Customer Service reps are often the first line of contact for retail customers seeking assistance. Providing your teams with efficient and user-friendly ways to interact with those in need of support is expensive. Off-the-shelf solutions often provide unwanted functionality and are cost-prohibitive. On the other hand, building custom solutions takes too long and is extremely costly. This is where Perficient can help.

Optimize and Accelerate Your Twilio Flex Retail Capabilities

Our Twilio Flex Retail Starter Pack provides the out-of-the-box functionality your customer service team needs to do their job without all the things they don’t need. Communicating with your customers in a way that makes sense to them will create a positive customer experience that keeps them coming back. This Starter Pack is designed to reduce cost and bridge the build-versus-buy gap. It uses multiple channels and features integrations with major shipping organizations, creating ease in the customer experience.

Once the Starter Pack has been implemented and configured, your Twilio Flex implementation will have several added channels, integrations, and features, including:

Channels

• Email Routing with SendGrid
• SMS
• Twitter
• Video
• Voice
• Web Chat

Integrations

• Co-browsing with Glance
• Shipment Tracking with FedEx, UPS, and USPS

Features

• Callbacks and Voicemail
• Canned Responses
• Emoji Picker
• Reason/Disposition Codes
• Web Chat Nudge Behavior

How Long Do Twilio Flex Retail Implementations Normally Take?

Basic implementations take two weeks, with customized implementations available that vary in length depending on the scope of customizations and integrations required. This Starter Pack lays the foundation for future feature implementations, optimizing your contact center on Twilio Flex.

Why Perficient?

We are a Twilio Gold Partner with a team of certified Twilio Flex engineers and more than 20 years of experience delivering unparalleled customer engagement and contact center experience solutions. For more information on our Twilio Flex practice and capabilities, visit us here!

Building a programmable contact center solution with Twilio Flex provides significant enhancements to the end consumer experience with limitless platform flexibility aimed to influence the desired outcome. With complete control of the customer journey and agent experience, you can connect with customers the way you want and do so across numerous communications channels such as WhatsApp, Messenger, chat, SMS, email, video, or voice. Powered by industry-leading APIs, Twilio’s extensibility accelerates customer service and boosts productivity in this ever-changing world of modern customer service. This results in a powerful outcome that differs dramatically from the out-of-the-box experience inclusions that encompass a CCaaS platform. 

Making the move to a Twilio solution will no doubt hold a rewarding outcome. However, successful execution and ongoing production obstacles may be encountered that can act as a blocker for your organization to overcome. Whether you are exploring Twilio for the first time, actively working on the implementation of a Twilio solution, or have already migrated your production contact center to Twilio Flex, Perficient can help ensure your ongoing journey stays on pace resulting in continued sustainability and success.  

Solution Assessment 

It is not uncommon for customers to stumble when trying to take ownership of a self-build or sustain a self-management model. Many of our customer engagements begin in this fashion when we start our journey with an audit and health check of the current Flex implementation. Our initial assessment typically encompasses some of the below activities: 

• Review of existing WorkFlow and StudioFlow configurations and efficiencies  
• Investigation of common triggered Twilio Debugger events 

• Review of current TaskRouter API rate frequencies and limits 
• Evaluation of existing logging and identify areas for additional logging  
• Evaluation of existing Plugins 
• Evaluation of existing integrations  
• Custom code inspection 

• Review of current deployment process 
• Review of account scalability capacity and future growth capabilities 
• Review of any existing self-service (if applicable) and/or identify areas for self-service  
• Identification of areas to update and/or modernize  

Through our impartial evaluation, we gain a thorough understanding of the current state of your Twilio instance as well as any supporting services and cloud infrastructure making up the full solution. This empowers us to share meaningful areas of risk, identify inefficiencies, and highlight areas for improvement and optimizations.  

What’s Next? 

Pending the results of our findings and the stage of your Twilio build journey, the next steps can include many possibilities such as: 

• The customer continues down the self-ownership path, taking the findings of our initial assessment and independently actions accordingly 
• Joint ownership is shared between Perficient and the customer to tackle backlog items  

• Perficient is engaged to own all remaining aspects of the build or optimization process 
• Perficient is engaged through a Managed Services Offering for ongoing production support, continued monitoring of health and efficiencies, and implementation of optimizations 

If you’re interested in learning more about our Twilio capabilities, require our expertise to assess the heath of your Twilio solution, or can benefit from a Twilio Gold status partner to turn to 24×7 for ongoing production challenges, we can help.  

Perficient takes pride in our personal approach to the customer journey where we regularly help enterprise clients transform, modernize, and manage their contact center experience with Twilio Flex. 

For more information on how Perficient can help you get the most out of Twilio, please contact us here 

Customers want to interact with a website that adapts to their needs, and as a result, the key segments of the modern customer digital experience are personalization and convenience. Customers not only expect the ability to make purchases or leave comments, but they also expect those interactions to be saved for the purpose of updated account preferences and future recommendations.

These same expectations are changing the world of customer service and contact center experience. To keep up with rising challenges, contact centers need to provide a personalized experience to their customers and this is where Segment comes in. It provides a unified customer profile that can be used to create a consistent and customized customer experience across multiple platforms.

Our team has been working to create a Segment / Twilio Flex integration that an agent can use to assist a customer, especially while they navigate through a connected website. Segment uses powerful tools to process customer data that Twilio Flex then channels through a customizable user-friendly interface. This integration paves the way for a more efficient contact center and its use cases include:

• Enabling agents to view the customer journey to quickly solve issues with a customer’s most recent order
• Allowing agents to change a customer’s preferred method of communication for marketing campaigns
• Adding and removing customers from marketing campaigns
• The automatic detection of customers across all contact channels, especially SMS and Voice
• Items left in a cart triggering an SMS message for a customer to which the customer can respond to receive help from an agent.

Creating a Source

There are a plethora of different kinds of sources that can funnel data into Segment. One of the most basic is the JavaScript source, which is simply any JavaScript-based application that sends data to the Analytics API. We utilized a retail-style website as our source and there we created a few hard-coded example users.

When a customer is selected an identify call is made. This call tells Segment that the customer has signed in and identifies the user as a unique profile. A unique customer identifier is included in the call and is used consistently throughout the website to identify the customer.

There are also several track calls made to the Analytics API. These correspond with key events such as adding an item to the cart or making a purchase. Whenever a customer performs one of these actions, a track call is sent. In addition to notifying Segment of the action itself, the track calls also provide any relevant information about the action, such as the name and the price of an item added to the cart.

Handling the data in Segment

The lovely thing about Segment is that it does all the heavy lifting. Once it receives the information, it automates all sorts of related tasks and data analytics. The info from the identify and track calls Segment received is gathered and sent to the Segment Personas platform to be refined. The Personas platform consists of the following tools – Profiles, Audiences, and Journeys.

The users and all their relevant data reside within the Profiles tool. Traits provided in identity calls, like name, email, and preferred contact method, show up here as Custom Traits. Custom Traits appear alongside values called Computed Traits, such as last purchase date and lifetime spend, which are calculated based on events or other traits.

Groups of users from the Profiles tool can be defined and calculated based on events and traits using the Audiences tool. These groups or “audiences” are analyzed based on common traits and behavioral patterns and they can also be imported into the Journeys tool where they can be singled out for channels like SMS and email campaigns.

Integrating Segment into a Twilio Flex Plugin

The key to putting all this data to work is in Twilio Flex. By integrating Segment into a Twilio Flex plugin, agents are not only given access to relevant customer information but also given the ability to edit customer info as needed.

It’s possible to query Segment for an individual customer profile through the Profile API and information such as user traits, events, external IDs, and more can be requested. In our plugin, we utilized the call and SMS external identifiers we defined to retrieve customer data depending on what channel the customer used to contact the contact center.

If a customer profile is found within Segment, their information is displayed in the CRM panel. If that is not the case, a form to add the customer’s information is displayed instead. Once this form is submitted, an identify call is sent to the Analytics API where Segment adds a new user to the list of profiles. Editing a customer’s contact info can be achieved with the same method, the primary difference being that when Segment receives the identify call it does not create a new profile. It updates the existing one with the new information instead.

Using a drop-down menu below the customer’s profile, the agent can add or remove the customer from any of the campaigns managed in Segment. This is done through a track call to the Analytics API that represents an Enroll or Unenroll action.  Campaigns provide a consistent point of contact with customers, and they can include anything from coupon email lists and SMS marketing campaigns to newsletters. Not only does this allow agents to efficiently enroll customers in relevant campaigns based on their profile, but it also gives customers more control over their privacy by making it easier to opt out of unwanted campaigns.

In the CRM panel, we can also find the entire customer journey that shows all the track events recorded for that user, capped at any specified number. For example, we capped our instance at 20 track events. By looking at these events, an agent can see what the customer is doing on the website and can better assist them.

Takeaway

In our project, we have only just scratched the surface of how Segment integrations can be used to enhance not only the Twilio Flex experience but also customer data management. With the versatility of Twilio Flex contact centers and the powerful customer data management of Segment, the possibilities are endless. We plan to continue delving into this topic and I encourage others to explore what this software power couple can do for them as well.

Why Perficient?

We are a Twilio Gold Partner with a team of certified Twilio Flex engineers and more than 20 years of experience delivering unparalleled customer engagement and contact center experience solutions. For more information on our Twilio Flex practice and capabilities visit us on our Twilio partner page!

There are many reasons you might want to play a sound in the Flex UI (User Interface). For example:

• Ringing to indicate an incoming call task and alert the agent
• Sound notifications for new chat messages to alert an agent who may be handling multiple chats simultaneously
• Sound to indicate that participants have joined or left a conference

To implement sounds in some of these scenarios, a few workarounds are required in Flex. The Incoming call/SMS/chat ringer plugin for Twilio Flex helps contact center administrators set up an audio alert for the incoming Call, SMS, and Chat tasks to the agents. As of the writing of this blog, however, Flex does not natively support audio alert (ringer alert) for incoming tasks. (To track the addition of the browser ringer as a feature, visit the Flex Release Notes page.)

Twilio does provide the code example below for a browser to automatically ring when a Flex call comes in on their website. However, there is a problem with this code: it was designed to respond only to voice calls, not to other channels.

Copyright, Perficient 2022

There are two issues in the example code:

1. The browser is notified when both an inbound call and an outbound call occur. Outbound calls should not ring the browser.
2. There is no ringing for other channels such as SMS and Chat.

To fix this, we can automate the browser to ring for voice calls, SMS, and chat messages and fix the ringing on outbound calls by adding the inbound direction attribute to the example code.

The new improved code looks like this:

Copyright, Perficient 2022

The alerts are divided into 2 categories:

• Repeatable media (alertSound.loop = true) are played in a loop, like a phone ringing that goes on and on. The only way to stop repeatable media is to manually call the stop method.
• Non-repeatable media (smsSound.loop = false) are played once, like a beep or bleep. Non-repeatable media automatically stop after being played once.

In this code, the repeated audio file (ringing.mp3, in this example) plays until the worker in Flex accepts the voice task. If an SMS/Chat task is received, this code will play a one-time audio file (smsAlert.mp3, in this example).

To make this code work, you will need to do the following:

• Update the ringing.mp3 and smsAlert.mp3 audio file URL in lines 1 and 2, and
• Add your code to the init() function of your plugin.

For help adding this code to your hosted Flex instance, please see Creating Plugins for Twilio Flex.

Note: The audio file must be accessible by Twilio’s proxy servers. Local files on your desktop are inaccessible via these methods, but your audio file may be uploaded to Twilio Assets for use here.

If you are interested in Twilio Flex and need some guidance on maximizing your contact center’s efficiency, we can help.

Why Perficient?

We are a Twilio Gold Partner with a team of certified Twilio Flex engineers and more than 20 years of experience delivering unparalleled customer engagement and contact center experience solutions. For more information on our Twilio Flex practice and capabilities visit us on our Twilio partner page!

Establishing and executing your customer-first promise can have an extreme impact on the customer experience, retail brand loyalty, and repeat business. However, to remain competitive you must continuously improve productivity, efficiency, and customer satisfaction to achieve long-term goals.

Enabling your teams with easy and efficient ways to interact with customers can be expensive. Off-the-shelf solutions often provide unwanted functionality or are cost prohibitive while building a custom solutions takes too long and is extremely costly.

Twilio Flex’s agile approach to contact center solutions offers your retail agents the channels, integration capabilities, and features that are needed to equip them for success. To help you get started, Perficient has released a Twilio Flex Retail Starter Pack.

Deliver Your Customer-First Promise with The Twilio Flex Retail Starter Pack

Our Twilio Flex Retail Starter Pack provides only the functionality your teams need to do their job, right of the the box. It also integrates seamlessly with SendGrid for email routing, and Glance for co-browsing and video capabilities.

Once the retail Starter Pack is implemented and configured, you can take advantage of serval added channels, integrations, and features including:

Channels

• Email routing with SendGrid
• Web chat
• Voice
• Video (chat to video escalations)
• Twitter (direct messages and mentions)
• SMS (inbound and outbound)

Integrations

• Shipment tracking (UPS, FedEx, USPS)
• Co-browsing with Glance

Features

• Callbacks
• Voicemail
• Reason/disposition codes
• Web chat nudge behavior
• Canned responses
• Emoji picker

How Long do Implementations Normally Take?

implementation time varies in duration from two weeks to several months, depending on the required scope of customizations and integrations. The starter pack also lays the foundation for the future updates.

Why Perficient?

We are a Twilio Gold Partner with a team of certified Twilio Flex engineers and more than 20 years of experience delivering unparalleled customer engagement and contact center experience solutions. For more information on our Twilio Flex practice and capabilities visit us on our Twilio partner page!

Building software tools for contact centers that make complex tasks look effortless is an important focus within Perficient’s Customer Product Development BU. For example, we help agents and customers who speak different languages communicate easily via text. Some companies have customers around the world who speak a wide range of languages while their agents only speak English.

One client asked us to help English-speaking agents chat online in other languages by translating their messages before they reach customers, and in turn translating customers’ messages into English. Let’s look at the steps that go into fulfilling this type of request.

Amazon Translate and Other AWS Services

Our first step is building an API powered by AWS Translate and other Amazon services.

This takes three parameters:

• a block of text,
• the language the text is written in, and
• the language we’re translating it into.

We can write the block of code below in a Lambda function to send our parameters to Amazon Translate and return a translated message.

We grab our input from the queryStringParameters object. The language parameters take the form of AWS language codes. We create an endpoint with API Gateway and test our API in the browser. To translate “hello” to Spanish, we plug it into our “text” parameter, and we plug the language codes “en” and “es” into our “from” and “to” parameters:

“hola”

Twilio Flex WebChat

Now that we have our translator, we can call it from our front end. Customers direct message agents from the client’s website using Twilio Flex WebChat. From their Flex environment, agents can receive phone calls, SMS texts, and webchat messages. Here we are only concerned with webchat.

We write a plugin to translate the agent’s messages before sending them. We also need to translate the customer’s messages into English before they reach the agent, so we will need to edit the codebase of our client’s page separately. Though we need the customer and agent to see two different versions of the same message, Flex WebChat leverages web sockets so that the body of the message is the same for both parties.

In phase one, we replace each message with a version that contains both the translated and the original text. Here is a code example for the Flex agent side:

Our url is the endpoint we created with API Gateway. We call it with “en” (English) as the “from” parameter and the customer’s language code—derived from the task attributes—as the “to” parameter. Notice the “notYetTranslated” Boolean switch initiated to “true.”  We switch it to false after we translate our message. Note: Without this switch, we would create an infinite loop. The event would keep  cancelling itself, and the message would never be sent.

When we translate the customer’s messages to English, it looks almost exactly like the agent-side code above. The only difference is  our “to” parameter is “en” and our “from” parameter is the customer’s language code, instead of vice versa. We do this because we are translating to English, instead of from English.

Replacing the Message Body

After we’ve written our translateMessage function and added it to the SendMessage listener in both the Flex plugin and our client’s Flex WebChat page, our messages will be translated in both directions. But we’re not finished. The messages will reach both the agent and customer in a non-user-friendly format: the translated message followed by the “TRANSLATEDFROM” parser, followed by the original message:

To show each party the message in their language and only their language, we parse the message bodies at the UI level. Like our event listener in the last step, this is something we will do twice: once in our Flex plugin for our agent’s screen and once on our client’s webpage for our customer’s screen. This time, the code can be identical in both environments.

The “remove” command erases the body of each message. We add our own custom component to our message bubbles to replace the messages we’ve erased. It’s a simple React component. Custom components in Flex inherit their parent component’s properties, so our message is preserved in ReplaceMessageBody with its TRANSLATEDFROM parser in place. We can split the string into an array at the parser and only show the user the version of the message they can understand.

This is the render statement for ReplaceMessageBody. In our Flex plugin, the Boolean value isFromMe will be true for all messages sent by the agent. If the message was sent by the agent, we display the second (untranslated) item of the array. If the message was sent by the customer, we display the first (translated) item of the array.

Turning the Translator ON and OFF

We could stop here and roughly achieve the look and functionality of the side-by-side at the beginning of this article, Amazon Translate charges by the character, so we want to avoid calling it when we’re not actually translating anything.

We can limit the service at the Flex front end to only call our translateMessage function if the task’s language code is not found in the agent’s skillset. This keeps our event listener from needlessly calling our Lambda, but it only restricts agent-side translation. On the customer’s side, we don’t know if our initial message will need to be translated until it reaches an agent. Once it does, we can translate our subsequent messages if and only if the agent’s returning message includes the TRANSLATEDFROM parser. We then add logic to  translate the customer’s initial message if it is not already in English. And we modify the agent’s ReplaceMessageBody component to show the customer’s opening message untranslated if the agent is skilled in that language. This allows the agent to see the customer’s first message translated only if it is needed. And if it is not needed, the customer’s subsequent messages will remain untranslated.

Conclusion

This is a proof-of-concept outline for a simple webchat translator made with Twilio Flex and Amazon Web Services. In addition to adding styling and security, there are many things to consider before using this in a commercial setting – like stripping out the TRANSLATEDFROM parser when either party manually types it in and adding static translations to the WebChat UI  so that customers are fully immersed in their own language. This example assumes our webchat only has two participants. A chat with three or more participants would require more metadata in the unparsed messages.

If you already have a Twilio Flex environment and an AWS instance, you can fork the following three repositories to get started with webchat translation on your own:

• https://github.com/scriptkd/translate (back end)
• https://github.com/scriptkd/plugin-translate-webchat (front end agent side)
• https://github.com/scriptkd/flex-webchat-ui-translation (front end customer side)

If you’re interested in Amazon Translate or Twilio Flex and need some guidance on maximizing your contact center’s efficiency, we can help.

Perficient takes pride in our personal approach to the customer journey where we help enterprise clients transform and modernize their contact center experience with platforms like Twilio Flex, Amazon Connect, ServiceNow, and more.

For more information on how Perficient can help you get the most out of your contact center, please contact us here.

Help desks are often the first point of contact for both customers and employees seeking support, a solution to a problem, workflow guidance, and more. Providing your teams with efficient and user-friendly ways to interact with those in need of support is expensive. Off-the-shelf solutions often provide unwanted functionality and are cost-prohibitive. On the other hand, building custom solutions takes too long and is extremely costly. This is where Perficient can help.

Optimize and Accelerate Your Twilio Flex Help Desk Capabilities

Our Twilio Flex Help Desk Starter Pack provides the out-of-the-box functionality your teams need to do their job, without all the things they don’t need. It also provides integrations with ZenDesk and ServiceNow for computer-telephone integrations (CTI), automatic ticket lookup, and integration with Glance for co-browsing and video capabilities.

Once the starter pack has been implemented and configured, your Twilio flex implementation will have several added channels, integrations, and features including:

Channels

• Email routing with SendGrid
• Webchat
• Voice

Integrations

• ZenDesk
• ServiceNow

Features

• Glance screen sharing
• File attachments
• Callbacks and voicemails
• Reasons/dispositions codes

How Long do Implementations Normally Take?

Basic implementations take two weeks, with customized implementations available and varying in length depending on the scope of customizations and integrations required. This starter pack lays the foundation for future feature implementations, optimizing your contact center on Twilio Flex.

Why Perficient?

We are a Twilio Gold Partner with a team of certified Twilio Flex engineers and more than 20 years of experience delivering unparalleled customer engagement and contact center experience solutions. For more information on our Twilio Flex practice and capabilities visit us here!

As expected, there was no shortage of announcements on the first day of Signal, mostly during the keynote. We’ll be able to dig deeper into the details on some of these in breakout sessions, but there is certainly some interesting stuff to talk about.

Twilio Engage represents the first over-arching consolidation of services into a Twilio customer engagement platform. For anyone paying attention, it’s been obvious from the acquisitions of SendGrid and then Segment that Twilio was heading in this direction. It’s a natural play, and one that Twilio has been foreshadowing as far back as Signal 2019 when Jeff Lawson talked about the difference between notifications and conversations. Already a lot of chatter from Forbes, TechCrunch and others.

It’s all about delighting customers with every type of interaction and inviting them to engage in conversations, feedback and high-touch experiences every step of the way. Twilio’s communication platforms already form the basis for much of the customer communication backbone, so now it’s just a matter of fitting the pieces together. Engage represents a way of framing the “how to” of doing this as well as providing the platform – always programmable, as is the Twilio way.

For me, the biggest wow factor from a demo and new possibilities standpoint is Twilio Intelligence for Voice. Al Cook has been leading the effort to build this over the past few years. You might remember him from a little product called Twilio Flex. Lots to dig into here, but generally this is an application of machine learning to pull actionable insights out of your voice calls. Al calls it “turning voice into data and data into meaning”.

I think this is a smart play in a couple of ways. One, in a market somewhat overloaded with various AI solutions, Twilio decided to double down on their original powerhouse product, Programmable Voice. It might have been obvious to do yet another chatbot/virtual agent solution, but this product harnesses their unique strengths and plays to the existing customer base. Two, it immediately has impacts for Twilio Flex, both in terms of the intelligence piece itself and a native transcriptions engine that is pretty great. Three, with voice channel usage changing and customers preferring digital in a lot of ways, many of the highest impact interactions with customers take place over voice. This provides a way of harnessing all the data in those conversations to improve CSAT, conversions and agent efficiency.

I could see many customers looking at the transcriptions piece alone as we are getting a lot of interest in that area. It will be interesting to see how this gets priced out and sold, particularly the transcriptions API side of it.

When Conversations API was announced , the first question for many of us was, “How does this fit into Flex?” The answers are starting to come in the form of Flex One. Coming in the first part of 2022 and in private pilots now, this is one of the most significant enhancements to the platform since its initial launch. There is significant effort to rework digital channels from the current approach, and there will be some migration details to work out for existing customers. There are several advantages to using Conversations over Programmable Chat/Messaging around how channels are managed and orchestrated. Functionality that currently can be complex to build mostly come “for free” in Conversations – things like channel-switching, ease of managing participants even across channels, conversation history and so on. I haven’t seen much yet around the new Content API, but this should allow better consistency across channels and a bit of decoupling between message and platform.

One benefit of this change is it will finally allow for a native email channel in Flex, and we got our first look at the UI for it in some demos. It’s similar to some of the work Perficient has done to try to map email to Programmable Chat. Email has been more complicated than other text-based or digital channels because of things like multiple recipients, threading, more complicated attachment management and user expectations around email composition and management. When you are used to Gmail or other mature email platforms, you forget how much functionality is now built into those systems. And now users, in this case agents, have higher expectations. It will be interesting to see how/if Twilio addresses this. Newer services and platforms like Conversations API, Content API and others make an email channel option a bit less challenging as the feature expectations map much better.

These are some key things I’m excited about, but some other great announcements as well include: Twilio Messaging X, Regional Twilio and some great initiatives around COVID vaccination efforts globally. There is still a lot to dig in to here. The Engage platform alone opens up a lot of new opportunity and will take some time to understand. As a partner, it’s exciting to see all the possibilities opened up with these new products. Many of them are direct answers to requests we’ve been hearing from customers for quite some time. Let’s build some exciting new customer journeys together!

On June 22^nd, 2021, Perficient’s Director of Healthcare Strategy David Allen joined forces with Susan Collins, Twilio’s Global Head of Healthcare Services, to discuss what they are seeing in the Healthcare and Life Sciences industry, how customer engagement solutions are being utilized to new extents, and what the future holds for digital health as a whole.

As healthcare providers plan for a post-COVID-19 environment, consumers are more likely than ever to conduct a majority of their interactions with healthcare entities through digital pathways. This has led to a wide variety of technologies being knit together to drive expanded goals and even a technological arms race for healthcare consumer engagement, including but not limited to:

• Personalization – Integrated platforms delivering messaging according to patients’ preferences.
• Digital Marketing – Increasingly insight driven.
• Virtual Health – Rapidly expanding array of options.
• Interoperability – Mandates, expectations and prerequisites.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Data maturity that creates knowledge and channels.
• Cloud Infrastructure – Ever more flexible deployments.

However, with the extensive implementation needed to conduct business at the scale of enterprise healthcare payers and providers, we are seeing the challenges of investing equally across them all. For example:

• 57% of healthcare executives indicate substantial investment in AI in the next 3 years,
• 90% of marketing departments say personalization is the key to advancing consumer relations,
• And 60% of patients want to continue to use technology more to communicate with providers in a post-COVID environment.

So, what does this mean? – It means a less transactional, and more human experience has never been more important!

The clients who are seeing the most success are those that have a clear understanding and approach when it comes to toolkits, teams, and overall vision. Healthcare entities need to have flexible, extensible, and compatible platforms and applications in today’s rising hybrid ecosystem. They need to possess connected, collaborative, and motivated teams with a big picture mindset. And, have a consistently understood, adaptable vision that is visibly adhered to or openly adjusted.

In our next blog we will highlight the conversations and insights that both David and Susan had around setting up virtual health as a lens to view customer engagement!

Learn More:

Perficient is a Twilio Gold Consulting Partner with certified engineers and years of experience delivering customer engagement solutions. Our contact center experience can accelerate innovation with Twilio, while our cloud expertise lets us create powerful solutions while maintaining business agility and flexibility.

To learn more about our Twilio practice and get in contact with our customer engagement team please visit our Twilio Partner Page!

Perficient’s CES Planning and Contact Center Strategist, Lora-Lee Pond, will be joining Twilio experts Tuesday, June 15 for the second installment of Twilio Talks to discuss Flex as the programmable contact center of the future. Lora-Lee will illustrate, first-hand, the strategy and implementation behind Twilio Flex here at Perficient.

Historically contact centers have been served by a combination of proprietary hardware and numerous disparate software applications. The result? A brittle architecture impeding agile development, innovation and incurring high maintenance costs. The advent of Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) has removed some of this pain but in a cookie-cutter way which limits functionality, customization and ultimately results. A programmable Contact Center allows enterprises to uniquely tailor contact center capabilities to better serve customers, agents, and management teams.

In today’s contact center climate, it is important to stay ahead of customers’ ever-changing expectations. With Twilio Flex’s programmability you have complete control of every channel, interface, routing, workflow etc.

There are endless possibilities when it comes to a creating a contact center as unique as your business

Join us for an hour-long session where Twilio and Perficient experts share how an agile approach enabled by a contact center platform with comprehensive API’s can deliver customized capabilities to reduce cost, increase CSAT, and boost agent productivity. Benefiting from fast delivery and rapid time to benefit, programmable technologies reduce risk and lead to better outcomes.

This is the second of three installments in partnership with Perficient and Twilio. These virtual events are completely free to join but space is extremely limited! Register today!

All attendees will receive swag at the conclusion of the event, compliments of Twilio.

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: 

1. Improve customer service, predicting your customer needs, and meeting your customers using channels they frequent most i.e. SMS, Email, Video, WhatsApp, etc. 
2. 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!

Whether you work in big tech or the service industry, you are retired or grudgingly buying your pre-teen their first smartphone, let’s face it, texting has become the most used communication tool in your daily life.  SMS (Short Message Service), aka “Texting”, enables many to skip voice communication altogether and opt for the instant power at their fingertips.

While SMS plays such a convenient role in personal communication, it has been increasingly more valuable as a means of interaction for businesses.  Mass marketing, conducting surveys, and collecting customer feedback are just a few common ways that help organizations reach their customer base via SMS.

Recently, businesses have been moving toward the use of SMS for 2FA (Two Factor Authentication), Omni Channel Contact Centers, and Contact Tracing.  Even Curbside Pickup, a business offering made popular during COVID-19 lockdowns, incorporates the use of SMS as a more convenient way for customers to pick-up orders without having to step foot in a storefront (see  Perficient:  A Fully SMS-Based Curbside Pickup Solution).

How do Businesses Handle Carrier Routing, Outages, and Latency with SMS?

Wait, I thought businesses were busy, well, running their businesses?  How do they handle underlying complexities of SMS such as carrier routing, outages, and message latency?  Well, the short answer is, they don’t.

Twilio, the leading cloud communications platform, takes care of that for you with their Super Network.  This worldwide Super Network of carriers allows Twilio to take the burden of infrastructure, scalability, and reliability away from the business and allows them to focus on what they are really good at.

I recently attended SIGNAL, Twilio’s annual customer and developer conference.  You guessed it, this year’s conference was virtual. Twilio provided a top notch lineup of speakers from both technical and business backgrounds, including our very own from Perficient.

I attended the session “Optimizing Message Delivery with Machine Learning” presented by Twilio Senior Software Engineer, Riivo Kikas.  Riivo discusses how Twilio uses machine learning to navigate its vast Super Network of carriers.  This machine learning determines the best routes, and diminishes message latency.  As SMS messages are sent in mass quantities, they do not all get to their destination immediately.  Why?

Because Not All Texts Are Created Equal.

Well, perhaps the method of message transmission is, but not all carriers are created equal.  And not all networks and infrastructure worldwide are created equal.

Because of this, we rely on machine learning algorithms to track and anticipate which SMS route paths will work best.  This is based on past and trending deliverability data, from carriers themselves.  Because the rate of deliverability can fluctuate by region and carrier, predicting the best SMS route paths will help maximize message deliverability and conversion rates.

I Can’t Control What Route SMS Messages Take, or Can I?

Fortunately, Twilio’s Message Feedback API allows developers to provide feedback to Twilio regarding the delivery status of an SMS message.  This takes the carrier delivery status out of the equation and provides even more accurate and real-time data.  Twilio then uses this data to update preferred message routing paths, improving deliverability conversion rates for your SMS messages, and the Twilio service as a whole.

How does this work?

When a user responds to an SMS in some fashion (SMS, mobile app, website, etc), such as with an OTP (One Time Password) response, a developer can send the provide feedback attribute along with the Create Message API POST.  This attribute tells Twilio that it can expect feedback for the response to this message id.  Upon receiving the user’s response to the SMS, a POST to the Message Feedback API with the original message id and outcome attribute lets Twilio know that the message has been received.  As mentioned previously, Twilio will use this data to actively modify its SMS routing path.  This means that developers can actively work on improving SMS conversion rates for their business.

How Do I Access These Metrics?

As soon as you begin using the Message Feedback API, Twilio will begin populating its Programmable Messaging Insights.  This data will appear under the OTP Conversion tab in Programmable Messaging Insights within the Twilio Console.  This API is best suited for OTP responses, however, you may certainly use it in other use cases.  However, if you choose to implement multiple uses for the API, Insights will not be able to distinguish between different response types in its reporting.

Let Us Help You

Our Customer Engagement Solutions team helps businesses reach out to their customers on any and every channel that they prefer.  This includes SMS.  We would love to help you navigate the simplest path to your customers. Learn more about our Twilio practice here.