Twilio will soon launch Flex, a dedicated contact center solution

Twilio’s Engagement Cloud, its suite of products for building new customer experiences, is about to get a new feature, TechCrunch has learned. The company plans on launching the beta of a full contact center solution for businesses at the Enterprise Connect conference in March, according to a tip we received this afternoon. When reached for confirmation, Twilio had no comment.

With the launch of this product, Twilio could potentially be going up against some of its current customers who are selling contact center solutions to enterprises. In a copy of the internal email we saw about the upcoming launch of this new product, the company clearly aims to avoid this impression, but that’s likely because it’s worried about how this move will be perceived by current players in this market who are likely using some of Twilio’s services themselves.

Until now, Twilio positioned its various APIs as the building blocks for developing new contact center solutions. With Flex, it’ll now essentially bundle these together to make it far easier for developers to build these services.

Our understanding is that Twilio Flex, as the service is currently called (though that could change in the time leading up to the launch date), will follow in the footsteps of most of the company’s products in that it will put an emphasis on the developer experience. For example, it will allow systems integrators to build a customized contact center solution on top of Flex.

Twilio Flex will offer them the basic building blocks to power the communications experience, single sign-on and integration points for these organizations workforce management and workforce optimization suites (i.e. all of the usual contact center goodies, like call recording, agent coaching, speech analytics, etc.), as well as integrations with their back-office employee scheduling systems.

As the name implies, Twilio is positioning this service as a very customizable solution, though that also means that it’ll take some extra integration work on the side of the customer to make it work. Twilio, however, argues that it’s exactly this kind of customization that will enable businesses to optimize their contact centers.

According to our source, the announcement is currently scheduled for March 12th, the first day of the Enterprise Connect conference In Orlando, which focuses on the contact and calling center market.

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