Customer expectations are rapidly on the rise, as basic satisfaction indicators like quality products and fair pricing are swamped by faster response times, personalized services, and the ability to reach brands across multiple digital channels. Businesses need to keep pace – or they risk losing out to competitors.
But many are falling short. In an Accenture survey of 25,000 global consumers, around two-thirds felt that companies are not responding fast enough to their changing needs. Building a solid customer service offering starts with finding out what these needs are – but how can this be accurately determined?
Data insights are the foundations of a stronger customer service strategy, but many businesses haven’t tapped into their potential. The fact is, customer interactions – whether via live chat or social media – hold a host of valuable information from preferences to satisfaction levels.
In an age where social media is a preferred contact method, call data is often an untapped resource. Using AI voice intelligence, these interactions can be analyzed to deliver a personalized service tailored to what the customer really wants.
Made-to-measure conversations 
Building an effective voice experience starts with choosing the right software. Today, there are a wide variety of options in the market to help you analyze interactions and make necessary adjustments.
Twilio’s communication tools help you turn unstructured voice calls into actionable data insights. Voice Intelligence can transcribe and analyze customer interactions at scale and identify key trends. Are your customers mentioning a competitor’s lower price? How do they want to be contacted? What are some common complaints, and what subjects do they want to hear more about?
Leveraging conversation data in this way not only helps agents solve queries faster, but that they can identify areas of improvement and maximize customer satisfaction. Whether that’s matching a lower rate elsewhere or following up on a specific product via email, it can deliver an entirely bespoke, data-driven experience.
Putting the customer in control 
It’s not just call centre agents and business owners who are equipped to find solutions to customer issues. Now, anyone can have full autonomy over their phone calls with the use of a modern interactive voice response, or IVR.
Advances in technology mean customers can accomplish entire tasks on their own. Natural language AI first analyzes a user’s sentiment and determines their objective. Bots then provide tailored automated responses to facilitate requests like booking flights, scheduling appointments, and making a purchase over the phone.
Today’s modern marketers are taking IVR a step further. Phone polls and surveys are a sure-fire way to unveil customer likes, interests, and demographics. Following a recent transaction or interaction with your customer service department, IVR can ask open-ended questions to collect real-time feedback to help your business adapt to your customer’s ever-changing needs.
Voice solutions to suit everyone 
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.

How voice can help you build an unforgettable customer experience

Many businesses pride themselves on their customer service. They answer queries promptly, resolve issues effectively, and are keen to continually improve their products following feedback. That said, just as many businesses are unaware of the importance of one key area of customer service: call data.
While most businesses understand the importance of customer interactions, call data is often an untapped resource. Sometimes, this is because decision-makers don’t know what to do with it. Other times, this is because they don’t realize how useful it can be. And often, businesses don’t have the tools to sift through the sheer volume of conversation data and identify meaningful insights.
Whatever the reason, customer service interactions are brimming with useful information. In fact, call data can shed light on everything from preferences to competition information and satisfaction levels.
What do customers want?
Call data can help you better understand customer needs. From smaller things like logging contact preferences to bigger things like gauging overall satisfaction levels, the right insights can really help.
How do your customers feel about certain products? Are there any frequently cited pain points? Are your customers happy to be called back, or would they prefer an email?
Leveraging conversation data can help you deliver a smoother, more satisfactory customer experience on the individual level. But it can also help you understand how customers feel about products or services, and make data-driven improvements in response.
That’s competitive talk
You might know a lot about your competitors – but you can bet your customers do too. In fact, your customers almost certainly mention them when calling your contact center – and it’s crucial to keep track of when they do.
After all, if a customer talks about another company’s lower price, more favorable delivery terms, or a stronger interest rate, you need to know. The reason? It can give you a better lay of the land, help you understand your own positioning within the market, and support with more informed decision-making.
It’s all about customization 
Customer expectations are always changing. For this reason, your customer conversation data software should come with the ability to set bespoke parameters.
This can take many shapes. A bank might highlight an interest rate objection from a customer, allowing them to identify alternative rates and win the opportunity. A retailer might hone in on the name of a competitor, allowing them to identify suitable alternatives or add-ons for cross-sell opportunities.
Whatever you do, you need to tailor your software to your needs. This way, you’ll get the most value out of the tools and uncover new opportunities that may otherwise be missed.
Good listening, good business
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.

Find your voice: why customer conversations are your best new data source

Customer expectations are constantly shifting, as global events, social changes and technological advancements influences their preferences. Businesses are under increasing pressure to satisfy their customers’ changing needs, knowing that they are happy to shop around if their expectations aren’t met.
It’s now crucial businesses understand the factors that influence their customers the most to build their trust and improve long-term loyalty. Today, more and more consumers want to contact brands on their preferred online platforms, from live chat and voice to email and social media. Exceptional customer service now means providing a true omnichannel digital experience.
While taken for granted in the modern age, integrating voice intelligence can be a business’ greatest asset, full of valuable data and insights that enable better customer service, relationships and retention.
Cut down response times
According to research by HubSpot, 82% of consumers expect responses within just ten minutes. A modern interactive voice response, or IVR, can automate self-service tasks using virtual agents, enabling customers to find answers – and fast.
Modern IVRs can do more than say “press one”. IVRs combined with text-to-speech (TTS) technology allow customers to make a purchase or schedule an appointment virtually over the phone. Today, outbound IVR systems can send bill notifications, reminders, and retail order updates – all without involving a live agent.
Leveraging IVR for simpler tasks can help reduce caller frustration, while simultaneously freeing live agents to handle specialized issues. This way, it becomes a powerful tool for customer engagement and satisfaction.
Website building platform, Wix, took customer experience into their own hands and built a Twilio-powered call centre to scale their phone support for their growing customer base. This allowed them to gather valuable data, including average wait times and call abandonment rates.
With this information, the team created a call scheduler which lets customers arrange their own calls and supports management to control the flow of support calls intelligently. Within months, Wix doubled their capacity for scheduled support calls without hiring new staff, reducing their call handle time by 30%.
Deliver personalized service
Voice intelligence can transcribe and analyze call recordings at scale to help inform future interactions and improve your end customer experience. From detecting key words and phrases to categorizing calls, it spots valuable trends that can help create a bespoke service.
Does your customer decline a follow up call? Do they object to an interest rate or mention a competitor? Have they asked to escalate a specific issue?
In this way, unstructured conversations are transformed into actionable data insights highlighting what customers really want – and what will keep them coming back.
Twilio’s flexible communications platform gave Marks & Spencer an agile solution to modernize their contact centre. The team designed a prototype to automate the company’s existing switchboard, using Twilio Programmable Voice and Twilio Speech Recognition APIS.
The new communication solution allows Marks & Spencer’s switchboard to convert customer speech into text in real time, determine customer intent and then route their one million inbound monthly telephone calls appropriately, at a 90% accuracy rate.
Employ seamless CX
Ultimately, it’s what every customer wants and what every business strives to deliver. When you embed voice intelligence directly into your applications, everyone benefits.
Now call centers can automatically route incoming enquiries to the correct representatives or build a call queuing system. Customers can also be greeted in their spoken language, whereas masked calling protects buyers’ and sellers’ personal phone numbers in a transaction.
Whatever the task, you need to tailor your software to your customer needs. This way, you can deliver a smoother experience that they’ll remember and return to.  
Cloud-based customer service platform Zendesk uses Twilio’s Advanced Voice features to make sure agents get the customer information they need immediately and programmatically. This includes call data insights, real-time dashboards, and IVR.
From historical call data appearing on screen, to “warm transfers” (which provide relevant information to the new agent so a caller doesn’t have to repeat themselves), these communication tools provide a better, more seamless experience for both customers and agents.
Boost loyalty, boost business 
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.

Love to talk: three ways voice can boost loyalty

Today’s consumers are quick to act when they find what they want. They are also quick to walk away when they don’t.
Consumers are pros at swiping through content and hyper aware of how brands engage with them. All it takes is one irrelevant ad or untimely message and—poof!—they’re gone. Generic communication doesn’t cut it anymore.
Here’s the main issue: According to Twilio’s 2023 State of Customer Engagement Report , 91% of brands report that they often or always personalize engagement with consumers, while only 56% of consumers agree.
Where’s the disconnect? Companies have been collecting data on their customers since the dawn of direct marketing. But in the digital era, gathering information is only the first step. Truly knowing your customer requires that all of your existing tools—including your CRM, marketing suite, and contact center—are capturing and integrating customer insights. That way, you can create an accurate picture of who they are and what they want.
That’s the power of CustomerAI from Twilio. It enables businesses to gain clear, trusted, and unprecedented understanding of every individual customer at scale—all in real time. Not just what they want, but how and why they engage, so that you can proactively deliver timely, tailored experiences they’ll love.
Navigating the deep end of customer data
Data without insight is useless. Insight without action is deadweight. Instead of flailing in an endless sea of data, companies can leverage CustomerAI to sail through customer journeys that deliver better experiences and ultimately convert.
With CustomerAI, companies can combine living customer data and real-time engagement insight with bleeding-edge intelligence. Together, they enable personalized experiences that allow marketers to grow customer trust, optimize every interaction, and drive meaningful business results.
Because personalization builds trust. 86% of consumers say that personalized experiences increase their loyalty to specific brands.
Unlocking the potential of every customer in real time doesn’t start with better campaigns, better agents, or better tools—it starts with better data. CustomerAI’s unique ability to combine structured data with valuable, unstructured context from conversations and interactions creates a deeper understanding that drives better customer engagement.
Creating a perfect circle of data and communications
Customer and engagement data together provides far better intelligence models and ROI than common customer data alone. In fact, 60% of brands say that investing in a digital customer engagement service like Twilio has improved their ability to meet changing customer needs—and 90% say it has increased revenue.
CustomerAI accelerates the flywheel that is created when data and communications come together. While tools like CRM provide the ability to track and store details about a customer relationship, they don’t provide the real-time context needed to truly understand customer intent.
Every interaction with a customer fuels a deeper, more intimate understanding of who they are and what they need. This flywheel generates better engagement, increases loyalty, and consistently delivers better business outcomes.
Generating efficient marketing with AI
CustomerAI works by combining the power of large language models (LLMs) with real-time customer and communications data to unlock the potential of every customer. It boosts operational efficiency and productivity by leveraging predictive and generative AI to help marketers quickly create content, campaigns, and customer journeys.
With CustomerAI, content creation becomes faster and easier. It can autonomously generate text, images, and even videos based on predefined guidelines and data inputs. Marketing and creative teams can stop spending hours on laborious tasks and focus instead on more strategic and creative endeavors.
CustomerAI can also swiftly develop personalized and highly targeted campaigns that drive higher engagement and conversion rates.
It streamlines customer journeys that lead to greater customer satisfaction and loyalty by:

Automating decision-making processes
Analyzing customer interactions and preferences in real time
Providing seamless and highly personalized experiences

Ensuring consumer data privacy and transparency
98% of consumers want brands to do more to guarantee the privacy of their data, as well as be more transparent about how their data is used. But how can consumers trust companies with AI capabilities?
Twilio’s approach to CustomerAI supports the compliant and responsible use of customer data. The company has adopted a set of CustomerAI trust principles that guide its use of AI capabilities. They are:
Transparency
Being completely clear about AI usage and giving customers the ability to control their data.
Responsibility
Selecting responsible AI vendors and helping customers use AI in a way that respects privacy, keeps data secure, and minimizes the risk of bias or other harms.
Accountability
Monitoring the functioning of AI to address harms and fitness for purpose in partnership with AI vendors and customers.
Unlocking the full potential of your customers
By helping companies understand customers on a profound level, CustomerAI deepens customer interactions and helps foster genuine relationships. Ultimately, this approach is good for business, good for marketers, and good for customers.
Learn more about CustomerAI
Check our demo below and find out how CustomerAI from Twilio can help you maximize customer engagement, loyalty, and revenue.

CustomerAI: Treat every customer like the only one

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.

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