Earlier this year we reported that Twilio was going to launch a full contact center solution called Flex on March 12 — lo and behold, today is March 12 and Twilio today announced the launch of Flex at the Enterprise Connect conference in Orlando. Flex brings together virtually every part of the existing Twilio infrastructure and platform for developers that already power nearly 40… Read More
12
2018
Twilio launches Flex, a fully programmable contact center
Earlier this year we reported that Twilio was going to launch a full contact center solution called Flex on March 12 — lo and behold, today is March 12 and Twilio today announced the launch of Flex at the Enterprise Connect conference in Orlando. Flex brings together virtually every part of the existing Twilio infrastructure and platform for developers that already power nearly 40 billion interactions a year and bundles it with a rather slick user interface for companies that want to set up an out-of-the-box contact center or update their existing deployments.
Twilio’s expertise has long been in providing backend communications services and its design expertise is mostly in building APIs, not user interfaces. With this move, though, the company is giving enterprises (and this product is meant for the kind of companies that have hundreds or thousands of people in a contact center) a full stack contact center with a full graphical user interface.
As the company’s head of its contact center business Al Cook told me, though, the main design philosophy behind Flex is to give users maximum flexibility. He argues that business today have to choose between going with products that they can’t customize themselves, so that they have to rely on expensive outside vendors that will do the customization for them (which also tends to take a lot of time), or a SaaS contact center that can be quickly deployed but is hard to scale and lacks customization options. “Think of Flex as an application platform,” Cook told me. It takes its cues from Twilio’s experience in working with developers and gives enterprises an easy API interface for customizing the service to their liking, but also provides all of the necessary tools out of the box.
“The reason why APIs were very transformative to the industry is because you are unconstrained in what you can do,” Cook explained. “Once you put a user interface on that, you constrain users.” So for Flex, the team had to ask itself some new questions. “How do you build user interfaces in a fundamentally different way that gives people the best features they want without constraining them?”
Out of the box, Flex supports all of the standard messaging channels that contact centers are now expected to support. These include Voice, video, text, picture messaging, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, LINE and WeChat. The service also supports screen sharing and co-browsing. Twilio is also integrating its own intelligent TaskRouter service into Flex to automatically route questions to the right agent. A single Flex deployment can support up to 50,000 agents.
Cook argues that getting started with Flex is a one-click affair, though once it’s up and running, most users will surely need to customize the service a bit for their own needs and embed chat widgets and other functions on their websites and into their apps (think click-to-call, for example). Some of the more in-depth customization can be done in Twilio Studio, the company’s drag and drop application builder, too.
Most large enterprises already have contact centers, though, so it’s maybe no surprise that some of the thinking behind making Flex as… well… flexible as possible is about giving those users the ability to mix and match features from Flex with their existing tools to allow for a slow and steady migration.
As we reported last month, Flex will also integrate with all the standard CRM tools like Salesforce and Zendesk, as well as workforce management and optimization tools that are currently in use in most contact centers.
Before launching the product today, Twilio already worked with ING, Zillow, National Debt Relief and RealPage to test Flex. In addition, it lined up a number of tech and consulting partners to support new users.
23
2016
The top 7 startups from Y Combinator S16 Demo Day 1
In-flight VR entertainment and security guard drones were amongst our favorites from the 44 startups that launched at Y Combinator’s Summer 2016 Demo Day 1. After querying investors and our writers, here are TechCrunch’s picks for the 7 most promising companies from the first half of the batch, plus an honorable mention. Check back later for all the startups and our picks from… Read More
11
2010
sfAmfPlugin 1.5.0 released
Hi all,
I have just released the version 1.5.0 of the sfAmfPlugin.You can get it from .
The new version brings some fixes and new features. Most noteably:
- Updated version of SabreAMF inlcuded (latest development version)
- Symfony 1.3 and 1.4 Support
- First version of a AMF Service Browser (thanks to Benoît Gouchet)
The plan for the next version shows improvements for Class Mapping, VO and Caching. And I promise to create a better documentation for it…
05
2009
sfAmfPlugin 1.4.2
I released a new version of the Symfony-Plugin sfAmfPlugin som hours ago. With the new version the communication between Flex and Symfony is easier than ever.The new version brings big improvements regarding the Doctrine Adapters. Relations between classes are handled better now. The error_reporting is working now as it should and there is a default implementation of a gateway module included.I hope you like it and find it useful. And as always I would like to hear from you if there are bugs or feature requests.Get it while it’s hot Timo
05
2009
sfAmfPlugin 1.3.0 released
Just want to inform you that my sfAmfPlugin for Symfony-Flex-Communication was released in version 1.3.0.
Most noticeable changes:
- Fixing a bug with PHP Strict mode (thanks to Daniel Holmes for spotting this one)
- Adding the possibility to store the services in all lib-folders of a project (app, module, project, plugins)
- Fixing different bugs with AMF conversion of Doctrine objects (thanks to Patrick Schirch for bugging me about them)
I’m still working to get the Doctrine support better, there will be much more about this in the next version of the plugin. Class mapping is also a thing I want to improve a lot. So stay tuned and watch out for future versions
16
2009
sfAmfPlugin 1.2.3 for Flex/Symfony released
Hi,
just for your information: I released the version 1.2.3 of the sfAmfPlugin earlier this day. The new version is a pretty important update so please install the new version.
The most important change is the fix of the bug taht caused problems with the usage of packages for the service classes
Installation as always:
$> symfony plugin:install sfAmfPlugin
If you want more information about the plugin vistit the symfony plugin page or read the the HelloWorld example blog post.
Timo
09
2009
sfAmfPlugin version 1.2.0 released
Hi all,
i just released the new version 1.2.0 of the AMF-Plugin for Symfony (http://www.symfony-project.org/plugins/sfAmfPlugin/1_2_0)
There are some new features in this version:
- Updated SabreAMF to the most current version 1.2.203
- Added a fix for Service-Classes with packages in the class name
- More work on comments and documentation
- Added Symfony 1.2.0 compatibility
- Added a new commandline-task with that you can create a new Service class
The most important new feature is the new task. You can now create a service class via command line:
$ symfony amf:create-service User will create a file /lib/services/UserService.class.php
$symfony amf:create-service –package=de.shiftup.project User will create /lib/services/se/shiftup/project/UserService.class.php
Get it while it is hot
As always: Feedback wanted!
08
2009
Just got Flex Builder 3
So I was curious about Flex, an Adobe Product to make Rich Internet Interfaces on a website or on the desktop using Adobe AIR. Installed Flex Builder 3 and am exploring it.
Reminds me a lot of Visual Basic when I first used an IDE, but on the web. Alot of reusable components will make this useful.
EDIT1: So I made my first Flex App. This is a really simple ZipCode app using Flex Builder 3 that’ll take a ZipCode and spit out the information from a web service.
EDIT2: Ok so I did a search on the web and found someone else doing a Flickr Tileset using Flex Builder 2. I take his source and update it to Flex Builder 3 (not as easy as Adobe said it would be), and this is the result: a very simple Flickr Tileset using Flex Builder 3.