New Way Now: Twilio delivers next-generation customer engagement with Google Cloud
28Summary: Russ Kahan, product manager for self-service automation solutions at Twilio, shares how Google Cloud is helping the leading cloud communications platform leverage AI innovation to take customer engagement to the next level. With Google Cloud, Twilio is empowering its customers with the AI tools and technologies they need to deliver automated, personalized self-service communications experiences.
Challenge: To meet today’s digital-first service expectations, Twilio wanted to help businesses automate and personalize their customer interactions across all channels using state-of-the-art AI technologies like generative AI.
Solution: Twilio integrated Google Cloud AI into its platform, enabling its customers to provide automated, intelligent interactions in real time — with little or no human intervention. With easy access to products like Dialogflow, customers can deploy conversational, self-service solutions like virtual AI agents, powered by Google Cloud gen AI and other natural language processing (NLP) models. These solutions can handle simple requests, answer common questions, and quickly route more complex issues to the right human agent, enabling businesses to respond to requests and address customer needs 24/7 for more satisfying, exceptional customer experiences.
Results: Together with Google Cloud, Twilio is shaping the next-generation of customer engagement tools that put cutting-edge AI capabilities into the hands of hundreds of thousands of businesses. Twilio customers are seeing powerful results — for example, a major automotive manufacturer leveraging Twilio and Google Dialogflow for their 'Destination Assist' feature has seen a significant improvement in agent efficiency. By seamlessly transitioning conversations from AI-powered bots to human agents, they've reduced agent call times by 18-20%. This translates to faster response times for drivers and a more streamlined customer service experience.
In another compelling case, a leading insurance provider in the UK has implemented Twilio and Google Dialogflow to automate claims processing. By empowering customers with a self-service solution that can answer their claims-related questions, they've increased automated query resolution by 20%. This automation has not only improved customer satisfaction but has also generated an estimated cost savings of $9 million annually.
Interview highlights and key takeaways:
→ Twilio believes AI holds huge potential to completely transform the face of customer service and engagement, unlocking valuable insights that can reveal new business intents and opportunities. Already, Twilio is exploring ways to incorporate Google Cloud gen AI to power “best-next-action” recommendations for agents based on customer data, generate call summaries to analyze service experiences, and automatically capture first-party data to further enrich customer profiles.
→ "We see customers using these automated and intelligent interactions to discover new business opportunities with structured first-party data. Now, they can learn and refine how they interact with their customers on the basis of the self-service automation solutions that they're deploying with Twilio and Google." - Russ Kahan, Product Manager for Self-Service Automation Solutions at Twilio
→ "Google is a market leader in these AI technologies and speech recognition in terms of performance and low-latency interactions. We had systems engineers demo bots built with Dialogflow. The 'aha' moment was there’s usually some kind of structured flowchart tree. Now, you can do the same thing with a two or three line prompt. It blew me away." - Russ Kahan, Product Manager for Self-Service Automation Solutions at Twilio
Google Cloud products used: Dialogflow, Speech-to-Text API
Learn more:
→ Twilio and Google Cloud Expand Partnership to Improve Customer Experience with AI https://www.twilio.com/en-us/press/releases/twilio-and-google-cloud-expand-partnership-to-improve-customer-experience-with-ai
→ Twilio and Dialogflow: https://cloud.google.com/dialogflow/cx/docs/concept/integration/twilio
→ Speech-to-Text AI: https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text