Twilio Conversations Creates Meaningful, Cross-channel Connections with Customers At Scale

Twilio Conversations provides one unified API to scale group conversations across SMS, MMS, Chat and WhatsApp

Removes the complexity of cross-channel orchestration, participant management and message archiving so developers can bring conversational experiences to market more quickly

SAN FRANCISCO -- SIGNAL 2019 -- Aug. 6, 2019 — Twilio (NYSE: TWLO), the leading cloud communications platform, today announced Twilio Conversations, an API that enables developers to build conversational experiences for their customers across multiple messaging channels. Integrating various messaging channels and maintaining the infrastructure to support group messaging and cross-channel conversations presents a complicated technical challenge for businesses. Twilio Conversations removes the complexity from the development process by allowing developers to leverage one unified API to scale group conversations across SMS, MMS, Chat and WhatsApp. To learn more, visit www.twilio.com/conversations.

“Over the last two decades, we’ve watched businesses evolve their communications with customers from the phone call, to website chat, to native mobile apps,” said Chee Chew, chief product officer at Twilio. “Leading companies have figured out that the next evolution of great customer experience is through messaging. Twilio Conversations empowers businesses to build personal, long-lived connections with their customers on the channels they prefer.”

A Twilio study found that 9 out of 10 consumers globally want to message with brands and that the majority of these people want to not only receive messages from a business but also be able to respond to that message. Building on the same messaging platform that has allowed digital natives and major enterprises to build communications into their applications, Twilio Conversations is a unified API that addresses some of the greatest challenges in customer messaging: cross-channel orchestration, participant management and message archives. By building this functionality into Twilio Conversations, developers’ time to market is dramatically reduced, allowing them to focus on building long-lasting relationships with customers.

With Twilio Conversations, developers can build experiences such as:

• Support conversations for field service - Imagine a customer needs to change the address of their takeout delivery order. They respond to an order confirmation text with the correct address. With Twilio Conversations, a customer support agent could receive that text in the contact center, chat with the driver who is on WhatsApp and bridge all three parties into one conversation to coordinate the delivery.
• Secure, compliant conversations for financial services - Imagine you are texting with your personal wealth advisor about an upcoming financial decision. You want to run the idea by your partner who is traveling internationally and only accessible via WhatsApp. With Twilio Conversations, your banker could use chat to have a secure, compliant and integrated conversation with you on text and your partner on WhatsApp. 

Pricing and availability

Twilio Conversations is available in the Twilio Console today in public beta.  

Conversations starts at $0.03 per active user per month and $.25 per GB of underlying storage fees. There is also a charge for any associated SMS or WhatsApp costs. 

About Twilio

Millions of developers around the world have used Twilio to unlock the magic of communications to improve any human experience. Twilio has democratized communications channels like voice, text, chat, video, and email by virtualizing the world’s communications infrastructure through APIs that are simple enough for any developer to use, yet robust enough to power the world’s most demanding applications. By making communications a part of every software developer’s toolkit, Twilio is enabling innovators across every industry — from emerging leaders to the world’s largest organizations — to reinvent how companies engage with their customers.