Twilio and the Future of the Contact Center #CCTR
Rewind back to mid-March, where at Enterprise Connect, Twilio Flex was launched.
On one hand, it wasn’t much to notice. Organizations have been building contact centers on Twilio’s tools for years. On the other hand, the concept of a packaged DIY contact center has merit. After all, aren’t all contact centers DYI to some degree? The question really is who does the DIY part, IT, the contact center staff, the vendor, or modern developers? More importantly, who does the support?
It was just a year earlier when Amazon shook things up with its launch of Amazon Connect at Enterprise Connect 2017. Amazon’s approach was a basic call center application within a DIY ecosystem of advanced tools.
Not long after EC18 I was invited to participate on a Fonolo panel to discuss the future of the contact center. It was a lively conversation.
The contact center is going through a radical transformation. In addition to the changing vendor landscape, there’s the approach (DIY vs. packaged app), the AI-powered capabilities, the prem v cloud debate, the consolidation of WFO and contact center apps, the center vs. at-home agents discussion, and radical new approaches to billing (usage vs per agent/mo). While most of the cloud conversation has been moving premises-based systems to cloud-delivered services, there’s also the Avaya Mobile Experience that brings a new cloud angle to premises-based systems.
The panelist on the conversation above are @ShaiBerger, @Alan_Quayle, @Nicolask3, and myself (@DaveMichels).
The full conversation is above, Fonolo also posted highlights here: fonolo.com/blog/2018/03/3-takeaways-from-our-live-discussion-on-how-the-twilio-amazon-stack-is-changing-the-call-center/