Twilio has launched CustomerAI, an offering that embeds generative AI into its Customer Engagement Platform.
The solution supports businesses in gaining new customer data and utilizing that to further service, sales, and marketing activities.
To unlock that new data, CustomerAI pulls insights from customer communications using large language models (LLMs) and natural language processing (NLP).
Those insights may include intent and sentiment data – alongside nuggets of qualitative feedback.
All this then filters into the ‘Golden Profiles’ within Twilio Segment – which collect preference, demographic, and behavioral data for individual customers.
Adding depth to these Golden Profiles is critical to Twilio’s vision of AI in CX. As Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio, said:
If AI is going to help build better customer relationships, that AI needs to know the customer.
CustomerAI enables this understanding, creating those deeper profiles from which service, sales, and marketing teams can extract additional value.
The offering helps there, too, as highlighted below.
Service, Sales, & Marketing Use Cases
Customer service teams that use Twilio Flex may harness CustomerAI to auto-generate customer responses during digital customer conversations.
Various sources of information, including the contact center knowledge base, inform the “meat” of the response. Yet, Segment and its Golden Profiles help to personalize it to the individual customer.
As such, agents may simply tweak and send their replies to customers instead of typing them out from scratch – saving lots of time across many contact reasons.
Meanwhile, as CustomerAI digs into knowledge sources, it will highlight gaps, suggest knowledge base updates, and recommend additional agent training.
A final contact center use case is auto-summaries of customer conversations. These help to accelerate post-contact processing.
Such summaries include key snippets of customer feedback and sentiment data, which funnels back into the Golden Profile – as the image below highlights.
Next, consider marketing. CustomerAI generates outbound campaigns with only natural language prompts – as the screenshot below exemplifies.
Moreover, the offering creates segments for every campaign with its “generative audiences” feature, altering and optimizing content for individual customers to increase conversion rates.
Finally, consider sales. These teams can use CustomerAI to draft client responses, which may help convert a lead.
In addition, the offering can auto-generate insights for them. For example, CustomerAI could spotlight the business’s most valuable customers. As such, sales teams can prioritize their renewal process and speed them through various reboarding processes.
Another helpful insight could include the client’s channel preferences for interactions and authentication – the value of which extends beyond sales alone.
Uniting Departments with the Power of AI
CustomerAI aspires to augment service, sales, and marketing functions with new capabilities that push customer experiences forward.
Yet, Twilio also recognizes that each department shares many of the same CX goals and hopes its latest offering fosters greater collaboration.
“Customers are real-time. And they interact with companies in lots of different ways,” said Kathryn Murphy, SVP of Product Management at Twilio.
A customer might be having a tough experience and engaged with the call center, but does marketing know about that? And is marketing suppressing a message or sending something with the right tone?
“This is one example, and traditionally it’s been super hard to pull off. But that’s exactly what CustomerAI is helping companies to do: make customer engagement real-time and personalized.”
By inspiring that convergence, CustomerAI could be the start of a more cohesive Twilio.
Indeed, some have criticized the vendor for trying to be the Swiss Army Knife of customer experience and covering too many bases.
Yet, recent moves – such as selling its IoT arm and Zipwhip – paired with this latest innovation may signal that Twilio is ready to focus in and move forward with more direction.
