Episode web page: https://bit.ly/4aP37nC ----------------------- Rate Insights Unlocked and write a review If you appreciate Insights Unlocked, please give it a rating and a review. Visit Apple Podcasts, pull up the Insights Unlocked show page and scroll to the bottom of the screen. Below the trailers, you'll find Ratings and Reviews. Click on a star rating. Scroll down past the highlighted review and click on "Write a Review." You'll make my day. ----------------------- In this episode of Insights Unlocked, Michelle Engle sits down with Andy O’Dower, Twilio’s VP of Product Management, to dive into the company’s game-changing approach to customer communication. From simplifying complex communication systems for developers to using AI to deliver personalized experiences, Twilio is leading the way in reshaping how businesses engage with their customers. Andy shares how Twilio’s platform enables real-time, omnichannel communication at a massive global scale, helping brands create trusted, seamless, and smart interactions. He also sheds light on how advancements in conversational AI, sentiment analysis, and voice intelligence are revolutionizing customer engagement and support. What You’ll Learn in This Episode: How Twilio empowers developers with simple APIs to integrate voice, video, email, and messaging capabilities. How AI tools like transcription, sentiment analysis, and virtual agents are redefining customer experiences. Why trust and privacy are essential in building AI-driven communication systems. The role of autonomous agents in creating personalized, frictionless interactions with customers. Twilio’s vision for the future of customer engagement, with AI and data at its core.
Chapter 1: Who are the hosts and guest of this episode?
Welcome to the Insights Unlocked podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, Senior Manager for Content Production at UserTesting. And joining us today as host is Michelle Engel, UserTesting's Chief Product Officer. Welcome to the show, Michelle.
Great. It's great to be here. Hi, everyone.
And our guest today is Andy O'Dower. Andy is Twilio's Vice President of Product Management for Voice, Video, and Flex. Andy possesses a rich blend of entrepreneurial, technical, and business expertise. He has founded and scaled platforms, as well as B2B SaaS and B2C products, serving thousands of customers and millions of consumers at companies like Wowza, Snapsheet, and Curiosity.
Welcome to the show, Andy.
Thanks for having me. Great to be here.
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Chapter 2: How is Twilio revolutionizing customer communication?
So Andy, thank you for joining us. I'm looking forward to the conversation today. And I was thinking to get us started, why don't you give us a quick overview of what Twilio is and how the platform is used by businesses to enhance customer communication and experience?
Sure. Thanks for having me again. Yeah, if you think about it, and Twilio just celebrated our 16th birthday, if you will, from conception 16 years ago to the really massive global scale that Twilio operates. If you think about it, the messages that you might get from a business, you want them to be personalized, effective, and that's really what Twilio does.
It's a customer engagement platform to really drive personalized real-time experiences and communications for brands at a global scale. So if you think about it, we've built this solution to a really difficult problem for businesses that need an easy way to communicate with their end customers and consumers. They need a big trusted platform that navigates
every channel from email, messaging, voice, video, over the top channels like WhatsApp as well, and need that to just work and be simple to be able to access. They need all the contextual data to be able to serve those communications to make them personalized. So you and I and others on the receiving end of any of those have a really delightful experience and then
We've got a massive ecosystem of developers that was really at the heart of the company founding was making it easier to take all of these big complex communication systems and make them very simple APIs for developers and builders to build them into their applications and reach customers and consumers.
And so you might see them in your everyday life of onboarding to the latest mobile app that you downloaded and authenticating and making sure
you're sharing with the business who you are and they know who you are very simple things like your one-time password that you might get from uh from a business to um email marketing and promotions that you might get or the you know ever important transactional things that you know money's in your bank you know your packages arriving on time to conversational um and that's really where um you know we play into that sales and customer service so from everything from
from authenticating and security to marketing promotions to sales and customer service. You can kind of picture that whole customer life cycle that you might have with a business. And then as a builder that you have with your end consumers, Twilio is right at the heart of all of those communications there for context. So massive, massive scale and a great company to be a part of that
as communications is changing and shifting with AI at the forefront where we are right now. So it's a great place to be.
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Chapter 3: What role does Andy O'Dower play at Twilio?
Amazing. That's a great overview. Thanks. Could you also tell us a bit about your role at Twilio? What are your main responsibilities? How does your team contribute to improving CX through Twilio's voice, video, and flex products?
Sure. So at the heart of it, we have a saying, wear the customer shoes as part of our Twilio values and Twilio magic. And at the end of the day, my job really distills on how do I help my team and our company, my team of product managers, leaders,
directors, work with our core design partners, core engineering partners, architecture, and our customers and developer community to deliver the right product to the customers at a really big scale. And so that really distills down into understanding what these end consumers need and what our businesses need. What are those jobs to be done?
How are they really trying to reach their customers at the end of the day? How can we make our products better, easier, faster? We've really honed in on this idea of trusted, simple, and smart layers. So how that relates to product management is going into our whole platform that's grown over the years.
um, to hundreds of thousands of customers, tens of millions of developers to ensure our, all our communications trusted at the end of the day, we all want to make sure that, um, all the communications are trusted and that can mean many things that can mean reliability and scale of the platform that can mean introducing things like branded calling and the voice platform, for example.
So, and consumers know who is the business that's reaching out to them. And that relates into messaging and email as well. then if we think about simple, then what are those ways that we can simplify a depth and breadth of product offerings that we have in APIs over the years to continue to introduce that magic moment
that wow moment that a builder comes to Twilio and says, wow, that was super simple, super easy and powerful. I want to go tell my team, look what we can do with the power of Twilio at that simple layer. And so over time with a 16 year old business, those types of complexities start to add up and those features and capabilities start to add up.
So in some cases, it's how do we edit down and really simplify and really stay true to that Twilio magic moment, that aha moment of getting a product up and running? And then that smart layer is really thinking through how can we leverage AI for a lot of the automated communications that we see happening?
How can we help our customers identify fraud faster with AI models, save on costs with automated AI agents and things like that, and then
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Chapter 4: How does AI contribute to Twilio's product strategy?
How do they get their their need addressed? And that can happen in a variety of ways. And so really making sure that that global platform is stable, up and running. You never even worry about the quality of a call you're going to have globally. And then you start thinking about all the other capabilities that you can do on top of it, of recording, transcribing, speech recognition.
uh voices back in a uh automated virtual agent scenario uh for those types of things and then on the video side of things too we've got a big uh helmet telemedicine healthcare education financial services component where it's a small room usually a one-to-one type scenario and embedded in a customer's application. So it's very seamless.
Customers and a telemedicine patient, for example, doesn't have to opt out to a third party call or a Zoom call or Microsoft Teams or something else like that. They stay in that application. of the business or the healthcare provider that they're dealing with, for example, making sure that type of stuff just works.
And then as you get into the Flex environment, a contact center as a service, we just see contact centers really being disrupted left and right. And our approach, again, is to build a platform where builders can embed these contact center capabilities like automated virtual agents and agent co-pilots right into their applications so they can really scale.
They can automate a lot of areas of customer service. And then when they do have these critical make or break moments with consumers and their agents, that they're super agents. And so we empower them. And so I'm happy to share more about that. But that's kind of the depth and breadth of this big communications business.
And these three that I lead and then really ensuring that that, you know, trusted, simple, smart are these this ethos that really blends into our product development. And then at the other side is ensuring that we leverage our position of just. Communications is hard to build out that infrastructure for our customers. Data is hard to know who am I talking to?
Who are these customers that I can personalize experience? And then leveraging AI as well to enhance that. That's kind of the other layer, three layer of communications data and AI that we look at that is just in my day to day, all day, every day as we build products.
Makes sense. I think as we build products, the trusted, simple, smart, and then you also said better, faster, easier, great mantras for lots of our listeners to be thinking about as they're leading their teams. So you mentioned AI. So let's explore that for a little bit. I know it's top of mind for a lot of folks who listen to the podcast.
How do you see conversational AI transforming customer support and engagement in the coming years? And where do you see opportunities or challenges for brands as they look at how they adopt more AI-driven interactions?
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Chapter 5: How is conversational AI transforming customer support?
So in that sense, you've got amazing innovations that have happened in things like speech recognition. And that's a really key piece that's AI driven there. And then you've got really amazing generative AI voices on the other side. So you can build out these experiences that are really highly personalized contact center virtual agents
to answer many of the customer support queries that might come in from a large volume of consumers at any given time. And if you think about it as consumers, we want things to when we have those make or break moments, we want things to get done really quickly. We want that agent that has the most knowledge about us and our behavior.
Again, that contextual data, they understand us, they hear what we're saying on that side of things, and then they can actually take action and resolve any type of situation as fast as possible. So if you kind of take that just archetype of this super agent, Then you start to have the technology that can do it. You can bring the data at the second a customer calls in.
For example, they know it's Andy. They know it's me. They know my purchase history and my lifetime value and probably what I'm having problems with because I've been trying to do a forgot password on a big purchase to try to complete my cart purchase in that type of example. Or I'm a really hot lead because I need to get a new mortgage and now I want to talk to somebody.
You know, those types of scenarios where now conversational AI can know all of that data, they can be able to hear me and understand me, they can respond quickly, and they have all the knowledge in the world about the business and about the policies and about the product catalog and everything else like that. So we're starting to see, you know, timing is everything.
We're starting to see these things come together where, you know, previously in old IVR worlds of interactive voice response of press one for this, press two for that type thing. Maybe we'll kind of smartly intelligently route you to an agent that might be able to help you and then have to start all over again. Those days are really over.
And I think that's where the things that Twilio's approach to this is, is being a builder platform. We have large businesses that serve hundreds of thousands of customers in their own right to meet small and medium sized businesses and sell software. So offering those solutions to them.
to then offer solutions to their customers that might reach an end consumer at your local coffee shop or your local bike store or local realtor or something else like that. Really give these businesses the power that then also the big enterprises have, because that's also a big set of our customers too.
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Chapter 6: What are the challenges and opportunities for AI in customer interactions?
So I think it's really interesting as we're moving from this kind of black box technology, AI models over here, into bringing them really close to these voice channels and messaging channels to be able to be really effective. And now, you know, kind of chatbots and agents being this representation of your brand.
You know, it could be your website was that reputation of your brand and social media is another outlet of your brand. I think we're gonna see more and more of these agents being a representation of your brand and handling many, many things that
You know, for a long time, all of us, you know, got used to pointing and clicking and waiting and emailing and waiting on hold and everything else like that, where that doesn't have to be the case any longer. So it's super exciting right now.
Yeah, the ability to truly improve the customer experience. I mean, I think that most folks would say when they're calling in to support, their bar is pretty low. They've had their poor interactions. And I think the potential to really transform that, make it so much better for the consumer is amazing.
So you started to go into this, but let's talk a little bit about voice AI and how that is unlocking new ways to engage with customers. How is Twilio enhancing CX by using AI features like sentiment analysis or transcription? And what impact do you see these having on that customer satisfaction side?
Sure. Yeah. And if you think about it, you know, voice was the founding product that Jeff Lawson started the company with 16 years ago. That was the idea is essentially we know that voice is is a is a critical customer business interaction product. It's the way we've always communicated for millions of years.
And so that's the easiest, fastest way back to those types of words, easiest, fastest, simplest way for us to communicate our needs. And so really eliminating the complexity of building that type of thing to reach consumers.
um on a voice channel globally any time it was really the next logical move for us to move up stack and offer these things like real-time transcriptions to turn this audio that previously was ephemeral phone hangs up all the data goes away versus other channels that you track like crazy of clicks and everything else on a website and behavior but then you don't do anything on the voice channel
when those were the make or break moments that you talk to a customer and consumer. So that's where we really started through both acquisitions and investment starting years and years ago to turn that, you know, that ephemeral audio into really good structured data and first and zero party data to be super helpful.
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