MarTech Interview with Meera Vaidyanathan, VP of Product at Twilio Flex

Meera Vaidyanathan, VP of Product at Twilio Flex joins us to talk about Twilio’s latest partnership with Frame AI while commenting on the benefits of predictive and generative AI capabilities:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Meera, take us through the highlights of your B2B tech journey so far and tell us more about your time at Twilio…

I lead product design for Twilio Flex, our contact center solution that powers digital engagement for major brands like Toyota Connected, Better Mortgage, and Lyft.

In my role, I lead a global team and manage a product with global reach and adoption. My priorities as a product leader are building products with the end user in mind – creating value, solving customer experience challenges, and offering better personalization for consumers.

Prior to Twilio, I was a product leader for Amazon’s Honeycode within AWS. In this role, I executed AWS’s strategy and early product development for their low-code/no-code products for B2B use cases. I also led the building of a K-12 edtech product that reached more than 90% of school districts in the United States and was used daily by more than 1.5 million students to practice and learn math.

One of the most rewarding parts of my career has been seeing how the power of technology has the ability to transform life and work.

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We’d love to hear more about the Twilio and Frame AI partnership and how that will reshape the contact center experience down the line for end users?

Twilio Flex and Frame AI partnered to provide contact center decision makers with key insights and recommendations to optimize their contact center operations and, in turn, improve customer experiences.

The Twilio and Frame AI partnership will strengthen how AI-powered insights transform the contact center experience. Frame AI offers Flex customers the ability to harness the power of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) by analyzing customer intent and case severity effectively. With these capabilities, end users can create and monitor reports and make well-informed decisions.

Frame AI will also be able to apply generative AI to summarize cases and share recommendations. For instance, a company can customize its models to identify and categorize customer intent. Once this AI model is implemented, businesses will have access to reports within Flex to monitor the persisting topics, costs and customer assets that help determine recommendations for how to move forward with claims. Flex can help CX leaders improve the customer experience by reassigning agents or updating representative training.

Overall, the combined solutions utilize AI to uncover and summarize emerging themes that predict key metrics, allowing CX leaders to better allocate resourcing and product decisions that drive measurable business outcomes.

How are you seeing AI / Generative AI reshape various facets of the sales and after-sales / contact center experience today and what key thoughts do you have on the future of these technologies and its impact?

AI helps to automate tasks, which gives agents time back while increasing efficiency and accuracy. Generative AI has the capabilities to make sense of massive amounts of data and provide contact center agents with the right context and responses in real time on calls. Generative AI also has the ability to transcribe and summarize conversations for easy call wrap up, provide agents with next best action based on prior interactions, and overall help improve the end-to-end customer experience.

AI capabilities are only as good as the data that they are built on. When companies provide real-time first party data, AI allows for a more human approach to customer service. Agents will have the time and resources to utilize this customer data to fuel more meaningful support conversations. We expect AI to create a more user-friendly experience that drives personalization at scale – giving customers dedicated, personalized support.

What should brands in your view be doing to use AI more effectively to drive CX and personalization without compromising on ethics and without allowing AI biases to affect their outcomes?

At Twilio, we are committed to building AI safely and responsibly. We build privacy and security by design into our product development lifecycle and will ensure our customers have full transparency and control of the data that informs AI-powered interactions with their customers.

How do you feel contact centers of the near future will shape up or evolve?

This is an exciting time to be in the contact center space because we’re in the midst of a massive shift. Companies are now embracing and seeing the potential of AI, leveraging customer data and looking at the full end to end customer journey.

Contact centers are a main touch point between companies and their customers. They generate important data about customers, including sentiment, propensity to purchase or churn, relevant adjacent products, customer satisfaction, lifetime value, and more.

This data is unfortunately often siloed, along with data from marketing and sales teams. Today, customers expect a seamless end-to-end journey, with companies leveraging this data and sharing it across departments to provide better customer service. For example, if a contact center conversation indicates a customer’s interest in an adjacent product, the company could then target a marketing campaign with discounts to that customer to increase propensity to purchase.

Predictive and generative AI are also starting to transform contact centers because AI has the ability to take massive amounts of data, summarize it, and deliver the most relevant content to customers. This is a huge win for everyone across the board. For customers, this means they can get answers faster and through their preferred channels. For businesses, AI tools allow them to lean on tech for a broader set of use cases and deploy their human agents for more high-value conversations.

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If you had to share five thoughts about the state of martech in the next decade, what would it be?

• Generative and predictive AI are going to simplify marketers’ jobs because they can easily generate messages tailored to their customers’ tone and channel.
• AI will improve the customer experience by dramatically shortening response and resolution times.
• Martech professionals will work more closely with data scientists and researchers, and allocate their time to better understand the capabilities and limitations of AI.
• We will see businesses share more real-time content tailored to the audience.
• Businesses that provide personalized experiences powered by first-party data gathered from across the organization will win the hearts, minds (and wallets) of customers.