Hulu's mission is to help people find and enjoy premium video content when, where and how they want it. They offer content from over 260 content companies, including ABC, Comedy Central, FOX, NBCUniversal, MTV, Miramax, and VH-1.

While preparing to launch Hulu Plus, a premium subscription offering, the customer support team needed a contact center solution that could scale reliably with the tremendous growth they were expecting. The team selected Twilio because of it's ease of use and low cost.

"The succinct REST-based API was familiar territory for our web developers, which helped up us get our prototype launched in one day, and into full production shortly thereafter", explains Scott Post, Software Developer. "Twilio's cloud model and flexibility also allows us to constantly improve the customer experience without long lead times. Our mantra is to keep things simple and focus our energy on helping users, and Twilio enables us to do just that."

When users call Hulu's toll free support number, provisioned through Twilio, they are quickly routed to an available customer support advocate. Because Hulu has an in house CMS integrated with Twilio's API's, the customer support advocate is able to immediately see all relevant user information in their browser, allowing them to provide a highly custom support experience.

If all customer support agents are busy, estimated wait times and queue positions are communicated to the caller. Music from popular shows on Hulu are played while they wait, and they also have the option to press '1' at any time to schedule a call back. In this scenario, Hulu's CMS will detect when an agent becomes available, and then automatically dial back the caller.

All of these workflows were created with the Twilio API by Hulu's development team. From the PLAY object, which enables custom audio to be played for users, to the DIAL object, which enables Hulu to programmatically dial back users when needed, Hulu was able to leverage their existing web skills to build the solution. Also, because Twilio tracks rich meta data for each call that flows through the system, Hulu is able to track all the critical metrics for their customer support team, from total calls, average call time, distribution of calls, to name a few.