Automating Customer Engagement Workflows with Twilio

The Marks & Spencer Experience

Marks & Spencer is a UK-based value-for-money retailer with own-label businesses in clothing, food, home, and banking services. The company serves 30 million customers annually and has 65,000 employees across its stores, supply chain, support centers, and warehouses. One of its cardinal goals is to provide best-in-class customer service. But, it was not able to achieve this goal 100% because its service depended on a legacy phone system which couldn’t cater to the customers’ digital needs.

Marks & Spencer rectified this challenge by replacing its legacy phone system with newer technologies which would improve availability and uptime, and increase the scalability, accuracy, and efficiency of customer call routing. The company partnered with Twilio’s agile customer engagement solution. It deployed Twilio Programmable Voice and Twilio Speech Recognition APIs, and Twilio’s intelligent natural language routing solution across its stores in the UK. Within four weeks, it ran a prototype for automating the company’s existing switchboard. It launched the prototype during the busiest times of the year – Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day – when reps had to handle more than 20,000 customer calls, and it was a resounding success.

Today, with Twilio’s support solutions, Marks & Spencer is able to handle more than a million inbound telephone calls every month. It uses Twilio to convert customer speech into text in real-time during the voice call, and later uses the data to analyze the customer intent using Twilio’s integration with Google DialogFlow. It then routes the insights from the analysis to the relevant store, department, or contact center agent for resolution.

Twilio–For Customer Engagement

Twilio is a Customer Engagement Platform that enables data-driven customer engagement at scale to forge meaningful relationships between businesses and customers. It facilitates the personalization of customer interactions to improve engagement. The communication APIs from Twilio enable developers to build communication solutions for any digital channel such as Voice, SMS, email, WhatsApp, Video, and IoT.

Some of the key benefits of using Twilio for customer engagement include:

• Creating a Contact Center Hub: Contact centers form a core of customer engagement for businesses. Twilio enables businesses to manage customer engagement by acting as a contact center hub.
• Messaging: Twilio Messaging API facilitates bulk sending and receiving of SMS, MMS, and OTT with an intelligence tracking feature to track the delivery of messages.
• Videos: Twilio uses WebRTC and cloud infrastructure components to enable the building of secure and real-time video and HD audio applications.
• Marketing Campaigns: Twilio helps marketing teams run and manage marketing campaigns and track and monitor performance.
• Voice: Twilio allows the embedding of SIP, PSTN, or VoIP calling into any site, app, or service. Twilio Programmable voice allows the creation and management of digital calls for effective use in campaigns.
• Email: Twilio SendGrip API ensures the emails reach the customers’ inbox.
• User Verification: The Twilio verify feature prevents online frauds and scams by auto-verifying continuously through push notifications, SMS, voice, and email.
• Connectivity: Twilio’s Global Connectivity provides advanced, scalable solutions and services for connectivity.

Twilio Applications

Twilio has a suite of applications to cover the entire range of services offered by a company and to improve digital engagement with customers. These include:

Twilio Engage is an omnichannel marketing and growth platform. It empowers small, medium, and large businesses to build personalized campaigns with data management and analytics.

Twilio Frontline is a programmable mobile application for sending text and voice messages to improve outcomes of sales and marketing promotions.

Twilio Flex is a cloud contact center platform. It helps build and personalize solutions to deliver great customer experiences.

• API keys
• Twilio CLI
• Helper libraries
• Debugging tools
• A serverless hosting environment for Node.js code
• Visual workflow designer called Studio
• Static assets called Twilio Functions

The Twilio tools are developed with a developer-first approach, enabling developers to leverage them for building tailored solutions for customer engagement. Twilio Runtime suite of serverless tools has been built by developers and for developers. It includes:

The Twilio Super Network enables global communication delivery. It also helps in managing relationships with partner carriers, aggregating services and meeting compliance needs.

For ensuring security, Twilio uses a network-based intrusion detection system (IDS) from AWS GuardDuty. This system analyzes VPC Flow Logs, AWS CloudTrail, and AWS DNS logs to detect security breaches and prevent unauthorized and malicious activities.

Twilio also comes with reporting and analytics tools to track and monitor performance.

Indium for Twilio Implementation

Indium Software is a cutting-edge software development company that empowers businesses with customized solutions to enhance their operational excellence across different functions. The company helps its customers to identify their need to improve customer satisfaction and tailor the Twilio solution to deliver solutions for meaningful engagement. The team consists of experienced developers with cross-domain expertise who work closely with customers to understand their business needs and leverage technology to meet their growth objectives.

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