Keith Dawson's Analyst Perspectives

We are happy to share some insights about Twilio drawn from our latest Value Index research, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements.

We published the Ventana Research Value Index: Contact Center in the Cloud 2021, the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts. It is an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings will address buyers’ requirements for contact center software. The index is structured to replicate an RFI/RFP process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain technology, and maintain relationships with vendors.

In all of our Value Indexes we utilize a structured research methodology that includes evaluation categories designed to reflect real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal (RFP) and vendor selection process for contact center in the cloud. We evaluated Twilio and 13 other vendors in seven categories, five relevant to the product (adaptability, capability, manageability, reliability and usability) and two related to the vendor (TCO/ROI and vendor validation). To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our experience and on data derived from our benchmark research. Twilio’s overall performance rating in the Value Index is at 71.7%, with customer experience at 65.5% and product experience at 72.9%.

Twilio is one of the newest entrants to the contact center market with its focus on cloud communications platforms. Twilio was categorized as a Vendor of Merit, ranking 14th overall, and performed best in the Manageability category due largely to its strengths in data and application. Twilio’s CCaaS offering, Twilio Flex, is more geared toward organizations that plan to do a great deal of custom development to build their contact center infrastructures. It is focused on CPaaS but it directly engages the CCaaS market.

Twilio best ranking in Validation comes from its efforts to support customer requirements. It also performed well in Adaptability where its offering can augment existing contact centers.

Despite its own marketing and sales as a cloud contact center, Twilio has a great deal of room for improvement in every category. Though it supports a wide range of contact channels, the interaction handling features on those channels need beefing up, as does support for workforce optimization.

This assessment was based on Twilio’s cloud contact center products available at end of March in 2021. Since then, Twilio announced the acquisition of ZipWhip, which specializes in text-based communications with customers.

When cloud contact centers first emerged a decade ago, the focus for many was on finding the lowest cost provider. Today’s organizations should consider a broader range of criteria in their selection process, which we outline in this Value Index. A modern contact center requires a technology that provides continuous innovation and a product and customer experience to meet their long-term goals. With this in mind, when organizations begin the process of evaluating their efforts, they might consider Twilio.

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of contact center in the cloud software in the industry. Technology buyers can learn more about how to use our Value Index by clicking here and included vendors that wish to learn more can click here. Read the report here.

Regards,

Keith Dawson