iTWire has been following Twilio with keen interest for many years, finding it an innovative product much beloved by the software developer community. Twilio head of solution engineering APJ Christopher Connolly took time from his busy schedule to speak with iTWIre about its current growth and how the company is now a major force in contact centre software, being recognised as a strong contender against the likes of Genesys.

A little background: Twilio began life as a toolkit for developers, by developers, helping the world's software engineers make phone calls, send text-based messages, implement IVR systems, and do all kinds of telephony-related things, all via code. The developer focus was a major factor in Twilio's adoption. Twilio made it easy for devs globally to take up Twilio services, to register SIM cards, to perform all kinds of functions, well-backed with solid documentation and code samples. Unlike other platforms, everything you wanted to do was available through an API, while competitors typically offered a web portal that was supplemented by a limited API.

Twilio embraced the developer community with events and swag; this writer attended a Twilio developer day event in 2018, working through an RPG-style set of missions called TwilioQuest. The missions demonstrated how to make use of the platform. While we worked through the missions a highly entertaining 8-bit Universe soundtrack regaled us. At the end of the day, the three highest scorers won an achievement, along with the most clever username ("Thrillio"). You can see our photo memory here. For the record, iTWire came in second out of all the assembled clever people. I'd like to see other tech publications beat that.

See how our #developers in Sydney crushed TwilioQuest. Mission completed ? #TwilioEngage #Superclass pic.twitter.com/BbtVNruC4L

— twilio (@twilio) May 17, 2018

Going forwards, Twilio developed its Flex contact centre product, built entirely on top of Twilio APIs. Whether rightly or wrongly, at the time iTWire viewed Flex positively, but as a cool tool that was more proof of the amazing things you could do in Twilio, rather than something genuinely intended as a "real product."

Well, how wrong we were! Today, Twilio is still fully committed to its global network of enthusiastic software developers, but is also proving to be a major force in the contact centre market. Flex is not simply a proof of concept; it's a true, genuine, and fully-featured contact centre solution. It's so powerful, so convenient, so efficient that, Connolly said, customers like ANZ Bank and Electrolux are using Flex to replace their traditional contact and make the move to a cloud digital, cloud native world.

As way of background, Connolly explained Twilio entered the Australian market in 2018. "It had been in the US for some time," he said. However, while Australian born, he lived in the US for nine years and on moving back to Australia found despite its US presence, few Australians knew what Twilio does. Even today, six years later, "I'm still trying to explain we do more than messaging," he said. "A lot of people box us into SMS" - echoing my own miscomprehension too, that Twilio is vastly larger than may have been thought.

Fortunately, "we're growing leaps and bounds," Connolly said. "We've exploded in Australia. We've brought on the ANZ Bank and other amazing customers in a short time."

Some of these customers are on the bleeding edge. Some are early adopters wanting to expand into customer experience. However, many are traditional businesses such as MYOB and others.

The business has continued to grow, though transitioned to a remote-first business since COVID. "Our business is strong in APJ," Connolly said. "We have the ISV component to embed our tech inside other's capabilities, as well as direct business. We also have B2C, and the Authy app (now Verify)."

"Verify is a bit unknown," Connolly said, "but if you've ever used OTP - one-time passwords on your phone, which is hundreds of thousands of people, you've used it." Earlier this year, Twilio replaced Authy with the Verify API, which is a consolidated version of earlier versions of its phone verification and 2FA APIs.

Along its journey, Twilio acquired SendGrid, the well-known programmable email platform. "We've made a tremendous amount of integration. Twilio SendGrid processes about a third of the world's email every 30 days, we have private links to Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and others," he said. "It's been folded into the comms platform and is part of our stack."

So, with Twilio, you can "use email, SMS, and so on independently, or go up the stack and opt for more out-of-the-box and less code."

This is where capabilities like the Flex contact centre come in, which features in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Communications Platform as a Service. It's something that gives Connolly personal pride. "I came from Genesys, and Twilio wasn't initially on quadrants or market analysis so this is good recognition of what we've achieved. Our strategy is good, and customers such as ANZ and Electrolux are using the Flex capability to replace their contact centres," he said.

Macquarie Bank has recently gone live with Flex and 1,500 users, and their migration was under 12 months. "To move to cloud, to digital, to omni-channel within 12 months - it brings you personal pride," Connolly said.

Under the hood, Flex uses Twilio APIs, of course, but also SendGrid for its email sending. "It's all absorbed and integrated."

It's a similar story with Segment, Twilio's tool for analysing customer data. "All email outreach uses SendGrid by choice," he said, "but we believe in choice, so you can plug in MailChimp or other tools."

In Australia specifically, Connolly says the company goes to market directly, as well as via software and services and partners. "Partners like Synergy and Cloudwave extended our reach into Government panels," Connolly said. "Then there's the ISV component where partners like Atlassian embed our tech inside Jira. It's all serviced out of Australia."

Twilio is also growing its team. "We have a healthy set of individuals with engineering mindsets." In fact, coming back to Australia from the United States Connolly says it was so refreshing to see technologists really going deep, coding, and building solutions. "A lot of US-based companies in Australia only have sales. Twilio has engineering on-shore, a guest engineer component, and more connection to the product. We can influence the product roadmap here in Australia."

One example he cites is the MOLI mobile line identification protocol, which only exists at Australian telcos. "No other country uses this standard," Connolly said. Yet, "one of our local engineers got it into our product."

"As we're a virtual carrier around the world, now customers can use MOLI without any separate agreement with carriers."

It's a great example of taking local Australian engineering work, and offering functionality globally.

Another Australian Twilio customer Connolly referred to is Domino’s Pizza. "They moved from the legacy on-premises IVR capability to the cloud, using Twilio IVR to distribute calls to stores. It was built mostly in-house, with some Twilio professional services involved."

And, the previously mentioned ANZ Bank is doing more than contact centre. "The ANZ+ app is an innovative app for home loan origination," he said. "All its communications come through Twilio - voice, video, and text. It reimagines what banking can look like."

"ANZ+ is all in-app. There's no branch or broker. You can speak with a coach in the app. It provides challenges and pushed the limit of our platform, but was all done in house by about five engineers in Melbourne. They went down the infrastructure-as-code path through Terraform pipelines and GitHub actions. They can hit run and completely stand up an environment in 10 minutes with users, code, routing workflow, and validating the whole product."

"ANZ Bank is a world leader in their adoption of tech," Connolly said, "and the digital experience they provide is pretty cool."

Elsewhere, Mox, a virtual bank by Standard Chartered Bank, the Union Bank of the Philippines, and others are all going down the same path, leveraging Twilio. "They can do digital voice and make two-way comms from the app over WiFi. They don't need phone services."

Other customers include Fisher and Paykel, doing "some cool things in contact centre and communications," and Foxtel, "using Twilio Segment to understand data, customer behaviour, and churn, and influence what they can do about it."

Having a customer analytics platform such as Segment allows Twilio customers a lot of options. "Imagine if once you understand something about the customer you can make a real-time outreach to them. Display an ad or text, play a video, make a phone call ... the real-time data gives context into AI models to allow real-time actions."

And, when it comes to AI, the Twilio portfolio offers a rich suite of AI-based tools and functionality. These are things from predicting churn and customer lifetime value and next-best activity scenarios, as well as customising conversations based on what the customer has done in the past.

These are under the hood; more visibly, Twilio has added Copilot capabilities for contact centre workers, surfacing insights over customer information and event history, and more.

These features all combine to bring vast AI-based customer insights that help a company trace all the way from their customer satisfaction scores down through phone calls, messages, and interactions, down to individual workers and customers that contributed to that score.

As he speaks with customers, Connolly sees the rise of AI voicebots as something that's most exciting to them. "Since the 1990s we've been pushing speech systems in one form or another like Telstra 101 or Vodafone Lara. They've evolved completely from there," he said. "In January we did a hackathon to set the state of the art for voicebots. It's moved at lightning speed. We added capability in our cloud comms platform to be the voice you want, to let you put in a prompt, connect real-time data ... when we show customers what they can do with it, this excites them the most."

Of course, it's not all roses. "Companies worry about how to make sure they're not displacing workers, and whether AI offers commercial practicality," he said.

On the first point, Connolly suggests AI can and should take some tasks that can help human agents focus on more important matters. "If you're calling to reschedule a flight, a bot can help. But if you're calling about losing something on a flight, or a death on a flight, the bot isn't the best option."

Additionally, "data privacy is of growing concern locally, especially in the age of AI" to which Connolly says it is important to ensure a privacy-first approach when embarking on an AI strategy.

Additionally, "informed consent is the number one challenge we have as a whole industry, and that responsibility is on regulators as much as it is on companies."

These conversations arise in every country, he indicates, with no country more or less concerned than others. On this, "messaging opt-in and opt-out has become the norm. GDPR is the standard," Connolly said.

"We think there will be an extension of those where the responsibility and consent is embedded in the model. Right now customers have the right to be expunged, but what does it mean for AI models? We advocate for coming back to nutrition facts; have transparent usage and labelling on how the data is used, and allow people to opt-out or not opt-in."

Twilio wants to be transparent with how it uses data and how it employs AI. "AI is exploding everywhere and in all businesses," Connolly said. "AI nutrition labelling is something we want to push as an industry standard. It's essentially food packing for AI. We open-sourced nutrition-facts.ai to clearly state where the human sits in the loop, data retention, redaction, etc. Putting these labels on products say 'this is the AI inside' so it is clear to customers."