loveholidays is one of the UK’s fastest growing online travel agencies, offering custom package holidays to families, couples and friends. It goes without saying the COVID outbreak has caused monumental upheaval within the travel industry globally.

For over 4 months, travel agencies like loveholidays have been forced to refocus their customer service agents from bookings onto cancellations. Record numbers of queries have been coming in from anxious customers, all while social distancing rules necessitate a remote working contact center model.

loveholidays needed to update their on-premise solution to a cloud-based platform so that their agents could work from home. Selecting Twilio Flex provided an immediate fix to their most immediate obstacle of getting loveholidays agents up and running remotely. But remote working was just table-stakes for loveholidays, they chose Twilio Flex because it’s natively an omnichannel platform on which to get up and running quickly and keep on innovating for …

Like many countries, the UK is reopening its hospitality sector after the COVID-19 lockdown. To support the NHS Test and Trace service, hospitality businesses are now expected to capture the name, contact number and arrival time of all customers – and keep a secure record of this for 21 days.

Many establishments are doing this the old fashioned way, with pen and paper. It’s obvious that this method is rife with issues, notably hygiene and security of personal information. I for one don’t want my personal information to be sat out on a piece of paper for hours on end. On top of that, how can you guarantee that people will give real or accurate information?

Many Twilio customers have found people using their phone to sign up for services can dramatically cut down on incorrect details. In this case, it could literally be life and death.

Twilio Consulting …

Today Twilio is delighted to announce a significant update to the Twilio Build Partner Program. First, we’re introducing Twilio Professional Services, working with our Twilio Build Consulting Partners to help customers architect and deploy Twilio solutions with confidence. Second, we’re launching Lightning Packages, a set of pre-defined consulting offerings that combine a structured delivery plan with existing IP to deliver value faster.  With the help of Twilio Professional Services working alongside Twilio Consulting Partners, now every company has access to the tools, resources, and expertise to build next-generation customer engagement.

For many organizations, the best customer engagement experiences are built, not bought, and to do that every organization needs to write software. However, not everyone has the skills and resources available to get started building. Twilio Professional Services and Consulting Partners are here to solve these challenges, providing resources to get your projects started today. Together, we’re levelling the playing …

Following on from the brilliant Engage Everywhere Event with Angela Ahrendts, it’s clear that consumer preferences have changed, and to be successful, we need to now build for the new normal as it’s likely to be around for quite a while. One of those new normal behaviors we’ve collectively developed is to reduce contact as much as possible, in order to reduce exposure and risk.

Interacting outdoors significantly reduces transmission risks to both employees and customers, making curbside pickup a perfect solution for many retailers. It’s also more convenient for customers, saving them time, and it’s a habit likely to stick for many years to come as it was already growing fast.

Twilio has been powering curbside pickup for major retailers for many years such as Bass Pro Shops and Joann Fabrics and Crafts, but if you don’t have an initiative already underway, what are some best practices you can …

This is a second in the series of posts about how companies are transforming their businesses using Twilio Flex to create products, you can find the first on Synergy Fusion here.

Fast Access to Flex

Ciptex RACE was born out of the need to help organisations quickly move to a home working solution and specifically developed to deliver a world-class cloud-based contact centre solution within minutes not months.

Ciptex built an online signup and setup process that enables customers to customize Twilio Flex to their needs in minutes. The RACE Marketplace provides plugins which offer access to tried and tested integrations to third-party applications, such as CRM platforms, card payment solutions and Workforce Management applications. Ciptex provides advice, consultancy and DevOps engineers if required to extend and tailor the solution, further unlocking value from Twilio Flex.

For Ciptex, Twilio Flex is a cloud contact center that gives organizations unprecedented …

Most of us are still adjusting to the new reality of social distancing and ‘shelter-in-place’. Surveys show that even when these orders are lifted, many of us are unwilling or unable to go back to “normal” life until a vaccine is widely effective. Consumer preferences have dramatically shifted during this time, and one of the big shifts has been towards conversational commerce. It’s been a macro-trend for a long time but the current crisis has accelerated it because customers aren’t able to shop in the same way, they generally prefer messaging over voice and …

Congratulations to Synergy Enterprise Solutions for introducing ​Synergy Fusion, a fully customizable omnichannel cloud contact center powered by Twilio Flex.​ Synergy Enterprise Solutions, a leading contact center and CRM solutions provider based in Australia and New Zealand developed Fusion to help businesses streamline customer service and communications.  

Introducing New Business Models With Twilio Flex

Twilio Flex gives businesses complete control over how, when and what they deploy. Built on the trusted Twilio cloud communications infrastructure that powers over a half-million agents today. With Twilio Flex, as the industry's only fully programmable platform, Twilio Flex lets businesses deploy Twilio's broad array of channels while giving developers the tools they need to easily create, change, or extend any part of the solution.

Twilio Flex is changing the way enterprise software is being consumed. Its programmable platform provides a unique opportunity for developers, entrepreneurs and innovative organizations to develop new customer service software …

We are excited to help partners accelerate time to revenue and profitability with Twilio by expanding the benefits provided to partners through Twilio Build.

Highlights include:

• New program types and tiers for 2020
• Deal Registration
• Proof of Concept Program
• Application Reviews
• Market Development Funds

Existing partners will have a webinar invite in their inbox today with the full details. If you’re not an existing partner, you can sign up for the waitlist here.

Since the beginning, our partners have been a vital extension of Twilio. That’s why today, we’re excited to announce Twilio Build enhancements coming in the latter half of 2019 and into 2020.

We’re still maintaining two flavors o …

When the network is the problem, what’s the solution?

Most of us have experienced the annoying effects of degraded video conferencing quality: audio becomes robotic and choppy while video turns into a sequence of blurry pictures. This is frustrating for end-users who tend to complain to application developers and platform providers asking for a solution. However, experience shows that most of the time, what causes these problems is the network access of the end users themselves. Notably, crappy wifi.

Wireless links are subject to so many different types of interference that can cause packet loss that it’s impossible to control. Worse, the use of shared access mechanisms split the available bandwidth amongst channels and may cause bitrate drops in crowded areas. Even with wired ethernet, routers and firewalls might get congested causing jitter, latency and packet loss. Worst of all, free, coffee shop wifi.

When video conferencing, all these problems …