Recovery and emerging trends
As organizations begin to think about the recovery phase from the COVID era, businesses that were digitally enabled and able to innovate fared better. Companies that were previously resistant to change were suddenly faced with the choice to accelerate digital innovation or risk their survival.
At Twilio’s annual conference Signal 2020, Jeff Lawson, founder and CEO, discussed major trends that helped businesses thrive during what he termed as the “Great Digital Acceleration of 2020”. One Twilio customer noted changes in their reliance on digital channels from 30% before COVID to 100% during the height of the pandemic.
The Great Digital Acceleration of 2020
A major component of this digital acceleration involves modernizing your contact center. Fueled by the urgency to keep employees safe and providing customer service in face of increasing needs, the contact center needed to quickly adapt from an on-premise operation to a cloud-based solution. At a glance, modernizing the contact center requires a two-fold approach:
- Improve customer service, predicting your customer needs, and meeting your customers using channels they frequent most i.e. SMS, Email, Video, WhatsApp, etc.
- Empower your employees to provide quality customer service in an increasingly agile and remote facing industry. To that extent, it means providing your employees the right tools to increase efficiency and removing mundane tasks.
The Modern Contact Center for Enterprise Organizations
A proven framework for your omnichannel customer communication solution is the combination of ServiceNow and Twilio Flex. ServiceNow is a cloud-based workflow automation tool while Twilio Flex is a highly customizable, cloud-based contact center solution with omnichannel support. Perficient’s Twilio Flex ServiceNow integration automates tasks while providing a seamless customer service experience for both the caller and the agent.
As an omnichannel solution, Twilio Flex allows companies to integrate channels beyond voice and SMS, including video, email, Facebook Messenger, LINE, and WebChat. The flexibility of Twilio Flex is then made accessible through an iframe integrated into ServiceNow’s latest NOW platform.
Available as a bundled application for download, Perficient’s solution is built to enhance the Agent Workspace UI, which was first introduced in ServiceNow’s New York Instance. The solution passes customer information between Flex and ServiceNow, immediately providing the agent the relevant context behind a customer’s call and increasing efficiency. The agent is alerted by way of a screen-pop event displaying the customer’s information as well as the associated ticket.
Voice Call in Twilio Flex Iframe. Screen pops in ServiceNow displaying incoming caller details and context.
Multichannel capacity allows agents to handle multiple customers. Example: Incoming SMS customer inquiry during an ongoing voice call with another customer.
Flex allows the agent to handle multiple tasks including the customer calling-in while simultaneously addressing concerns via incoming SMS or through other channels. Further implementation empowers customers to self-serve and resolve common support issues such as incident status checks. A call or text for an incident status check is resolved by querying the caller’s details and incident status from within ServiceNow and passing this information to Flex for the caller to confirm. Similarly, the customer is also able to submit new tickets of concern simply by calling or texting in, where Flex captures the appropriate input and sends to ServiceNow for creation and assignment of the ticket; all without having to speak with an agent.
Finally, a click-to-call implementation allows your agents to quickly navigate to the appropriate customer profile and click to place an outbound call. The call event triggers an interaction screen pop associated with the customer’s profile. This helps to maintain a log of interactions with customers while providing your agents with a logging tool to update existing incidents or create new ones.
Click-to-call option on customer profile page.
Outgoing call to customer placed using Click-to-Call option.
Get More Out of Flex
In addition to the solutions discussed above, Twilio Flex provides an opportunity for more creativity in its integration with CRMs like ServiceNow. While the integration above is in relation to the Agent Workspace UI, Twilio Flex is highly customizable to be able to provide similar functionalities in the Classic Platform UI of ServiceNow. With continued innovation in Twilio Flex space, your organization can create customized IVRs leveraging Twilio’s partner AI-solutions and other Twilio services to create unique customer experiences.
Watch a quick demo below to see our solution for Twilio Flex integration in ServiceNow in action!
