Guide

What is Twilio? An introduction to the leading customer engagement platform

Twilio helps organizations of all sizes create the best interaction with every customer—every time—thanks to data-fueled engagement powered by AI.

An introduction to the leading customer engagement platform

Chatting with customer support, receiving an appointment reminder, messaging your rideshare driver, getting a personalized coupon in your inbox, video conferencing with your doctor—all of those interactions have something in common: they’re powered by Twilio.

What exactly is Twilio?

The short answer: Twilio is a customer engagement platform used by over 300,000 global enterprises and digital disruptors plus more than 10 million developers worldwide to build unique, personalized experiences for their customers.

For well over a decade, we’ve been known for democratizing channels like voice, text, chat, video, and email through APIs, giving organizations the tools to build meaningful interactions with customers on the channels they prefer.

Today’s customers expect businesses to engage with them seamlessly at every touchpoint. That’s why we’ve grown beyond communication APIs and created solutions for data, sales, support, marketing, authentication, and more—helping businesses personalize and streamline every interaction.

Although 46% of companies believe they’re doing an excellent job at personalization, only 15% of customers agree, according to our 2023 State of Customer Engagement Report.

But with CustomerAI, Twilio helps businesses accelerate customer understanding and activation across every touchpoint thanks to:

Real-time predictions
Intelligent agents and assistance
Generative audiences, campaigns, and content
AI coaching and summarization
AI-powered insights

Plus, we empower organizations to unlock customer data for precise personalization with Twilio Segment, the world’s leading customer data platform. Segment empowers you to capture first-party customer data in real time, analyze it in a single view, and use it to supercharge interactions at scale. This helps you get a real-time understanding of every single customer and activate that data across every touchpoint to deliver consistently better engagement.

Then, Twilio’s communication tools enable business to activate that understanding to:

Reach every customer exactly how, when, and where they want
Learn from every interaction to improve the next
Confidently scale and grow trust securely and compliantly

This unique position gives us a front-row seat to see how communication and customer data—together—invigorate companies and uplift communities.

Our flexible, robust tools help organizations achieve the ultimate customer relationships, such as:

Assisting Toyota with creating a seamless customer experience for drivers
Empowering Resy to seamlessly connect restaurants and diners
Helping Vacasa achieve 3x more bookings with personalized campaigns
Supporting Lyft to deliver exceptional rider and driver experiences
Providing Airbnb with secure, streamlined messaging between hosts and guests

We believe in a future that’s more engaged than ever before—one where inefficient, disconnected communications are a relic of the past. To learn more about how we’re building that future, read on to discover who we are and what you can do with Twilio.

What you can build with Twilio

We believe that better data drives better engagement for customers and businesses alike. Twilio’s Customer Engagement Platform provides completely adaptable engagement channels that unlock the potential of every customer and help them feel like they’re your top priority.

We’ve spent over a decade creating and perfecting tools to help organizations reach their audiences. Today, that means we have tools that span the entire customer lifecycle—from marketing, to sales, to product and customer service.

Learn how Twilio’s powerful applications can help you uplevel your digital engagement by:

Increasing deliverability and open rates on customer communications
Decreasing time to resolution and customer acquisition costs
Boosting customer satisfaction and lifetime value

Twilio MessagingX

Twilio MessagingX provides reliable messaging, enabling businesses to reach customers around the globe. As one of the world’s most widely-used, trusted, and accessible communication tools, MessagingX empowers you to send and receive SMS, MMS, WhatsApp messages, and more at scale.

With Twilio's Programmable Messaging API, you can deliver one-way, transactional messages to customers across channels. Twilio’s Conversations API also supports customers at critical moments with scalable, multiparty conversations on their preferred channels.

Deliver messages on time in 180+ countries with Twilio's global network of tier-1 carriers, real-time routing, and deliverability insights. And with Twilio Phone Numbers, enjoy instant access to local, national, mobile, and toll‑free phone numbers in more than 100 countries with a developer‑friendly API.

Gartner names Twilio a Leader in Communications Platform as a Service

Twilio was named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for CPaaS based on ability to execute and completeness of vision.

Read the report

Twilio SendGrid Email API

We know how important it is for your emails to make it to the intended inboxes, regardless of your sending volume. With 99.99% uptime, delivering valuable emails to your customers is more streamlined than ever thanks to Twilio SendGrid Email API.

Deliver all your emails in seconds and without interruption thanks to our proprietary Mail Transfer Agent (MTA), intuitive console, powerful features, and email experts. Maximize inbox placement with streamlined tools, insightful recommendations, and expert services.

Interested in A/B testing, automation, and campaign analytics? We have a dedicated tool for marketers, too.

Twilio Voice API

Direct connections make an impact. Twilio Voice API lets you make, take, and modify calls from any device and seamlessly embed PSTN, SIP, or VoIP calling into any app, site, or service you already use.

From efficient self-service to personalized live support, Twilio Voice API gives you complete control of your voice experience and call data. Use the CustomerAI Perception Engine to turn voice calls into valuable customer data points and actionable insights, using machine learning with Twilio’s Voice Intelligence. Analyze and activate call recordings to create personalized voice experiences that drive revenue and customer satisfaction.

Twilio Flex

Twilio Flex is a flexible cloud contact center platform that scales with your business. It enables you to drive loyalty and repeat sales by connecting customers to the right person across sales or support, surface relevant data for personalized conversations, and enrich customer profiles along the way.

Flex integrates seamlessly with your existing solutions, so you can modernize your platform without replacing your current contact center. You can also add new features when you need them and iterate in days, not months.

Twilio Verify

Twilio Verify is a fully managed API for multichannel user verification. You can add seamless two-factor authentication to your onboarding and login flow with a single API that does the work of a full one-time password (OTP) delivery solution.

It also guarantees 100% protection from SMS pumping fraud with Fraud Guard by monitoring your current and historical SMS traffic. Fraud Guard has already saved customers over $30 million by blocking over 141 million fraud attempts, based on Twilio's publicly available price list as of 7/14/2023.

Twilio Lookup

Twilio Lookup adds a seamless layer of security to customer relationships using real-time phone data. It uses mobile-based signals to provide smooth and robust protection for digital platforms and users, minimizing fraudulent activities without compromising the experience.

Lookup also seamlessly integrates with Twilio Verify, Programmable Messaging, and more to enhance your engagement solution with best-in-class security. Lookup’s Identity Match also prevents bots and false account creation, plus it confirms user identities by matching user-supplied data using a specified phone number against authoritative sources.

Who we are

Our success is built on the hard work of developers, leaders across industries, nonprofit visionaries, and our growing community of Twilions. In our work, we prioritize trust, privacy, inclusion, and innovation to create a better world through communications and data.