• by Ray Schultz , September 30, 2020

Twilio has added several features to its cloud communication platform to help firms speed up their digital transformation in response to COVID-19.

The enhancements were announced at the company’s SIGNAL 2020 event.

“Faced with an entirely new reality over the past six months, enterprises have been forced to accelerate their digital transformation plans to serve their customers,” states Jeff Lawson, CEO and co-founder of Twilio. 

In one launch, Twilio is offering Twilio Video Web RTC Go, a free toolkit that it says can help firms create and field one-to-one video applications.  

The company has seen a 500% increase in video since the start of COVID-19.   

In addition, Twilio has introduced Twilio Flex Ecosystem, a service that provides access to over 30 solutions from partners such as Google, Salesforce, Zendesk, and Calabrio.

Twilio introduced Twilio Flex, its cloud contact center, at SIGNAL in 2018 and has since added 100 features.

This year, Twilio also has unveiled Twilio Frontline, a mobile application that allows field workers to engage with customers from their personal devices. 

This app routes incoming and outgoing customer conversations from WhatsApp, SMS/MMS and web chat with more channels on the horizon, to a single app on an on an available employee’s personal device, the company says.  

Another new feature is Event Streams -- API that aggregates data from all Twilio-powered experiences, including voice, SMS and Super SIM and TaskRouter, while enabling reporting across channels.

Research by Twilio found that 97% of enterprises have accelerated their digital transformation by an average of six years in response to COVID-19. 

The company says that Twilio SendGrid processed 3 trillion emails in May, at a rate of 2.5 billion emails per day.

In the first half of this year, Twilio has sent and received almost double the number of messages of all types it did in the same period in 2019, the company says.