The News: At Enterprise Connect, Twilio announced two new features—Unified Profiles and Agent Copilot—within Twilio Flex, its cloud-based digital engagement solution. According to Twilio, Unified Profiles provides businesses with access to a native data layer powered by Segment, enabling the collection and activation of real-time, consented data for personalized interactions. Then, Agent Copilot leverages this data alongside AI to provide automated assistance to employees, improving productivity and efficiency. Twilio says that this is the first of three products it has committed to launching in 2024. You can read the full press release on Twilio’s website.
Twilio Launches Unified Profiles and Agent Copilot
Analyst Take: Twilio made two announcements at Enterprise Connect in late March focused on the collection and activation of real-time customer data to enhance the level of personalization and relevance of all engagements through Twilio Flex, the company’s cloud-based digital engagement solution.
Leveraging Unified Profiles to Extract Siloed Customer Data for Use Across Engagements
Twilio’s Unified Profiles is a new open and extensible data layer that is powered by Segment, Twilio’s customer data platform. Unified Profiles is designed to bring together customer data from various sources, including CRM systems, data warehouses, and real-time behavior tracking all into a central real-time profile, which can then provide sales and support teams with a 360-degree view of the customer that can be used to create personalized interactions based on predictive, historical, and real-time insights. Further, as it is a Segment workspace within Twilio Flex, Unified Profiles delivers immediate access to these insights without requiring a separate Segment contract.
The strategy behind Unified Profiles is to ensure that real-time information around customer preferences and activity can be leveraged across all business functions, including sales, marketing, and support teams, thereby making sure that each interaction incorporates individual preferences and activity history data. Furthermore, by embedding data provided by Twilio Segment’s Golden Customer Profiles in Flex, employees will be able to access and leverage deeper insights into customer behaviors and preferences, enabling more tailored interactions throughout the customer lifecycle.
Agent Copilot: Providing Agent Enhancement and Automation Capabilities
Twilio also announced its generative AI assistant, Agent Copilot, which is designed to leverage large language models (LLMs) to automate and enhance agent productivity. Agent Copilot will use the data contained within Unified Profiles to offer intelligent routing and actionable insights for each customer interaction, thereby reducing resolution times. Agent Copilot can also automate the process of creating post-call summaries, which are then used to further refine and improve the AI algorithms to create an ongoing flywheel of increasing understanding of the customer’s intent, preferences, and project behaviors.
When utilized together, Unified Profiles and Agent Copilot are designed to address typical contact center efficiency issues, providing faster interaction resolutions, more contextualized interactions, and seamless handoffs between bots to agents and agents to agents.
These product updates from Twilio reflect the growing need for organizations to incorporate as much data as possible to enhance customer interactions with not just personalized information (preferences, historical interaction data) but timely and relevant information. Twilio’s Segment CDP product, which had been under consideration for divestiture, is the key to enabling this type of functionality, and Unified Profiles should help provide more visibility into the power of Segment to Flex users, without requiring a separate Segment account.
Because there are limitations on the breadth and depth of Segment features that are included in Unified Profiles, customers who want to incorporate multiple data sources, track customer activity across more than a single website or mobile application, and track more than two computed traits and more than two predictive traits will need to sign up for a full Segment account. This “show-me” approach to Segment’s benefits should result in greater adoption of the CDP, so long as customers are able to generate real-world KPIs that are linked to the use of richer customer data.
Twilio says that these tools will result in increased productivity, a reduction in operational inefficiency, and higher customer satisfaction due to more personalized engagement and enhanced service quality. As always, the overall ROI will be determined by the quality of the data that is used to power these interactions and tools; if a company’s data is not granular enough, or not properly labeled, providing hyper-personalized or timely experiences will be challenging, regardless of the software that is used. Twilio’s success will also depend on its ability—as well as the ability of its implementation partners—to work with customers to ensure that the data used to feed into these AI and automation models is clean and actionable.
Twilio Announces Flex Mobile App to Provide More Flexibility to Workers
Additionally, Twilio is extending Flex’s capabilities with the introduction of Flex Mobile, which is focused on the needs of both sales and relationship professionals, as well as field agents. Flex Mobile, now in public beta, is an iOS and Android app that is designed to seamlessly integrate with existing Flex implementations. The app supports the management of calls, messages, and transfers directly from mobile devices and is designed to log all mobile interactions within the same system, ensuring a single source of truth for customer data and interactions.
Mobile applications have become table stakes for customer engagement applications. In addition to role-based functions, features, and interface templates, I expect that Twilio will continue to invest in Flex Mobile to provide more functionality based on specific industries and use cases to enable seamless service and support across a wide variety of agent and worker types.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is VP & Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
