Introducing Flex Boost: A Program for Contact Centers Impacted by COVID-19

Introducing Flex Boost: A Program for Contact Centers Impacted by COVID-19

COVID-19 has had a significant impact on organizations of all sizes — especially in the contact center. Companies are grappling with the reality of needing to quickly determine how to move a significant portion of their agents to work-from-home. At the same time, organizations and individuals are also creating new contact centers for public benefit.

We want to provide additional assistance to organizations, globally, impacted by COVID-19, which is why we’re launching Flex Boost. Flex Boost is a program that provides technical, operational, and financial resources to aid with the impact of COVID-19 on contact centers. Flex Boost consists of the following three pillars:

• Extended Free Hours: 10,000 free Flex Active User Hours (AUH) per month until June 30th for any company impacted by COVID-19, no contract required. 20,000 free Flex AUH per month until August 31st for qualified Direct Response projects. This includes access to Flex Insights.
• Technical Resources: Guides, tutorials, plugins, and sample code to get you started with Flex quickly.
• Operational Guidance: Advice and best practices from our customers to help you transition to and operate a distributed contact center.

You can find more details about each of these parts below, including links to resources and information on how to get started. We will be keeping this page up-to-date as we add additional resources to the program.

Extended Free Hours

We want to reduce the cost of transitioning or creating a contact center on Flex for organizations impacted by and responding to COVID-19. By default, we include 5,000 free Active User Hours to help you get started with Flex.

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re providing a larger grant of free Active User Hours for qualified organizations creating a new Flex project. We’re also providing access to Flex Insights, our historical reporting tool, for all organizations that qualify for either program.

Companies impacted by COVID-19 are now eligible to receive 10,000 free Active User Hours every calendar month until the end of June — no contract required. This allows any company impacted by COVID-19 to operate the equivalent of a 60 agent contact center for up to 3 months for just the cost of Twilio connectivity (PSTN minutes, SMSes, WhatsApp Template Messages) and any additional Active User Hours. Any company with a Flex project created after March 11th is eligible for this grant of hours.

Organizations that are creating or extending a COVID-19 related project explicitly for public benefit are eligible to receive 20,000 free Active User Hours every calendar month until the end of August. This is in addition to the other credits and discounts offered through our Twilio.org programs. This allows those projects to operate a contact center with the equivalent of 120 agents for up to 5 months for just the cost of Twilio connectivity (PSTN minutes, SMSes, WhatsApp Template Messages) and any additional Active User Hours.

We recognize that not all organizations and individuals creating COVID-19 related projects for the public benefit are non-profits. That’s why we have expanded our eligibility criteria for our Twilio.org programs to span any organization or individual that creates a project that directly responds to COVID-19 and is for the greater good.

Technical Resources

Many businesses, organizations, and governmental agencies are responding to the current public health crisis by spinning up contact centers with Twilio in a week – or shorter. We want to make it even easier for these organizations to deploy Twilio Flex with Flex Boost.

To do this, we’ve put together a set of tutorials, guides, plugins, and sample code with many of our best practices for distributed agents already baked in. We’re focusing our efforts on creating content and tools that solve some of the unique needs brought to light by COVID-19. We’ll be expanding these resources over the coming weeks.

Resources

Articles, Tutorials, and Guides

• Tutorial: Deploy a Remote Agent Contact Center in 30 Minutes With Twilio Flex - Twilio
• Tutorial: Create Queues and Skills for A Twilio Flex Contact Center - Twilio
• Guide: Tips for Setting up Work from Home Agents with Twilio Flex - Twilio
• Tutorial: Twilio WhatsApp API and Flex in Minutes - Twilio
• Tutorial: Integrating Facebook Messenger with Twilio Flex

Flex Plugins, Sample Code, and Utilities

• Flex Plugin: Chat and SMS Transfers
• Utility: Okta Setup Script for Flex

Operational Guidance

For many contact centers, having a significant number of agents working from home is a foray into uncharted territory. Organizations are asking questions like: How do you shift the culture to fully support a remote agent model? How do you keep agents motivated and empowered? How do you effectively manage a dispersed workforce when you’re used to being in one location?

Fortunately, many of our customers at Twilio either operate contact centers with large numbers of work-from-home agents or have already moved their agents to work-from-home in response to COVID-19. We’re interviewing them and collecting their experiences, advice, and best practices for transitioning to and operating a distributed contact center. We’re also creating a set of operational resources, including project plans and consulting sessions that have been put together by our Professional Services team.

Resources

Expert Interviews

• Interview: Shopify's Advice on Operating a 100% Remote Contact Center

Articles and Guides

• Article: Best practices for businesses across crisis comms, elastic infrastructure, and business continuity in the age of COVID-19 - Twilio
• Article: Best practices for contact centers to manage customer service in the midst of a crisis - Twilio
• Article: Adapting your business continuity plan in the time of COVID-19