resolution faster. For example, Google Cloud Contact Center AI offers Agent Assist, which can analyze customer intent based on voice or written input, surface recommended resources, such as FAQ pages, and make suggestions to resolve the inquiry. Additionally, agents can use the generative AI tool ChatGPT to create suggested responses tailored to the customer’s profile. This enables agents to respond quickly and accurately, contributing to faster resolutions. 5. Predict customer needs Meeting customers’ needs proactively can help improve your business’ customer service. But to do so, you need quality customer data. AI can help customer service agents get more from customer data by analyzing it to extract two types of customer traits: Inferred traits: These derive from users’ actions and interactions. For example, if a customer has a history of purchasing running shoes and apparel, AI can infer that the customer is a runner. Predictive traits: These forecast using historical data and predictive modeling. For example, if a customer has a history of upgrading their cell phone every two years, and they’re approaching two years since their last upgrade, AI can predict the customer is likely to upgrade their phone soon. So what do you do with these traits? AI-powered assistants can surface these traits during customer interactions, helping virtual agents and live agents predict customers’ needs and engage them proactively. 6. Identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities The inferred and predictive traits we discussed above can help agents identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities likely to resonate with customers. For example, say a customer messages an agent because they want to purchase a hoodie with their favorite sports team’s logo and have a question about sizing. The live agent could answer the question and stop there. But with AI assistance, they can go further. AI can surface recommended products based on the customer’s purchase history, like a matching beanie. And since the customer has purchased a beanie from the brand before and left a positive review, it’s likely they’ll want to purchase another one with their team’s logo. With this data, the agent can suggest the product and increase the customer’s purchase amount. 7. Improve self-service resources Businesses can use generative AI to improve self-service resources and write new content to help customers resolve their inquiries without contacting a live agent. For example, you can gather insights from common customer questions to identify gaps in FAQ pages, then use ChatGPT to draft new content to fill these gaps. Finally, have an employee knowledgeable on the topic review and edit the copy to ensure accuracy and consistency. You can also ask ChatGPT to review your current content and give you recommendations on how to improve it, such as condensing the content for customers to consume quickly. To make the most of the tool, write a detailed prompt explaining what you need. For example: “Please rewrite this FAQ page, condensing the content to no more than 500 words. Use bullet points where possible to make the content easier to scan.” 8. Translate in real time AI can help expand your business’ reach by enabling live agents to chat with customers in any language. This allows your business to support customers worldwide, even when live agents don’t speak the customer’s preferred language. For example, AI integration Lionbridge Language Cloud can detect the language of a customer’s text input and translate it in real time, showing the live agent the text in their primary language. The tool then translates the live agent’s response, enabling real-time communication across languages and allowing businesses to provide hyperpersonalized support. 9. Analyze customer sentiment AI can analyze large amounts of customer interaction data in a matter of seconds, generating valuable insights for customer support and helping your contact center serve customers more efficiently. For example, AI can extract the most common issues customers call about, like a bug in your software product. You can then share this information with the appropriate team to fix the issue. Plus, AI can analyze individual customer interactions and identify customers likely to churn. Then, you can create tailored outreach to try to retain these customers. Finally, AI tools can analyze sentiment in real time and route customers to the right agent or resource based on their needs. For example, if a virtual agent identifies negative sentiment in a chat conversation, it can escalate the conversation to a live agent (along with the context) to handle the interaction with the empathy and tact needed to de-escalate the customer's issue. 10. Summarize customer interactions Integrating ChatGPT with your contact center dashboard is another way AI can help live agents work more efficiently. For example, live agents can use this generative AI tool to summarize customer interactions, noting the customer sentiment and necessary follow-up action. This saves the live agent time in writing the summary, so they can move on to the next steps to support the customer or engage another customer. Plus, with this summary saved to the customer profile, other team members can tailor customer outreach and understand how to best support the customer in the next interaction. Implement customer service AI with Twilio As the strategies in this post illustrate, customer service AI can empower agents to work more efficiently when equipped with quality customer data and integrated seamlessly into your contact center software. Now that you have a better understanding of how AI can improve customer service, you’re ready to take the next step: implementing AI tools into your contact center. To do this effectively, you’ll need a flexible contact center platform that uses AI to improve the customer experience. Twilio Flex is just that tool. Flex enables businesses to adapt and scale contact centers to meet customers’ needs. Flex Unify, announced at SIGNAL and currently in private beta, uses real-time customer data and Twilio’s CustomerAI to deliver hyperpersonalized experiences across virtual and live agent interactions. Powered by inferred and predictive traits, Flex Unify goes a step further, using AI to route customers appropriately, personalize conversations, and provide recommended responses to resolve customers’ inquiries. Want to learn more? Discover how Flex Unify will help improve customer engagement.

Increasingly, we’ve seen a massive shift in the consumer/business power dynamic. Traditionally, consumers were limited to the brick-and-mortar businesses in their area for many purchases (especially those in rural areas). People ended up shopping at the most convenient business, even if the prices and selections weren’t great. In this business-friendly environment, customer retention strategies weren’t a top priority. The advent of e-commerce flipped things in favor of consumers. So whether you live in a large city with 20 furniture stores or a small town with a single store, you don’t have to shop at any of them. From the comfort of your couch, you can compare prices, research companies, and place an order from a seemingly endless range of options. With so many options, modern consumers want businesses to wow and woo them. Fail to meet their needs, and they’ll hop over to a competitor’s website. Consider these statistics: 5x more money is what you’ll spend to attract a new customer than to retain one 69% of consumers choose to shop at stores where the customer service is consistent 91% of consumers will consider additional purchases after a positive initial experience 79% of consumers say brand experiences are as important as a brand’s products or services 80% of profits come from just 20% of your most loyal customers 10x the value of their initial purchase is what loyal customers are worth Clearly, your current customers are a prime source of sustainable value. Hold on to them and you’ll set your business up for years of success. Your contact center is one of the most crucial touchpoints that can help you make this happen. 10 customer retention strategies for call centers If your goal is to improve customer retention (and it should be), you need to have a clear plan. Call centers are busy and unpredictable places, so the only way to achieve your desired results is to train your team and implement the right strategies. Here are 10 ways to elevate your call center to a full-fledged customer retention center. 1. Be proactive about your customers’ needs The hardest time to resolve a customer’s issues is when they reach the point of frustration. You can provide a better experience for your customers and agents alike by keeping tabs on where individuals are in the customer journey, then anticipating their needs. For example, let’s say that your company has a popular software product designed to help retailers track inventory. You could use call center data to identify the three most common questions that customers have when using your software. Then, you can create an email that explains how to navigate these three functions. If your software has a 30-day free trial, you might also consider sending an email to customers a few days before the trial ends. Explain that soon you’ll charge their card for your software and reiterate all the key reasons that it’s worth their money. That way, you won’t have angry people calling in about “unauthorized charges” to their credit cards. And don’t stop there. You could repurpose the FAQ email and free trial email with quality content for your call center agents. The better prepared they are for common issues, the more equipped they are to resolve concerns. By looking ahead and helping to smooth out the road for everyone involved, you’ll deliver better service and reduce headaches. 2. Give customers a clear path to resolution As part of the customer/business dynamic mentioned earlier, modern consumers expect rapid responses. Rather than drive 15 minutes to a brick-and-mortar location to make a purchase, they tap a button on their phone. And shipping times have dropped from a matter of days to a matter of hours. In this new e-commerce-driven world, you must deliver a frictionless customer service experience. Draw upon the expertise of user experience professionals to ensure customers can navigate your website and other interfaces so that they don’t spend time searching for the right resources, which will only lead to increased frustration. Your interactive voice response (IVR) system and text messaging platform should address common concerns and direct customers to solutions. For example, if you consistently get calls from customers struggling with payment issues, include that in your IVR script and clearly explain where customers can make their payments. And if callers have unique questions and require an agent, make sure your IVR system directs them to the right person. Your agents must have access to the full customer view, so when additional people need to join the call, they can quickly access the details and move toward a timely resolution. Going through multiple transfers or being forced to repeat information can be frustrating experiences for customers. 3. Use an omnichannel approach An effective customer retention center isn’t just a call center—it’s an omnichannel contact center. Learn how your customers want to connect with you, then provide the best channels for their needs. Not only will it provide crucial convenience, but it also reinforces your brand’s commitment to delivering a personalized experience to customers. But don’t offer a channel that you can’t service effectively. For example, a business might get angry feedback regarding the lack of text messaging for customer service. Anxious to remedy the situation, the business adds a phone number to its website and invites customers to text them whenever they need help. Without setting up a reliable system and protocols in advance, this hasty effort will only lead to more frustration from customers. It's also vital that call center customer retention representatives can seamlessly join conversations on the various channels. Your contact center solution should help keep everyone on the same page and silos a thing of the past. 4. Harness the power of self-service It’s easy to get carried away in your desire to provide good customer service and forget that some of the best solutions are available without the help of a call center customer retention representative. Customers care the most about expedited service, so deliver it to them wherever possible. This approach might begin on the customer service page of your website. Rather than providing your phone number and a call to action that says they should call you, think outside of the box. What resources could you add to the page that would allow people to get answers without making a call or sending you a text? Effective self-service options include: User community section with suggestions and answers provided by other customers FAQ section with your most commonly resolved questions and concerns Video tutorials that explain more in-depth topics The self-service approach can be incredibly effective. Not only will customers always be grateful that they can get what they want without waiting in a queue, but there’s a real power that comes from figuring something out for yourself. It’s not just the feeling of accomplishment, but there’s also a higher chance of internalizing the information. Someone who figures out a process is less likely to forget it in the future and seek your support again. Another reason that this is among the most impactful customer retention strategies is that it frees up your agents to dedicate more time to customer queries that might require more effort. 5. Make it personal Modern customers not only expect speedy results but also want personalization. This means that boilerplate is out, and customer journeys are in. You need to know your customers’ needs and priorities to help them feel valued. When communicating with customers, all agents should have access to the relevant history and data. By drawing from these resources, agents can provide better, custom solutions. Additionally, understanding a customer’s journey empowers your agents to be more empathetic. They’ll know how the customer got where they are and where they want to go. This then helps them to speak in a way that shows understanding and a sincere desire to help. 6. Don’t be afraid to apologize Part of showing empathy is knowing when to apologize. Some brands steer clear of apologies, wary of the culpability and liability it can bring. But you can’t deliver personalized service without sometimes expressing that you’re sorry someone had a frustrating experience. It doesn’t even require you to necessarily admit fault. Instead, you build emotional connections that can pay dividends in the future. Of course, apologies are incomplete unless accompanied by solutions. So listen carefully to customers’ concerns, then let them know how you plan to provide resolution. 7. Create a loyalty program Many businesses launch loyalty programs to just boost sales. But that’s a myopic view, as loyalty programs can help you learn more about your customers and establish bonds that will help you to resolve issues better. For example, a loyalty app reveals the timing and details of all brand interactions. This goes beyond transactions, as you can also see when customers read news updates that you post or participate in contests. By understanding their engagement level, your agents deliver better personalized care. From a practical standpoint, a loyalty program can also lead to better resolutions. For example, if a customer wants compensation after a disappointing experience, your agents can quickly add credits or promos directly to an app. There’s no need to waste time and money on mailing a gift card. 8. Seek copious amounts of feedback Even the best customer retention center teams have blind spots, so it’s essential that you create channels to gather feedback from customers. For example, you could conduct a brief exit interview with customers who call in to cancel their subscription. While agents assure the customers they are happy to assist in ending their subscription, have them ask a few questions to identify the reasons for the decision. Imagine how valuable these insights can be. As you identify trends, you’ll learn about some of the primary threats to your success. And it’s likely that you wouldn’t have without such direct access to feedback. If you’re serious about customer retention strategies, you’ll also need to get serious about customer feedback. Commit to taking action on what you learn, even when it’s uncomfortable to hear. Unfortunately, many companies merely use feedback to confirm assumptions rather than challenging them. But this echo-chamber approach won’t get you anywhere. Finally, be sure to sincerely thank every customer who shares feedback. And let them know you’ll take action. Many businesses find it effective to send out quarterly or annual emails highlighting the changes and updates made based on honest customer feedback. 9. Use KPIs to guide your progress The only way to get where you want to go is to understand where you stand. Key performance indicators (KPIs) help you measure success and convert metrics into action. For example, your internal data and customer feedback could reveal three major opportunities for retention improvement. Talk to individuals from across your teams to identify challenging but attainable goals for these three areas. Then, target the KPIs that will enable you to track progress. It’s also crucial to have internal buy-in on all performance-related goals. When your teams understand the objective and know their role in the process, they’re more likely to contribute in their unique ways. Call center software can greatly enhance these efforts as well. The best contact center software options provide real-time reports to help you monitor your business. You can customize the metrics and KPIs within the system, then view and share reports whenever necessary. 10. Follow up every time While the power of following up applies to all aspects of your business, it has special relevance for customer retention. As mentioned earlier, 79% of consumers consider the experiences they have with your brand to be just as important as the products or services you sell. So if you tell someone you’ll do something, make sure that it happens when (or before) they expect you to do it. And while it takes time to build trust with your customers, each time you follow up, know that you add to the positive experiences that customers use to define your brand. Fail to do what you said you would, and that equity can vanish. This is another area where call center software shines. Agents can enter notes after each customer interaction and manage timelines, helping to align customer expectations with your team’s abilities. When software enables individuals from all teams to view and act on the most current information, delivering on promises becomes easier. The importance of customer retention in call centers Retaining customers through call center efforts is a core element of any modern business. By personalizing your service and providing positive experiences, you’ll stand out and build customer loyalty. This sets you up to maximize the lifetime value of each customer and frees you up to spend less money on acquisition. You’ll also benefit from the insights received straight from your customers. This real-time feedback outpaces anything you could get from expensive panels and provides you with continual opportunities to improve. Another key aspect of customer retention is that it provides a catalyst to get all your teams collaborating more closely. Traditionally, siloes limited organizations from effectively and consistently sharing internal data and best practices. Modern contact center software helps solve these issues and create additional opportunities for your people to work together to provide good customer service. By making customer retention a priority, you implement strategies that will help your business thrive well into the future. Because customer retention, while noble and virtuous in intentions, is basically revenue retention. And every business wants that. Take the next step in customer retention strategies with Twilio Flex If you’re ready to deliver personalized service and retain more customers, Twilio Flex is an ideal solution. Our contact center software reduces friction by helping customers engage with you via their preferred channel. Quick access to data and details then empowers your agents to provide accurate solutions in real time. With the help of Flex, you can create a better customer experience while empowering agents. And, as any leader knows, those two factors lead to better retention every time. Contact our Sales team to learn more about what you can build with Flex.

Companies can harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to counter fraudulent activities, enhancing both customer experiences and financial security. An important aspect of this strategy involves establishing a reliable and seamless identity verification process for customers across various communication channels. By doing so, businesses can facilitate smoother interactions for legitimate customers while simultaneously identifying and thwarting attempts by malicious entities to exploit vulnerabilities in the system. One emerging threat is the manipulation of SMS traffic, commonly known as artificially inflated traffic. This form of fraud takes advantage of mobile number input fields on digital platforms to generate and divert SMS messages containing sensitive information such as one-time passwords (OTPs). Fraudsters manipulate these systems to divert SMS messages to numbers they control, subsequently profiting from the revenue generated through these fraudulent SMS activities. This practice not only incurs additional messaging costs for targeted businesses but also jeopardizes the security of customer communications. Detecting and blocking AIT To address this challenge, advanced AI-driven solutions have been developed to enhance the conversion rates of SMS OTPs and reduce overall costs per user. These solutions operate by precisely detecting and blocking instances of artificially inflated SMS traffic. By integrating such tools into their systems, companies can identify and prevent fraudulent SMS activities, safeguarding their messaging processes from exploitation. For instance, in the context of the gaming industry, where innovation thrives but fraud risks also escalate, businesses have sought more robust security measures. In response, they have turned to SMS-based one-time passcode verification, adding an extra layer of security without compromising user accessibility. This approach enables companies to ensure a safer and more reliable user experience while protecting sensitive user information. One of our beta customers, a large social media business, deployed our solution designed to detect and block AIT, Fraud Guard, and saw a 27% increase in their SMS conversion rate, a 42% decrease in cost-per-user, and they saved more than $300k in the first month with an anticipated $1.57M savings over time. How does it work? Great question: Fraud Guard uses machine learning algorithms to identify suspicious behavior that could be associated with AIT. For example, we’re able to identify abnormal requests like 25 OTPs requests in just one minute. To ensure we’re catching anomalies like this, Fraud Guard leverages the Twilio Supernetwork to learn from all the aggregate OTP data to assess what a normal behavior looks like. Multi-channel verification For organizations aiming to send OTPs or implement phone number verification seamlessly, they should consider a multi-channel verification API. Designed with scalability and high deliverability in mind, this approach ensures redundancy and low latency, critical for maintaining optimal user experiences. By adopting this solution, businesses can expand their global reach while effortlessly managing carrier pre-approved templates, compliance, and a pool of phone numbers, short codes, and long codes. Any solution you choose should also provide robust monitoring capabilities, and offer valuable insights through an intuitive console. In addition to Fraud Guard on Twilio’s Verify API, businesses can also use SMS Pumping Protection to prevent SMS pumping fraud when using the Programmable Messaging API for verification as well as other use cases, such as promotional messaging. This product is currently in private beta and to be released publicly in September 2023. Like Fraud Guard, Twilio’s SMS Pumping Protection offering uses machine learning to monitor traffic and identify messages it suspects are fraudulent. It’s able to accomplish this by comparing the current activity with historical data that we have. Once the engines can identify the anomalies, it blocks the traffic so that the fraudulent messages don't get sent. It’s critical that you have a strong messaging fraud strategy to both counteract fraudulent activities and ensure that you have the appropriate layers of protection. If you’re curious how much fraud is costing you, try out our Fraud Calculator. To sum it up In summary, artificial intelligence presents a powerful arsenal for companies in the battle against fraud. Establishing seamless customer identity verification processes, while simultaneously deploying AI to detect and prevent fraudulent activities like artificially inflated SMS traffic, enables businesses to provide secure and efficient customer experiences. This proactive approach helps build trust among customers and safeguards the company's financial interests in an increasingly digital landscape. Leverage the Power of AI Protect yourself from experiencing fraudulent costs via SMS with Twilio’s host of AI-powered tools. Get started with Fraud Guard, automatically included in your instance of Verify. Try Fraud Guard

At Twilio, we recognize that artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform the way we work, live, and interact with the world around us. We believe its use will give us the ability to improve our products and services and create new opportunities for our customers. We also believe the true value of AI is unlocked when companies like yours are able to safely and compliantly harness all of the data across their business—including the signals from each interaction with every individual customer—and use this deep understanding at scale, consistently improving the next interaction that every customer has with your brand in real time. This data-driven flywheel—iteratively understanding and growing deeper relationships with customers—is precisely what Twilio makes possible. That’s why we’re incredibly excited about the value that Twilio’s CustomerAI technology will unlock for the brands and enterprises we serve. That said, we recognize that AI does not come without risk and are committed to helping our customers use AI in an ethical, legal, and responsible way. Our legacy of trust, squarely at the center On June 6, 2023 we announced CustomerAI, which couples the power of large language models (LLMs) with rich customer data that flows through Twilio’s Customer Engagement Platform. Ultimately, CustomerAI accelerates how companies unlock the potential of their customers across the entire customer journey, including marketing, sales and support, onboarding, authentication, and more—enabling companies to create a flywheel unlike anything they’ve had before. Twilio Segment enables companies to personalize interactions with golden profiles assembled from events and behaviors. But now with CustomerAI, we can better interpret communications—identifying traits and important details, and updating the customer profile. The flywheel effect means that our customers better understand every interaction, enriching the golden profile and, in turn, better personalizing every touchpoint. CustomerAI starts with its foundations in trust and the commitment that all of your data is yours. While privacy concerns have come to the forefront with AI, Twilio has always taken data privacy seriously. We maintain a commitment to building privacy and security by design into our product development lifecycle to support our customers’ compliant and responsible use of their data with our products and services. For example, we have created a Privacy Pattern for our Flex, Console, and SendGrid products that empowers developers to build privacy directly into their applications. We offer Segment Privacy Portal, a data inventory feature that allows customers to automatically identify and classify data (e.g. high, medium, low risk). You can set rules to manage risk exposure and proactively block data to comply with your company’s privacy policy. In addition, Twilio encrypts data both in transit and at rest utilizing industry standard encryption algorithms. It offers controls for customers to manage their customer data and to delete personal data relating to their users as needed. As we continue to deliver powerful AI solutions across the Twilio platform, we’re committed to the same level of rigor and trust, especially when it comes to protecting customer data privacy. Our commitment to privacy: CustomerAI trust principles and privacy ladder We view the use of AI and the protection of privacy as a shared responsibility between our customers and Twilio. To support this, we have adopted a set of CustomerAI trust principles to guide the responsible development, use, and deployment of predictive and generative AI across all of Twilio’s products and features. CustomerAI Trust Principles Transparent We provide transparency about our use of AI and give our customers the ability to control their data. We help our customers make informed choices about whether to use different types of AI models by being fully transparent about the AI vendors and type of models we are using, and how customer data is used by those models. One of the ways we provide transparency to customers is through our AI Nutrition Facts Labels (more on this below). These labels are assigned to each AI-driven product and feature that we launch, bringing all of the key details front and center in a simple and easily understandable format. Responsible We select responsible AI vendors and strive to use—and help our customers use—AI in a way that respects privacy, keeps data secure, and minimizes the risk of bias or other harms. Twilio performs a privacy and security assessment prior to working with any AI vendor to ensure they meet our privacy and security standards and requires specific contractual commitments. These include a specific commitment not to use customer data to train their models. Accountable We monitor the functioning of AI to address harms and fitness for purpose in partnership with our AI vendors and customers. Twilio exercises auditing, logging, and monitoring to ensure our AI is operating as intended. Additionally, we offer a number of guardrails to ensure fitness for purpose, ranging from human-in-the-loop to monitoring for toxicity and other harms. CustomerAI Privacy Ladder In addition to Twilio’s CustomerAI trust principles, we have introduced our CustomerAI privacy ladder. For each AI-driven product or feature that you may opt to use, this ladder (and its levels) show the type of data used by the model, and whether the model is exclusively for your use or the use of multiple customers. While some customers may only prefer to use isolated models, we know that others may be open to sharing data and benefitting from models that use broader, more representative data sets. Level 1: Models with your data for your use, without PII Level 1 is the lowest privacy risk option and identifies models that use your data for your exclusive use without any personally identifiable information (PII)—that is, information that, when used alone or with other relevant data, can identify an individual. Level 2: Models with your data for your use, with PII Level 2 offers more value and requires more caution than the first level as it identifies models that use your data for your exclusive use, including PII. Level 3: Models with your data for multi-customer use, without PII Level 3 offers the highest level of value and need for caution as it identifies models that use your data and other customers’ data for multiple customer use but does not include any PII. This may include PII data that has been anonymized prior to being used by the model. We view Twilio’s CustomerAI trust principles and the privacy ladder framework outlined above as critical to ensuring that, as a customer of Twilio, you’re equipped to make well-informed decisions about which CustomerAI products and features you and your organization are prepared to adopt. Introducing Twilio’s AI Nutrition Facts Labels Finally, in addition to Twilio’s overarching CustomerAI trust principles and privacy ladder framework, we’re excited to introduce Twilio’s AI Nutrition Facts Labels—a clear, consistent, and transparent way to understand exactly “what’s in the box” when assessing all of Twilio’s CustomerAI products and features across the platform. Our AI Nutrition Facts Labels provide key information about an AI model’s privacy level and design elements in an easily understandable format, mimicking the food nutrition labels you’re likely already familiar with today. Below, you’ll find an example of the AI Nutrition Facts Label for Twilio’s Generative Journeys and Generative Content (both in Engage) as well as Voice Intelligence—all of which were announced today at SIGNAL. You’ll see how each label highlights critical details like: Ladder level Model type Base models and owners A detailed breakdown for how data is used by each model Additional links to supporting, public-facing resources. All of the products and features that are powered by Twilio CustomerAI will feature this label within the product UI/UX, but we haven’t stopped there. We want you to have the ability to create and share AI Nutrition Facts Labels in ways that instill trust and a commitment to the privacy of your customers. To help make this possible, we’ve launched nutrition-facts.ai, a new AI Nutrition Facts Label generator, powered by Twilio, allowing our customers, partners, and the industry as a whole to easily and thoughtfully create their own AI Nutrition Facts Labels. Bringing trust and privacy to life through CustomerAI At Twilio, we’re incredibly excited about the value and efficiency AI will bring to our customers while, at the same time, remaining aware of the associated risks and complexity. As we continue to deliver on our mission of building the world’s most trusted customer engagement platform, we’re committed to being transparent, responsible, and accountable in how we use AI in our products and features. We’re also committed to adapting our AI efforts responsibly as best practices and regulation continue to evolve. Amy Holcroft is Twilio’s Chief Privacy Officer. She brings over 20 years of experience in privacy and manages Twilio’s international team of privacy lawyers, risk, and compliance professionals responsible for Twilio’s global privacy program. Kathryn Murphy is Twilio’s Senior Vice President of Product and Design at Twilio, focused on Segment, Engage, and CustomerAI. She brings over 20 years of experience in product management, design and engineering with deep domain expertise across retail, commerce, payments, customer data platforms, and multi-channel marketing.

Contact centers have a lot of moving parts, like conversations across channels, customer databases, and metrics to track. This means agents and supervisors have a lot to manage while providing a positive customer experience. Having the right tools can help contact center employees work more efficiently and free up time to give customers the support needed. Luckily, businesses can rely on various contact center technologies to make this happen. Let’s take a look at 12 technologies and how each can benefit your contact center. What is contact center technology? Contact center technology refers to tools and software that help contact center agents and supervisors do their jobs more efficiently while creating a positive customer experience. This includes telephony features, omnichannel integrations, and automations that engage customers effectively. What are the benefits of using contact center technologies? Contact center technologies benefit your business, contact center agents, and customers through: Improved efficiency and productivity: Contact center technologies help automate processes such as call routing, saving agents time and helping them work more efficiently. Additionally, automation tools help customers reach the right resources or agents quickly, improving their experience. Lastly, chatbots can help reduce agents’ workload, increasing their productivity and giving customers better service. Personalized customer experience: Contact center technologies can support agents by surfacing the necessary information to provide personalized support. This is crucial, as 66% of customers admit they’ll stop doing business with a brand that doesn’t personalize interactions, and 86% say brands can increase customer loyalty with personalized experiences. Streamlined omnichannel support: Contact center technologies offer cross-channel integrations that enable agents to support customers on their preferred channels while carrying over the context of previous interactions to provide a seamless experience. This omnichannel support impacts revenue—businesses report that investing in digital engagement helped them increase revenue by 90% on average in 2022. Improved performance: Contact center analytics tools allow supervisors to track and analyze contact center metrics from a single dashboard. This gives them quick access to valuable performance insights to measure and improve contact center performance. Top 12 contact center technologies to know The following contact center technologies are vital to providing quality customer support across channels. And while the technologies your contact center needs will depend on your primary channels, the right contact center solution will include these tools and features natively or through integrations. Let’s dive into the top 12 technologies to consider for your contact center. 1. VoIP Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is one of the most important call center technologies because it enables businesses to make and receive phone calls over the internet. This eliminates outdated landlines, replacing them with VoIP-enabled devices, such as desk phones, cell phones, mobile devices, and computers. VoIP technology frees call centers from legacy hardware and gives businesses the flexibility to set up virtual call centers with basic equipment. 2. CTI Computer telephone integrations (CTI) enable contact centers to connect phones and computers, unlocking advanced functionality. For example, CTI can help contact center agents improve efficiency through pop-up screens with contextual information, automated dialing, and call monitoring. CTI has been around since 1992, but thanks to recent integrations with digital channels like SMS and live chat, it continues to facilitate efficiency in modern contact centers. For example, Lyft uses a CTI integration to connect associates’ phones and computers, allowing them to navigate simultaneous conversations across channels. 3. Call queuing Call queuing places inbound calls on hold, then surfaces the calls to agents accordingly. This is essential for call centers, as it helps organize inbound calls. Additionally, call centers can combine call queuing with other routing models, which we’ll discuss next, to route calls to the appropriate agent depending on the customers’ needs. 4. ACD Automatic call distribution (ACD) systems route inbound calls to available contact center agents. ACD systems can use a few different types of attribute-based routing to connect callers to the right agents: Skill-based routing routes callers to agents with specific skills or training depending on their needs (like connecting callers with technical difficulties to tech support and callers with billing questions to the billing department). Priority-based routing moves callers with urgent issues to the top of the queue. Time-of-day routing routes calls to agents based on their time zone and availability. ACD works in tandem with interactive voice response (IVR), which we’ll discuss next, to route calls without a live operator. 5. IVR IVR employs automated menus to help callers reach the appropriate agents or self-service options. It works alongside ACD to route customers based on their input. IVR receives callers’ inputs via spoken responses (like “if you have a billing question, say ‘billing’”) or touch-tone input (like “press 1 for scheduling”). Thus, IVR eliminates live operators and routes customers to the right agent quickly and efficiently—as long as you follow best practices. 6. Call recording Call recording tools enable contact centers to record customer calls for quality assurance and gather valuable information, like customer insights and common questions. However, call recording isn’t as straightforward as pressing Record. That’s because businesses must protect customer data, which means call recording practices must comply with privacy guidelines. This is where call recording technology can help. For example, it can enable agents to start recording once they have verbal consent from the customer (and not before) and pause recording when they provide sensitive information, like a credit card number. Additionally, call recording technology can encrypt recorded calls and offer benefits like automated call transcription. 7. Data analytics Data analytics are vital to measuring key performance indicators (KPIs), evaluating agent performance, and identifying areas for improvement. But when metrics are on different platforms and reports, it can be a challenge to view your contact center’s performance. That’s why access to data analytics from a single dashboard is essential for contact center managers or supervisors—it enables them to view top-level KPIs and zoom in on individual conversations. This gives them the necessary insight to improve performance and provide agent feedback. 8. CRM integration Contact center integration makes day-to-day operations more efficient by connecting your contact center with other vital tools in your tech stack. One of the most important platforms to integrate with your contact center is your customer relationship management (CRM) software. This facilitates data flow, giving agents access to customer profiles and notes on previous interactions to provide more personalized support. For example, say a customer calls support with a technical issue. With a CRM integration, the agent can see that the caller recently interacted with the sales team and purchased a software upgrade, which is vital information in solving the customer’s issue. 9. CDP integration A customer data platform (CDP) is another crucial tool to integrate with your contact center. It combines data from all customer touchpoints across channels, creating a centralized customer database. Then, businesses can segment that database based on various attributes or phases in the customer journey to tailor customer experiences. Integrating your CDP with your contact center gives agents access to real-time data to provide hyperpersonalized support—which, as we mentioned earlier, is vital to customer retention and loyalty. For example, a CDP integration can enable agents to view a customer's interactions with social media ads and marketing emails, giving them a more holistic view of the customer’s interests and preferences. 10. Chatbots A chatbot is an AI-powered program that can assist customers with basic questions and tasks without a live agent. Chatbots can help reduce agent workload while giving customers the support needed. For example, a chatbot can answer FAQs, schedule appointments, and perform straightforward tasks, like taking a meal order. And if the chatbot can’t answer the customer’s inquiry, it can hand off the interaction to a live agent, passing along the context so the agent can jump into the solution. In short, chatbots allow customers to self-serve while allowing agents to focus on more complex issues that require human interaction. 11. Omnichannel integration Omnichannel integration facilitates data flow and allows agents to engage customers across channels seamlessly to provide a consistent experience. For example, say you don’t have integrated contact center channels, making them time-consuming for agents to toggle back and forth to view previous interactions across channels. This can lead agents to ask repetitive questions that frustrate customers. Investing in digital channels helps businesses meet customers’ needs, as we mentioned earlier. So it’s vital for contact centers to offer integrated support across various channels (like SMS, live chat, video, and voice) to provide the best customer experience. 12. Unified UI A unified UI brings all your contact center’s channels and integrations into a single dashboard, putting all the information agents need in one place. This direct access to data and tools enables contact center agents to work more effectively. Emerging trends in contact center technologies The above contact center technologies are essential for businesses to give customers high-quality support. However, the industry is evolving constantly, and new technologies have emerged that give contact centers even more flexibility to meet customer needs. Let’s take a look at the top trends revolutionizing contact centers today. AI integration AI is one of the most talked-about innovations in business and technology. What was once a sci-fi dream is now an accessible tool that businesses can leverage to predict customer needs and increase efficiency. So how can contact centers use AI? Contact center integrations, like Google Cloud CCAI, can help agents work more efficiently, thanks to: Virtual agents that take IVR systems and chatbots to the next level by providing customized customer support. Agent assist features that automate tasks and surface recommended responses based on customer input. Sentiment analysis that helps understand customer intent and provide recommended actions to meet it. Additionally, AI can empower businesses to improve the customer experience by analyzing vast amounts of data to uncover customer insights and engagement opportunities. If your business is just getting started with AI, learn the basics concepts, then discover how your business can leverage this technology to engage customers better. Cloud-based solutions Contact centers that have been around for a long time likely rely on on-premise hardware that’s expensive to update and maintain. However, modern cloud-based solutions give businesses more agility to update contact centers to meet evolving customer needs. Additionally, cloud-based solutions allow contact center agents to work remotely (as long as they have an internet connection and VoIP-enabled device) because they don’t need on-premise equipment. However, the best cloud-based solutions offer the flexibility for businesses to augment on-premise contact centers without having to replace everything at once. For example, you can add new channels, like SMS and live chat, that integrate into your existing phone systems. Learn more about the benefits of cloud contact centers. Integrate technologies into your call center with Twilio Flex Now that you have an idea of the most important technologies, you may want to know how to integrate these into your contact center. Whether setting up a new contact center or modernizing your existing solution, Twilio Flex can help. This agile contact center platform empowers businesses to deliver personalized, frictionless customer support, thanks to: Digital channels that integrate with your existing tech stack. Seamless integrations with CRMs, CDPs, and AI tools, like Google Cloud CCAI. Customizable UI where customer service agents can access customer data, view the context of previous interactions, and engage customers across channels. Enhanced flexibility to augment your existing contact center solution or migrate to Flex as needed. Ready to get started? Learn more about what you can build with Flex.

What do you picture when someone asks you to take a trust leap? Does it conjure up images of a corny team building exercise where you’re asked to fall into a colleague’s awaiting arms to prove that you are a strong team? Well thankfully, that’s not what we’re referring to here! We’re talking about much smaller decisions that we make on a daily basis when we choose to trust an individual or an organization. Considering these trust leaps is central to understanding our customers and building lasting relationships with them. Rachel Botsman on Customer Trust The topic of trust and what constitutes it was the focus of our recent Twilio Transform London event. We hosted it at The Shard on a suitably rainy morning, where we welcomed Rachel Botsman, a world leading expert in trust. The event was focused on what constitutes trust and how companies can have strong relationships with the customers, especially in the context of user data. However, can trust be built? According to Rachel, it’s not that simple. Companies need to focus on demonstrating through action why customers should trust them, instead of ‘building it.’ Rachel defines trust as “a confident relationship with the unknown”. To quote one of our attendees, trust is knowing that the cat will come back at the end of the day when you let it out, or that your pizza will be delivered in 30 minutes once a notification pops up to tell you it’s on the way. But is that enough when it comes to data? And how can companies nurture trusting relationships once they do establish them? First-party data will be key to revolutionizing how brands engage with customers in a digital world and enable us to recreate the same level of engagement as we have with our local shop owner, however, companies need to focus on trust to get this right. Instead of asking how trust can be built, senior leaders need to ask themselves if their product, service or information is deserving of that trust in the first place. While it can be a very confronting question to ask, it opens up the potential for a much deeper and more rewarding relationship between companies and their customers. 'Actions speak louder than words’ might not be as much of a cliché as you think it is. Demonstrating that you’re using the first-party data that your customer entrusted to you well is that proof. Personalizing interactions and making suggestions for products or services someone might be interested in based on past purchases is another such demonstration. When this is done well and takes into account personal preferences, people will often tell their friends about it, furthering social-proof. Trust: a virtuous circle Trust is a circle and if done correctly, it’s a virtuous circle for companies. But first, companies need to be the ones to take that trust leap in using first-party data. Ready to leap? Find out more about Twilio Segment here.

An efficient and well-maintained interactive voice response system can be one of the most vital tools for a call center. That’s because IVR technology can save businesses time and money by automating processes that route customers to the right agents or resources. But an inefficient or outdated IVR system can create a poor experience for customers and agents. Plus, it can affect your bottom line: 56% of customers admit they'll discontinue business with a company after a frustrating experience with customer support. Understanding the most common IVR problems will help you provide a better experience for your customers—and agents. So let’s look at the top IVR issues and how to avoid them in your contact center. 1. Lengthy, confusing menus Providing callers with abundant menu options may seem good, but this can lead to decision fatigue. Plus, long and confusing prompts can create an ineffective call flow that doesn't help customers find the information they need. Additionally, lengthy menus can lead to a high call abandonment rate—the rate at which callers abandon a call before reaching a representative or resolving their issue—which businesses should aim to keep below the average rate of 6%. So how do you avoid this issue? Create a simplified, intuitive menu that gives customers a clear path to the agent or resource they need in a matter of seconds. For example, start by offering the most common options in the main menu: Press 1 for scheduling Press 2 for billing Press 3 for all other issues Then, use subsequent menus to further route customers. For example, if the caller selects Billing, they’d hear the following menu: Press 1 to check your balance Press 2 to pay a bill Press 3 to speak to a representative When crafting your menu, remember to put the most important information first. For example, if you create an IVR menu for a medical facility, the message “If this is a medical emergency, hang up and call 911” should be at the top of the recording. 2. Insufficient self-service options Many customers call a business’ contact center with straightforward questions or actions they can solve with self-service. In fact, 81% of customers attempt to resolve their issues with self-service before contacting a representative. So when you don’t provide self-service options, this can lead to unnecessarily long calls that frustrate customers. For example, say a caller needs to pay a bill. It’s much quicker to have them use an automated self-service option than place them on hold, then connect them to an agent who has to take their payment information verbally. Other common use cases for self-service include: Checking order status Updating contact information Checking account balance Canceling appointments In addition to meeting customers’ needs, automating these tasks can help your call center reduce costs. That’s because many contact center platforms have usage-based pricing models, so it's cheaper for your contact center when customers solve their issues quickly (and by themselves). 3. No clear path to reach a live agent While some callers need quick self-service options, as we discussed above, others have more complex issues that only a live agent can resolve. And these callers are bound to get frustrated when going deep into the IVR menu to find the option to speak to a representative—or worse, there is no such option. So avoid this negative customer experience by including the option to reach a live agent at the end of every IVR menu. For example, prompt callers to press 0 or say “representative” to reach an agent regardless of where they are in the IVR menu. 4. Ineffective call routing One of the benefits of IVR is routing callers to the right agent or resource without a human operator. But when call routing goes wrong, it can turn into a disappointing experience for customers quickly. Plus, it can cost agents time. For example, say a caller selects the Billing option from the IVR menu but gets routed to a general customer service agent who can’t help them with billing issues. The customer has to provide all their information, only for the agent to transfer them to another department, where they have to start over again. This is the type of experience that can hurt your contact center metrics and turn customers away from your business. So avoid it by auditing your IVR menu regularly to ensure it routes customers to the right department, agent, or resource. 5. Poor voice recognition and recording quality Many IVR systems rely on voice recognition software to interpret the customer’s voice input and direct them to the appropriate resource. But when voice recognition is faulty, customers may end up repeating themselves over and over without success. Similarly, if your IVR menu has a low-quality voice recording, customers may have a hard time hearing and understanding the menu options, leading to a poor experience. So invest in a quality IVR platform to give customers a positive experience that reflects well on your business. 6. No callback option or estimated wait time Customers faced with a long wait time are likely to abandon their call. In fact, customers abandon their call after waiting for 2 minutes and 36 seconds on average. To avoid a high call abandonment rate, offer callers the option to request a callback when it’s their turn in the queue. They may end up waiting longer than 2 minutes but won’t get as frustrated because they can carry on with other tasks until they receive a call. Additionally, give customers an estimated wait time to help them decide whether it’s worth staying on the line or requesting a callback. 7. No omnichannel integration Customers want to engage with businesses on multiple channels. But with disconnected channels, it can result in a negative customer experience. For example, if a customer reaches out via live chat about an issue, then calls customer service about the same issue, repeating their information and problem each time can be exasperating. With integrated channels, the context of every interaction carries through, allowing agents to see previous conversations and understand what the customer needs without asking numerous questions. This results in more effective handover between agents and allows them to offer personalized support, which we’ll discuss next. 8. Lack of personalization Customers today expect personalized support. In fact, over two-thirds of consumers admit they’ll stop doing business with a brand that doesn’t personalize their experience. So it can frustrate customers when they have to provide all their personal information before they can get to the reason why they called. The omnichannel integration we discussed above helps agents create a personalized experience. Additionally, integrating data sources like your customer data platform with your contact center allows the system to pull relevant information and helps agents identify customers faster. For example, when the IVR routes the caller to an agent, the agent can pull up the customer profile and verify a few data points (like name and date of birth) to identify the customer and offer personalized support. 9. Lack of testing and maintenance Your business probably evolves constantly, as should your IVR. That’s because if you don’t test and maintain your IVR menu regularly, it’ll result in outdated messaging, incorrect routing, and other issues that irritate customers. So to keep your IVR up to date, establish a regular cadence (like every 3 months) to test and maintain your IVR menu, prompts, and messaging. Improve your IVR experience with Twilio When you have a rigid or outdated IVR system, it’s challenging to make the necessary updates to keep up with customer needs. On the other hand, a flexible, scalable IVR system enables you to iterate and update your system to give customers high-quality support. Twilio’s IVR solution is quick to deploy and allows you to iterate nimbly to craft a customer experience that meets their needs. Plus, it allows you to: Integrate data sources and business processes using flexible API tools, enabling you to weave in context into every customer interaction Gather customer feedback and adjust your system accordingly Build voice assistants that guide customers through self-service options, reducing resolution times and costs Learn more about how you can create a better customer experience and maximize your IVR’s performance in our Playbook for a Modern IVR.

The software as a service (SaaS) industry is the epitome of innovation. Yet, customer service—a time-honored staple of any industry—is vital for success. Why is good SaaS customer service critical? First, businesses in this industry are typically subscription or usage-based, which means customer retention is crucial to the bottom line. Additionally, 83% of customers claim a company’s customer experience is equally important as its products and services. So SaaS companies must provide excellent customer service to keep customers happy. But how can you ensure that you provide quality customer service? Here are 7 ways to improve SaaS customer support. 1. Set the tone with onboarding Quality customer support should start the moment a customer interacts with your business. In the SaaS industry, this often begins with a free trial or demo. And it’s an opportunity to set the tone for a positive customer experience with a helpful onboarding flow. After all, there's a learning curve as users navigate new software, and if they don’t understand how to use the product, they may get frustrated and switch to a competitor. To avoid this, create an onboarding flow that shows new customers how to use the product and highlights the most important features. Onboarding can take many forms, including: Welcome email series Video tutorials Message boxes (for users to navigate the interface for the first time) Help centers (which we’ll discuss below) Additionally, onboarding is crucial to move free-trial customers toward the adoption phase, where they see the value of your product and decide to invest in it. 2. Provide comprehensive documentation Customers often prefer to help themselves before contacting support. In fact, 36% of consumers would rather endure an inconvenient experience, like losing their internet connection for a day, than contact customer service. So save customers the trouble (and reduce your call or ticket volume) by providing a knowledge center or help center with tips on how to use your product and troubleshoot issues. If your product is an API, this can include reference documentation, quickstarts, and sample code to give developers a head start. This type of self-service helps users learn to make the most of your product without contacting support every time they have a question. Just remember to give customers the option to contact support from every page in case they can’t resolve their issue with the self-service resources. 3. Create frictionless support across channels Customer support happens on many channels, from phone calls to live chat. But wherever customers interact with your business, they want a seamless experience. However, in a 2022 study, 55% of customers revealed their customer support experiences didn’t feel seamless. The likeliest culprit? Disconnected systems. With disconnected channels, data doesn’t flow between them, and agents can’t access the context of previous interactions to provide a consistent experience. Additionally, the same study found that 47% of companies intend to unify systems and tools to reduce agent effort and create more efficient workflows. This is a step in the right direction, as unified systems empower customer-facing employees to deliver better experiences backed by real-time data. 4. Predict customers’ needs Reactive customer support is just one part of the equation—customers also want businesses to predict their needs and provide personalized, proactive support. However, only 15% of customers report that most support experiences reflected their specific preferences, needs, and previous interactions. So SaaS companies have an opportunity to stand out from competitors by using data to offer proactive support at every stage of the customer journey. For example, if customers in the free-trial stage typically contact support with questions about how to set up their dashboard, send a proactive welcome email showing them how to do so. Or if existing customers often contact you with questions about certain features, create a webinar series with advanced-feature tutorials. 5. Communicate your data protection policies Data privacy is vital in the SaaS industry because businesses often input private customer data and other sensitive information into business applications. And customers want to know this data is secure: 98% of customers want businesses to guarantee their data privacy and be transparent about data usage. So as you onboard new customers, communicate transparently about your data protection policies and make this information accessible. For example, create a clear path to your business’ data retention and deletion policies. 6. Implement AI solutions AI is the most talked-about innovation in tech today. And it can help contact centers overcome many challenges, like the fact that 59% of companies report not having enough real-time data about customer intention. How can AI help? Tools like Google Cloud Contact Center AI integrate with contact center platforms to offer features like: Virtual agents Real-time guidance (for live agents based on customer intent) Recommended resources (for agents) Sentiment analysis Call transcription When contact center agents have access to these tools in a single user interface, they can work more efficiently and provide a seamless, personalized customer experience. 7. Share insights with product teams Customer support and product teams have one thing in common: the goal to meet customers’ needs. Yet, these teams often work in silos, creating a disconnected experience for employees and customers. However, businesses can create a more holistic experience by building relationships between customer support, product, and other teams by sharing valuable insight into what customers want. For example, the customer support team is often the first to learn about bugs and other product issues directly from customers. So gathering these insights and sharing them with the product team can help them fix bugs and deploy product updates that address customers’ most pressing needs. This makes customers feel heard and valued and can result in better customer retention. Improve SaaS customer support with Twilio Flex Many of the customer support tips in this post require certain tools to create seamless customer experiences across channels. But that doesn’t mean you must replace all your current systems. With Twilio Flex, you can build upon your contact center without a major overhaul of your systems. A Flex contact center enables businesses to: Add new digital channels that integrate with your existing systems. Integrate AI tools like Google Cloud CCAI with your contact center. Create a single dashboard where customer service agents can access customer data, view the context of previous interactions, and engage customers across channels. Adapt any aspect of your contact center as your needs evolve. Want to learn more? Here at Twilio, our sales development representatives wanted to improve how they connect with customers and personalize every interaction, so we created a custom solution. Read about what we built with Flex and how other companies use Flex to engage customers.

What is the key to unlocking retail success in Asia Pacific (APAC)? To answer that question, we hosted a webinar moderated by Audrey William, Principal Advisor at Ecosystm, and spoke with two pioneers in the APAC retail space: Adam Jacobs, co-founder of THE ICONIC - Australia's largest online fashion retailer, and the Co-Founder of Hatch Rachel Lim, co-founder of Love, Bonito, a multimillion-dollar international fashion label In this blog, we unveil their biggest lessons into building and growing a successful retail brand in APAC. Retail Resilience: Back to Basics Amid Disruption Concerns Adam highlighted the surprising resilience of the retail industry despite concerns about disruptive technologies like IoT, VR, AR, and the metaverse. Contrary to initial fears, these technologies haven't caused immediate disruptions or a total retail makeover. Instead, Adam said the most significant impact has come from focusing on the basics and improving: hassle-free returns faster and more reliable delivery overall web and mobile shopping experience enhanced product information and imagery These advancements have positively influenced customer expectations and satisfaction, reinforcing the importance of continuously meeting and exceeding these expectations. CX: Unveiling the 3 Layers of Success Both Adam and Rachel emphasised the importance of customer experience in navigating the challenges faced by their respective businesses. Adam shared an analogy of a customer experience cake, where different layers contribute to creating an exceptional customer experience. These extraordinary experiences are often derived from direct conversations with customers, understanding their needs, and implementing innovative ideas that truly resonate with them. THE ICONIC's 4 Elements for Customer Feedback Success Rachel emphasised the importance of founders understanding their target audience intimately, gaining insights into their needs and concerns. Love, Bonito expanded to physical retail spaces to observe customers in person, recognising the limitations of data alone. They relied on regular in-person feedback sessions but sought a more sustainable approach as the business grew. Adam stressed the need for a reliable system to understand customer sentiment, cautioning against subjective opinions. He recommended using a combination of quantitative and qualitative data for a comprehensive understanding of customer feedback, including the following elements: They used the Net Promoter Score (NPS) to assess customer satisfaction and loyalty. By delving into different dimensions of the experience, such as website usability, delivery, returns, and customer service, they gained a deeper understanding of the factors that drove customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction. They aggregated and analysed feedback received through their customer service team. This allowed them to identify recurring inquiries and themes, helping them address customer problems more effectively. They leveraged their website to allow customers to vote for features they wanted to see. This provided valuable input to their product team, guiding them in prioritising and implementing new features or improvements. The leadership team, including Adam, engaged directly with customers through personal deliveries. They gained firsthand insights into their experiences, preferences, and pain points by speaking with customers and asking questions. Rachel mentioned that Love, Bonito is looking to drive changes in their business model by utilising data. They aim to use data to inform decisions on production quantities, fabric purchases, and color selections. By leveraging past experiences and analysing data, they hope to reduce wastage and make their operations more sustainable. Building the Right Team: The Key to Organisational Success Rachel stressed the importance of finding the right people for the organisation, considering different stages of business require different talents. She acknowledged the challenge of attracting suitable talent, particularly in markets where the service industry lacks appeal. Addressing high churn rates and associated costs, Love, Bonito seeks to collaborate with the government and universities to promote retail careers. Reflecting on his experience, Adam realised that team quality plays a vital role in a company's success, estimating it accounts for 80-90% of success. Values alignment is crucial when selecting team members, as seen in THE ICONIC's focus on customer centricity, innovation, rejecting the status quo, fostering a collegiate environment, and maintaining a pragmatic attitude. Adam extended this concept to partners, emphasising the need for shared values to prevent misalignment, citing a failed partnership due to conflicting values. Key takeaways: Surprising trends in the retail industry have shown that improvements in web and mobile shopping experiences, faster delivery, hassle-free returns, and enhanced product information have had a more significant impact than cutting-edge technologies. Customer experience is paramount in navigating retail challenges, focusing on aligning company culture, getting the basics right, and creating exceptional and branded experiences. Capturing and utilising customer feedback effectively involves deep connections with the target audience, combining quantitative and qualitative data, and engaging in direct customer conversations. Values alignment is crucial in building a successful team and selecting partners, as shared values contribute to a business's mission and vision for growth and innovation. To learn more practical tips from Rachel and Adam, please check out the full webinar here.

If you run a small business, you’re probably used to taking on big challenges with limited resources. And adding a call center might seem like a major undertaking that’ll only strain your workload and budget. Spoiler alert: it doesn't have to be. In fact, a call center can help you streamline communication with customers, saving your business time and bringing a host of benefits, like improving customer engagement and increasing sales. And you don’t need a large staff or budget to do it. Want to know where to start? The best solution for a small business is often a flexible call center platform. It’s just a matter of finding the right one that’ll meet your needs. This post will cover what to look for in a call center solution for small business. But first, is call center software right for your business? Does my small business need call center software? Let’s start by addressing why you need a call center. It boils down to creating a positive experience for the customer any time they connect with your business—whether it’s a customer service request, a simple question, or feedback. Giving customers a convenient way to reach you and resolving their issues quickly will help nurture your relationship and create a positive experience. And that’s just what you can accomplish with an inbound call center. Additionally, an outbound call center enables you to tap into new audiences and increase sales. Now, that all sounds good, but how can a small business make this happen with limited resources? That’s where cloud-based contact center services come in. Picture a traditional call center with dozens or hundreds of agents. You might think there’s no way your small business could afford this kind of setup, right? The good news is that you don’t have to because virtual call center software allows businesses of all sizes to build a call center with a modest investment and small staff. Additionally, the traditional call center has expanded into the contact center, encompassing every communication channel, including voice, chat, SMS, email, and more. This allows you to connect with customers on their preferred channels. With the right contact center solution, you can equip a small team with the necessary tools to start reaping the benefits of a call center without making large investments in infrastructure or staff. Then, as your needs evolve, you can scale your contact center accordingly. Now, let’s dive into how to choose between call center services for small businesses. Important call center features for small business As you look for a small business contact center solution, keep an eye out for these features to help you find the right fit. 1. Quick to deploy Setting up a traditional call center can take months of back-and-forth, contract negotiations, installation, and training. This process and timeline is probably not ideal for a business of any size. Contact center software gets rid of these barriers, allowing businesses to deploy a solution in a matter of days or even minutes. So look for a solution that’s quick to deploy with low code, allowing you to get up and running quickly. 2. Omnichannel capabilities While you may want to start with a true call center—focused on voice support only—you might need to expand to other channels eventually. That’s because most modern customers expect to communicate with businesses on their preferred platforms, such as live chat and messaging. Plus, adding channels like webchat can lighten the workload for your support teams, leveraging integrations and automation to solve straightforward queries quickly (more on this below). So look for a contact center solution with omnichannel capabilities, meaning it enables you to serve customers on any channel. And most importantly, ensure you can manage all these channels from a single platform—so your agents don’t waste time toggling between platforms. 3. IVR compatibility Efficiency is the name of the game for small businesses, and burdening your call center agents with basic questions and call routing can get in the way of that efficiency. To avoid this, look for a call center solution that allows you to quickly build an interactive voice response (IVR) system with menus that help the customer get automated answers to common questions, like business hours, or route themselves to the right agent. An IVR system can help you reduce call center costs, solve calls faster, and free up your agents’ time to handle more complex questions that require human assistance. 4. Intuitive UI Convenience isn't just for your customers—prioritizing ease of use for your agents will also set them up for success. So look for a contact center with an intuitive user interface (UI) that’s straightforward to learn and navigate. For example, make sure there’s a clear path for agents to pull up customer data and switch channels. This will get your agents up and running quickly and empower them to provide a positive customer experience. 5. Useful integrations Data silos can reduce the efficiency of your contact center and keep you from providing a personalized customer experience. That’s why you should look for a call center solution that seamlessly integrates with your existing software. For example, integrating your contact center with customer relationship management software, like Salesforce or Zendesk, equips your agents with the data they need to personalize every interaction. Additionally, integrating an AI solution like Google Cloud Contact Center AI can help you support human agents with virtual agents, recommended responses, and sentiment analysis. Other useful integrations to look for include workflow automation platforms, like ServiceNow, and messaging apps. Learn more about the most important contact center integrations. 6. Chatbot capabilities A chatbot can make your contact center more efficient by using AI to answer basic questions, giving your agents more time to focus on other tasks. This can save time and money, which is especially critical for a small business call center. Look for a contact center solution that supports chatbot integration on your website, allowing customers to contact you by pressing a button. Additionally, look for a solution that allows you to set up a seamless handoff from the chatbot to a live agent for complex issues. 7. Analytics tracking Tracking and analyzing call center performance is essential to provide excellent customer service. And if you run a small business, you don’t want to spend a lot of time pulling reports and creating dashboards. So look for a solution that allows call center supervisors to quickly generate reports and dashboards to track performance and gain insight into how to improve your call center. Most importantly, opt for a platform that allows users to do this without using code, enabling anyone in your business to learn to pull these insights. Gathering the right data will help you understand how you can improve the customer experience and ensure your call center provides return on investment for your business. 8. Platform scalability You might start your call center with a handful of agents and a few core channels, but if business begins to boom, you may have to expand sooner than expected. So pick a contact center solution that can grow with your business. The right platform will enable you to add new channels that integrate with your existing systems as your business needs evolve. Conversely, you’ll also want to look for a solution that scales down if you no longer need certain channels or the call volume fluctuates seasonally. Additionally, focus on a solution that allows you to make changes and iterate quickly without negotiating new contracts or waiting for new systems. Cloud-based solutions give you this flexibility to scale and expand your reach as your business grows. 9. Flexible pricing model Last but not least, consider your budget and the pricing model that will benefit your business. After all, when you get started with a contact center, you probably want to try it with a modest investment before you commit. So look for a solution that lets you start with a free trial or small investment, then increase your investment if you decide it’s the right fit for your business. Additionally, look for a solution with different pricing options, such as usage-based pricing and flat-rate pricing, to help you choose the one that makes the most sense for your business. Find the right contact center solution for small business Now that you have an idea of what to look for in a call center solution for small business, the next step is to find the right provider for your business that will offer the features you need at the right price. To simplify your search, we rounded up the top providers for 2023. At the top of the list, you’ll find Twilio Flex, a scalable contact center platform you can deploy in a matter of minutes to augment your existing systems. Flex is highly programmable, so you can customize it to fit your needs. Plus, it supports omnichannel communications, enabling you to add new channels as needed without replacing your current solutions. And with its intuitive UI and code-free analytics dashboards, your employees can get started in no time. Sound like the right fit? Try Flex with a free trial that includes 5,000 active user hours, then choose from per-hour or per-month pricing. Want to learn more first? Check out an interactive demo.

When scaling your WhatsApp use cases, you may run into challenges, such as maintaining compliance with opt-in requirements or encouraging more conversational messaging with your customers to drive engagement and new use cases around customer support or conversational commerce. In part one of this series on scaling with WhatsApp, we discussed how to manage sender quality and increase messaging capacity limits. In this post, we will discuss how to use WhatsApp templates and manage opt-ins, along with our best practices for driving conversational messaging use cases. Part 2: Managing Templates & Opt-Ins and Best Practices for Conversational Messaging Template Management Guidance around template requirements WhatsApp requires pre-approved message templates to send a message to a consumer outside of a 24-hour conversation window. However, if a user has messaged you within the last 24 hours, either in reply to an initial outbound message or by initiating the conversation, you can respond without a message template. You can submit message templates for approval in the Twilio Console. WhatsApp announced in August 2022 that templates will now be approved in minutes due to improved content detection, rather than needing to wait up to 24 hours for template approval. This will take effect in September 2022. Promotional templates are now allowed on the WhatsApp Business Platform, enabling you to grow your business with marketing and promotional notifications on WhatsApp. In addition to text-only templates, quick reply buttons and call to action buttons are available. Content API Twilio’s Content API, now in pilot, provides a unified template to send notifications across channels, including SMS and WhatsApp. This saves you time as you can create a message template once and send it as a notification on both WhatsApp and SMS. For WhatsApp messages that exceed the SMS character length or include unsupported features such as buttons, QR codes, and sending documents, the Content API lets you configure a simpler version of the message that will automatically be sent via SMS, avoiding errors and preserving your important content. In addition, the Content API supports a fuller set of rich WhatsApp messages, including lists, media templates, buttons with dynamic variables, and footers. Opt-In & Opt-Out Best Practices Guidance on WhatsApp opt-in requirements WhatsApp has clear requirements for obtaining a customer’s opt-in before messaging them. When receiving a customer’s opt-in, you must make it clear that consumers are opting in to receive your messages over WhatsApp specifically and use your business’s name. You can obtain opt-ins both on and off WhatsApp; for example, having a customer fill out a form to receive messages or clicking on a “Click to Message on WhatsApp” ad. Ensuring that customers understand what types of messages they are planning to receive is important to avoid them opting out. For example, if they opt-in thinking they will only be getting account updates and then start to receive marketing messages, it may lead to increased dissatisfaction, higher block rates, and lower sender quality, preventing your number from scaling. Messaging Services - Advanced Opt-Out Twilio Messaging Services offers Advanced Opt-Out, which allows you to customize keywords for opt-in and opt-out. By including the opt-out keywords in the text of the message, customers can easily opt out of messages they no longer want to receive. Using Advanced Opt-Out with WhatsApp helps maintain a sender’s number quality because it decreases the number of users who will block the sender, since they have a simple way of stopping the messages. Alternatively, with WhatsApp, you can offer opt-out through quick replies, allowing consumers to stop unwanted messages with just a tap. To do this, simply configure your quick reply button with your opt-out keyword. You can test these two different opt-out methods – Advanced Opt-Out and opt-out through quick replies – to see which works best for your business. Making the opt-out process simple for customers mitigates customer dissatisfaction and helps maintain your number’s sender quality. Conversational Messaging Best Practices Developing conversational use cases WhatsApp is well-suited for conversational messaging use cases because consumers are used to using it for back-and-forth communication with friends and family and because WhatsApp includes features such as quick replies that can help increase engagement. Conversational messaging use cases include customer care (such as pre-sales engagement or post-sales customer support), and conversational commerce. These types of conversational messaging use cases can help you increase conversions and revenue or improve the efficiency of your support operations. You can build out your conversational WhatsApp capabilities over time in order to scale your use cases and learn from each step: Enable consumers to respond to messages using buttons or quick replies. Using Twilio Studio, develop bot-like functionality to respond to customers based on keywords or in response to the buttons they select. Scale your conversational messaging capabilities by adding intelligence, such as an intelligent assistant, allowing consumers to converse in natural language. At each stage, you can also build in the capability to hand off the conversation to a live agent for more assistance. A WhatsApp conversation using Twilio Studio. WhatsApp is a useful tool for interacting with your customers, as it allows you to reach them where they already are and enable better engagement using WhatsApp’s rich messaging features. As you look to grow the volume of messages, these best practices and Twilio’s Messaging Services will help engage with your customers at scale and grow your business. With Twilio Studio and Flex, you can continue to build deep engagement with your customers and accelerate your growth with more conversational messaging use cases, including customer support and conversational commerce. Guide for Scaling your Messaging Strategy with the WhatsApp Business Platform Part 1: Sender Management & Capacity Limits Part 2: Managing Templates & Opt-Ins and Best Practices for Conversational Messaging

For global businesses, interacting with customers on WhatsApp can help grow their trust and engagement with your brand, especially in regions where WhatsApp is a replacement for or a preferred alternative to SMS. However, as you are looking to grow your WhatsApp implementation, you might start running into challenges or roadblocks that you need to overcome to send WhatsApp messages at scale. As your WhatsApp use cases become more complex, learning how to scale with the WhatsApp Business Platform is critical to ensure you can achieve your messaging goals and deliver a positive customer experience. Part 1: Sender Management & Capacity Limits Increased complexity can look like higher messaging volumes or more senders or recipients. Additionally, scale can mean expanding your WhatsApp use cases, from account updates or notifications to promotional messages, conversational use cases like customer support, or OTP with Twilio Verify WhatsApp. With Twilio’s Messaging Services, you can send WhatsApp messages at scale by distributing high message volumes across multiple WhatsApp numbers. Additionally, Twilio’s guidance and best practices can help you scale with WhatsApp without hitting roadblocks due to number quality issues. Sender Management Messaging Services Twilio Messaging Services allows businesses to create a sender pool with shared settings and features. WhatsApp numbers can be included in a sender pool along with other phone number types. Messaging Services enables customers to send messages at scale and also assists with sending messages across multiple countries. Messaging Services’ Advanced Opt-Out feature allows you to define a set of common opt-out keywords. Creating trust with senders Building trust with customers is critical to developing a strong relationship with them, and ensuring consumers trust the WhatsApp sender they are receiving messages from is a key step. For example, using local phone numbers helps build trust with recipients. A select number of global enterprises are designated as an official business account after an additional review by WhatsApp; these senders have a green checkmark next to their name in their profile and the header of the chat. Number quality & best practices for maintaining quality WhatsApp assigns each sender a quality rating based on how consumers have reacted to its messages. The sender quality is a factor in determining the capacity limit that WhatsApp puts in place for that sender. Though WhatsApp does not publish exactly how this rating is calculated, they do share that reactions like blocking a sender, or reporting a message as spam negatively impact a sender's quality rating and that the quality rating is weighted by recency. As a result, taking steps to mitigate the risk of recipients blocking or reporting your number is important to maintain high sender quality and, therefore, a higher messaging capacity. You can avoid consumers hitting “Block” or “Report” by only sending messages to consumers who have opted in and ensuring the messages consumers receive are relevant to them. In addition, it is recommended you provide consumers an easy way to reply to future messaging, so they don't need to block your sender. Using Twilio's Advanced Opt Out, you can include a note in the message, such as "Reply STOP to unsubscribe", in any language you choose. One way to check whether users feel your messaging is relevant to them is by making it easy for them to respond to you; for example, you can use quick reply buttons to allow them to respond with a tap. This not only helps increase your conversational traffic but also helps you understand whether consumers are engaged with your messaging. In August 2022, WhatsApp announced that message templates that users reported would no longer reduce the overall sender’s quality. Templates not meeting WhatsApp’s content requirements will be paused before being disabled. Capacity limits & best practices for increasing messaging limits WhatsApp implements a limit on the number of recipients you can start conversations with within a 24-hour period. There are 5 tiers of capacity limits; new numbers start at a limit of 250 unique users per 24 hours (tier 0) until the Meta Business Manager is verified. Tier 0 was introduced in early 2023. At tier 1, you can start conversations with 1,000 users per 24 hours, 10,000 users per 24 hours at tier 2, 100,000 at tier 3, and an unlimited number at tier 4. These messaging limits only apply to business-initiated conversations and do not apply to user-initiated conversations. For example, if a user sends you a message and you respond, that user does not count towards the limit. In order to move to a higher tier of capacity, you must ensure your number quality is not low, and your business needs to have been at your current messaging tier for at least 48 hours. Additionally, over a 7-day period, you must start conversations with half the number of customers as your current messaging limit. Previously, WhatsApp required businesses to start twice the number of conversations as their messaging limit, but they announced in August 2022 that this would be reduced. If these criteria are met, your messaging limits will be automatically increased; however, your limits can be decreased if your quality decreases because users are blocking or reporting messages. Because of these requirements, it will take a minimum of 7 days to move from tier 1 to tier 4; a typical timeframe is around 4-6 weeks. When working to move up tiers, consider some of the following best practices. First, make sure you understand your current tier and number quality before you start. You can get this information in the Twilio Console. Understanding your current number quality is important because if it’s low, you need to work on improving the quality before trying to move up tiers. You can also distribute the messages you need to send to hit the next tier over the course of the week, so you have consistency over time. And finally, think about your audience when you are working to move up tiers. As we know, having recipients report or block a number will decrease its quality, consider sending relevant, personalized messages to those who you have communicated with in the past to mitigate the risk of being blocked or reported. Managing WhatsApp sender quality is an important step in increasing capacity limits and scaling your WhatsApp use cases. In the second part of our guide to scaling with WhatsApp, learn about template management, opt-in requirements, and best practices for conversational messaging. Guide for Scaling your Messaging Strategy with the WhatsApp Business Platform Part 1: Sender Management & Capacity Limits Part 2: Managing Templates & Opt-Ins and Best Practices for Conversational Messaging