Twilio is a cloud communication platform that enables you to engage with your customers however you’d like. Check out this post to learn more about what it is and how it can benefit your business!
Communicating with customers has evolved over the last 20 years mainly due to the evolution of technology. Put simply, what worked then, doesn’t work now.
Depending on the type of business you are involved in, you might notify customers of order status, provide support via phone call or email, or confirm a reservation over a text message. These are just a few examples of how businesses like yours communicate and support their customers.
Today’s consumers expect prompt and helpful support and frequent communication from your website, app, social media, or email.
But is it essential to communicate with your customers every day and everywhere? And when do you know it’s too much? The key is to connect with your audience in the communication channels that they use daily; otherwise, you are just wasting your time and money.
How should you manage this with the myriad of available communication channels and customer expectations for information and support? This is where a solution like Twilio comes in!
Reaching customers across all of these channels securely worldwide is one thing, but it can be extremely overwhelming when multiple carriers, networking gear, and foreign regulations are factored in.
This article will explain what Twilio does and give you an idea if you should consider using this tool.
Twilio is a cloud communication platform used for customer engagement.
The company was co-founded by software developer turned CEO, Jeff Lawson, in 2008. Lawson established Twilio with his team to provide developers with the tools they needed to build scalable and customised communication experiences for businesses. His expertise and track record in maximally utilising the capabilities of developers to create software innovation is remarkable. It has been well-documented in the Wall Street Journal bestseller, “Ask Your Developer.”
Twilio is popular amongst countless software developers and over 190,000 businesses, enabling approximately 932 billion digital interactions annually. While primarily suited to extensive scale customer interactions, the platform is still a viable option for companies wanting to reach fewer audiences.
The point is that Twilio will make it work for you whether you are sending 100 SMS or emails or a billion of them!
Twilio’s platform is purely API driven — but what does that essentially mean? API stands for application programming interface, an essential building block that facilitates communication between software applications. In a more technical sense, they enable “integrations” between application programs so that they can both run seamlessly together, giving the user a single platform with functionalities of both applications.
An example of this would be an eCommerce application supported by third party freight software. They work together because of an integration built through an API to provide users with a holistic online shopping experience.
So through Twilio’s communication APIs, all it takes to send a text, make a call, or start a chat on your app or website is a few lines of code. Yes, it is that simple! Yet, you’ll still need assistance from a knowledgeable programmer who knows what they are doing.
Twilio’s APIs are a programmable set of connection blocks that allow developers to build customised customer communication experiences. The Twilio Customer Engagement Platform, which is Twilio’s developer platform for communications, can be used to create almost any digital communication experience. This is where the customisable aspect of the platform comes into play.
Think of it this way — as a business, you may want to communicate with your prospects via emails, phone calls, SMS, voice chat, you name it; Twilio probably has a solution.
Next, let’s talk about the different products that Twilio offers. They have various products and services at their disposal, from their cloud contact centre, Twilio Flex, and UI based email marketing tools to their popular channel APIs used for communication with customers on their preferred channels.
With all of the different products that Twilio provides, it can be a great communication asset to build reliability and global reach to deliver excellent customer service and foster engagement and loyalty in your customers. They have APIs for almost all major communication channels, and you’ll find a few of their APIs that work best with your ideal buyers.
We’ll go over some of these products in greater detail in the next section.
Twilio’s customer engagement platform is unlike any other. They provide catered solutions to different industries and the three phases of the customer lifecycle — marketing, sales, and service.
They have solutions to take your digital customer interactions to the next level, such as:
Twilio Flex is perhaps the most popular solution provided by Twilio. It is the leading cloud contact centre platform that can be used to create an omnichannel contact centre to serve customers. The platform supports email, SMS, WhatsApp, WebChat, Messenger and more — and it provides a single UI to manage tasks across multiple channels. You can create engagement and communication workflows catered to your business and also integrate the platform with your CRM to get relevant customer information from a single source.
Twilio Frontline is a programmable and ready-to-use customer relationship application designed for your sales team. Frontline comes with customisable workflows that can be integrated with your CRM to empower your sales team with a single application to build customer relationships and guide customers through the purchase funnel.
Twilio also provides an email marketing tool called Marketing Campaigns, which is excellent for quickly sending high-quality, engaging emails to large audience segments. Businesses commonly use this tool to send emails for newsletters, company announcements, privacy updates, rewards programs, onboarding, and more.
Next, we’ll discuss some communication channel APIs that make Twilio amazing for reaching customers across multiple platforms.
Twilio’s programmable messaging API has everything you’ll ever need to send and receive messages at scale globally on SMS, MMS and WhatsApp.
With Twilio’s programmable voice API, you’ll be able to create a scalable voice experience with your customers around the world. You’ll get additional benefits and features such as Alerts & Notifications, Call Tracking, Embedded Calling, Global Conferencing, Masked Calling, and Interactive Voice Response (IVR).
Using the programmable video API, you can add video chat functionality to your web, iOS, and Android applications. Twilio Video will provide you with APIs and guiding tools to create real-time customised video communication experiences for your customers.
As discussed earlier, APIs are the heart and soul of Twilio. But what is it precisely that Twilio is doing for you? In many ways, it bridges the gap between web applications and a communication channel.
Let’s put this into perspective with an example.
Unlike the internet, the telephone world is far more complex. It requires multiple protocols to manage session initiation, real-time communication, and device connectivity over other things. It’s no easy feat to build a custom communication functionality, such as a company-wide phone infrastructure, as an example.
The solution was provided by Twilio, which saw an evident lack of connection between the internet and the telephone network and aimed to fill the gap between the two networks. Essentially, through Twilio, your web application can integrate seamlessly with complex carrier networks, and as a result, you can make phone calls with customers globally in a matter of seconds.
Being an utterly API-driven platform, Twilio provides high-quality documentation that will guide your developers through the process. The documentation contains in-depth instructions and guides with complete sample applications.
They provide you with a detailed list of starting languages and learning resources to get you started. For example, if you want to use the SMS API, you’ve got code examples for Node.js, C#, Ruby, PHP, Python, Java, etc.
Twilio understands that global cross-communication is not a one-size-fits-all solution, so they provide customisation options through programmable APIs. Businesses like yours can build digital experiences relevant to their specific business logic.
Specificity is critical, and through Twilio, you can build customer interaction experiences that suit your brand’s intent, size and customer engagement culture.
Essentially, all it comes down to is that if you are trying to communicate digitally with your customers at scale, then Twilio is a solution provider that you must take a look at. Their variety of different channel APIs just cannot be ignored.
But the benefits of using Twilio don’t stop there, and we’ve compiled a list of some other advantages of using Twilio as a cloud communication platform below:
Perhaps, one of their most significant selling points, you don’t have to commit to an expensive subscription to use the platform. Because of their usage-based pricing policy, you will pay for the extent of what you use the platform for. We’ll go over pricing in further detail later in this article.
While it’s not drag-and-drop, it could be more technical and complicated to implement. The Twilio APIs are powerful yet simple to use, and detailed documentation and tutorials will seamlessly guide your developers through the implementation process.
Want to reach your customers around the world on multiple channels? Well, that’s precisely what Twilio will help you with. The platform comes pre-integrated with popular communication channels like Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, Email, Voice, and SMS so that you can reach your customers where they prefer.
By integrating your CRM with Twilio, you’ll gain unique insights into your customers’ preferences and behaviour, helping you better understand the buyer’s overall journey.
You can even track calls and attribute sources to measure marketing ROI and effectiveness and make informed decisions moving forward.
Whether you are a multinational enterprise or a small to midsize business, Twilio’s communication tools are scalable to suit your specific needs for all things customer interaction.
If you want to send bulk messages to your customers or even your employees or like to notify a select customer about their shipping status, Twilio will make that happen.
Twilio prides itself on its personalised customer service. They have guaranteed responsiveness based on the inquiry’s priority level. They have a dedicated technical account manager who knows your setup and business and wastes no time helping you resolve any issues.
Furthermore, they have 24/7 live chat support and different tier-based support packages that you can purchase based on your budget.
This is a big one; Twilio’s Super Network solidifies the carrier communication network leading to better connectivity and unrivalled scale for communication. Instead of building a network of carriers yourself, the Twilio software will help you use a global ecosystem of carriers in a few clicks.
In addition, they use proactive routing measures to detect potential outages with carriers to establish a reliable and high-quality connection.
Now that you know Twilio’s benefits, it is also essential to note its shortcomings.
While Twilio’s programmable APIs are robust and relatively easy to use, you’ll still need a developer to set everything up. This means that you’ll have to invest additional costs to work with developers if you don’t already have access to such resources.
Finally, based on observations of customer reviews on TrustRadius, most existing and past users of Twilio feel that the software could improve on the following:
Let’s take a few real-life use case scenarios of Twilio to understand better how the platform helps businesses achieve customer engagement excellence.
We’ll start with Lyft, a transport service provider akin to Uber. Lyft uses Twilio Flex, Twilio’s customisable cloud call centre solution, to deliver exceptional driver and rider experiences.
In the past, Lyft was having issues with their contact centre, where they had to look up an average of 11 data fields for each contact, and each required at least three clicks to access across multiple channels.
By using Twilio Flex, they could use a single-source-of-truth to bring all of that data and use it as they saw fit, thereby reducing the constant cross-platform switching that was producing too much unnecessary work harming the customer relationships.
Another interesting case study comes in Airbnb, which used Twilio during its early days to streamline administrative processes. When the business was scaling and going through those “rapid-growth issues,” it encountered a significant problem with follow-up calls.
Back then, when a user submitted a booking request on the Airbnb website, the host would receive an email, but when hosts took too long to respond, Airbnb reps would telephone the host, reminding them that a user was waiting to hear back.
What was the solution? Twilio solved this problem by introducing a feature where hosts could accept requests via SMS if they hadn’t accepted the initial emailed booking request. This improved the percentage of booking success while reducing hours of manual calling.
Twilio was recently also used in one of our own projects. Here’s what Rojan Shrestha, our superstar Development Project Manager, had to say about using Twilio:
“We used Twilio in one of our recent custom-software development projects. Twilio’s Verify API was used to send OTP (one-time-password) codes via SMS to users who had enabled multi-factor authentication in their accounts. Our development team found the system to be user friendly, and the API and associated documentation were up to date and very easy to implement.”
One of the best things about Twilio is its flexible “pay as you go” pricing model so that you won’t get locked into big contracts or monthly subscription fees.
They also offer volume and committed usage discounts as additional pricing incentives. If you would like to know more, head over to Twilio’s pricing page for detailed information on the cost associated with the different API solutions.
If your business needs to communicate regularly with customers across multiple platforms on a global scale, Twilio should be a no-brainer. Furthermore, if you already have developers and technical expertise in your company, they can help you set up and implement the platform in no time.
On the other hand, Twilio can be an expensive investment for small to medium enterprises, not just price-wise but also considering time and effort. It would mean shifting your entire consumer communication process, which may be unnecessary if there isn’t a need to do so already.
Ultimately, if you would like to learn more about Twilio and other tools, feel free to reach out to us, and our expert team members will be more than happy to answer your questions.
Are you looking for a trusted partner that can help you scale by utilising strategy, data, commerce and technology to create world-leading customer experiences for your brand and streamline your sales, marketing, service and operations processes?
Creating genuinely exceptional customer experiences across different mediums can be challenging and daunting for any business, so we are here to help you.
