Twilio wants to make communication easier. That has been its mission since the company's founding in 2008.
During a recent interview, Leigh Hawksley, Vice President for APJ (Asia Pacific & Japan), explained the firm's rapid growth as well as its vision for the future - and why their developer-driven approach to communications technology could shape how organisations everywhere interact with their customers.
"Twilio's been around since 2008, started in San Francisco by our current CEO, a guy called Jeff Lawson, who is a developer himself," Hawksley said. Lawson believed there had to be a better way for apps and developers to connect with customers, by harnessing the power of the world's global communications infrastructure.
At its heart, Twilio is all about helping people and organisations communicate. "Twilio has been a leader in democratizing the world's communication infrastructure," Hawksley explained. The company's core offering is its suite of application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow businesses to access voice, video, messaging and email - "and so on and so forth" - all through just a few clicks in the cloud.
According to Hawksley, what was once technically daunting is now much simpler. "We've been doing that now for what is it, 13, 14 years, so we've grown tremendously in that time, and I'm fortunate enough to run our business over here in Asia Pacific, based out of Sydney," he said.
The company's origins are rooted in the challenge of sending text messages to customers around the globe - a problem that was once far more complex than today's users may appreciate. "Our genesis, our history if you like, was in text messaging," Hawksley explained. "Way back in the day, our first product was really allowing developers and enterprise customers to connect their apps to our API infrastructure so that they could SMS their customers no matter where they were."
He added, "It's hard for a lot of people to really wrap their head around these days how hard that was 10 or 15 years ago. To say, OK, I have this app and I want to do something really simple and straightforward like, let's say for example, two-factor authentication... That was actually incredibly difficult back in the day, because you've got to connect to a whole bunch of infrastructure."
On top of technical barriers, there were also financial and geographic hurdles. "What countries do you want to connect to? What is the cost structure going to be? It's a different cost to send an SMS in the US to what it is in Australia versus Indonesia, for example," he said. "Twilio basically flattens all that out, makes it super simple for developers and takes all of those headaches away, so that they can concentrate fully on the customer experience rather than on infrastructure."
When asked about other products, Hawksley shared, "The programmable messaging that I talked about a second ago, but we also have another product that has done incredibly well over the last three years - a product called Flex, which is essentially a fully programmable contact centre solution in the cloud." This allows people to "build customer experiences in any way they want, freed of the burden of a lot of the limitations that you might have from either a packaged solution or a typical cloud-based solution. Because it's all API driven - it's totally open, as I say, fully programmable - there really are no limitations."
He cited insurance companies as an example of how Flex is being used. "A customer might only really ever contact them at two points of time - either when they need to make a claim, or at the time of renewal. Two real moments that matter, where the customer expects really high quality interactions and a frictionless customer experience."
Twilio's technology powers over half a million contact centre agents, helping organisations to connect with customers "in their channel of choice, in a tone and a context that's appropriate."
Another standout customer story comes from the healthcare sector. Hawksley highlighted a collaboration with Fred IT, a technology provider for pharmacies in Australia. "Fred IT had this idea that in this modern age, fulfilling a prescription should not be a painful, paper-driven process," he said. Working with Twilio's APIs and WhatsApp, Fred IT "deployed to thousands of pharmacists throughout Australia and now having a prescription fulfilled is a seamless, paperless process. That's again a big leap from where we were maybe 18 months ago - and really what's interesting about Fred IT is that they brought this capability to life in a matter of weeks in the midst of a global pandemic."
Looking to the future, Hawksley said the main trend in customer engagement is hyper-personalisation. "What's vitally important in those comms is the degree of personalisation. We've kind of been through the first wave where the email or the text message or whatever it was, says 'Dear Alex'," he explained. The second wave involved recognising a customer's preferred communication channel. "The third wave is really interesting for me because it brings into focus the context, of being able to leverage data in real time and signals in real time. And also timing - timing is vitally important when it comes to hyper-personalisation and highly contextual messaging."
Twilio is investing heavily in this area, including the acquisition of data platform Segment. "Segment is doing amazing things with huge volumes of first-party data for our customers, making sure that they have all of the signals to hyper-personalise their messaging in this third wave of personalisation," he said. "We think that's going to be a mega trend for the next two to three years and something that we're certainly seeing a lot of developer, CIO and CMO interest in, so we're really excited by that trend."
For those inspired to give Twilio's offerings a try, the process is simple. "Everything that we have is available in the cloud, Alex, and the best way to connect with us is through our website," Hawksley said. "All of our products are available to try, so any developer out there who wants to get under the covers - a few clicks and you'll be up and running with Twilio, and we can't wait to see what you build."
