Twilio Debuts New API to Bring Chat Channels Under Single Umbrella

In Mid-March, cloud communications platform company Twilio (News - Alert) announced Twilio Flex, its contact center platform that gives businesses the ability to deploy an omnichannel contact center platform and also programmatically customize every element of the experience including the interface, communication channels, agent routing, and reporting to meet the unique needs of the business. Twilio's customer engagement platform powers over a half million agents today and it's helping businesses deploy tailored cloud contact centers while freeing them from the limitations of software-as-a-service (SaaS (News - Alert)) applications.

Today, the company announced the deployment of a new API for its Flex contact center service that combines the platform’s existing chat channels under a single umbrella to make it easier for developers to build contact center applications. The goal is to build applications that are more user friendly for customers, eliminating siloed information that often means customers must repeat themselves across communications channels. Instead, developers will be able to access the platform’s existing chat channels through a single API rather than managing multiple connections.

“Before Flex Conversations, developers had to work with individual channel APIs (voice, chat, WhatsApp, Messenger, SMS, etc) to implement and manage channels embedded within Flex,” Simonetta Turek, the GM of Flex, told TechCrunch. “To be clear, all these channels have been available on Twilio Flex, it just took a bit more time to configure them. Consistent with our aim to make the building process incrementally easier and within reach of a wider variety of personas, Flex Conversations simplifies the build process by requiring only a single API for all of the digital channels. This means one set of Documentation and a single build motion to invoke and manage any number of digital channels. The result is faster deployments and iterations post-deployment.”

By eliminating the need to work with individual channels, call centers can cut down on development time and also reduce the average handle time for customer queries. 

Edited by Luke Bellos