AI adoption key to customer engagement, says Twilio

By Beatriz Marie D. Cruz, Reporter

PHILIPPINE businesses must adopt artificial intelligence (AI) tools to meet consumer demand for personalized experiences, said American cloud communications company Twilio.

“I would argue that, in Asia as a whole — including the Philippines — you’re seeing a higher level of sophistication among consumers,” Nicholas Kontopoulos, vice-president of marketing, Asia-Pacific & Japan at Twilio, said in an interview with BusinessWorld.

“[This is evident] both in their knowledge of how to use the tools available to them to get the best deals possible, compare services, and gain insights into which brands are serving their customers well,” he said.

Twilio helps companies build a platform for communication features such as messaging, calls, and customer support. It specializes in application programming interface (API), allowing businesses to seamlessly integrate Twilio’s services into their respective applications.

Other customer engagement solutions the company specializes in include user authentication and identity verification, voice APIs, and short message service (SMS) marketing.

Twilio serves over 325,000 global enterprises, including major firms like Uber, IBM, Dell, and HubSpot. In the Philippines, Twilio covers business-to-business and business-to-client brands across industries such as financial services, retail, and airlines.

About 57% of Philippine consumers said they are likely to spend money on brands that personalize their services, according to Twilio’s 2024 State of Customer Engagement Report.

Mr. Kontopoulos noted that companies’ data silos — or isolated data across departments or units — hamper their ability to leverage customer engagement.

To address this, the Twilio Segment customer data platform (CDP) helps developers collect and unify customer data. It provides insights across a firm’s marketing, sales, and customer service teams to ensure data-driven customer engagement.

The company is banking on its CDP to expand its reach in the Philippines, particularly in industries such as retail and financial services, amid the increasing demand for personalized customer engagement.

Likewise, the company’s ConversationRelay enables businesses to create robust natural-voice AI agents for customer inquiries. It seamlessly integrates real-time streaming, speech recognition, and interruption handling.

“Where I really get excited about AI is how it also will support individual employees in performing their roles more effectively,” he said, adding that AI can increase companies’ productivity by 20-30%.

CONSUMER TRUSTDespite this, Twilio seeks to ensure that its products are designed to secure customer data, the company said.

“People think about customer experience always at the front end, but security is a great opportunity to deliver and really solidify customer experience and trust,” he said.

It maintains a risk-based assessment security program based on the ISO/IEC 27001 information security management system (ISMS), according to its website. This includes administrative, technical, organizational, and physical safeguards reasonably designed to protect its services and the security, confidentiality, integrity, and availability of customer data.

The company also conducts regular external audits and subjects its employees to minimum security measures.

According to Mr. Kontopoulos, trust remains the “bedrock” of the customer experience.

“If I’m sharing my data with you, are you using that data? Are you protecting that data?” he said. “But then it’s also not just about protecting the data. Are you using that data in a way that creates value for me?”

Mr. Kontopoulos also cited the need for brands to be transparent about their AI use, especially in customer interactions.

“I think that’s one of the mistakes that businesses could make — if they don’t inform consumers that they’re dealing with an AI agent, and for whatever reason, their experience doesn’t go the way they hoped, it could create a negative reaction.”

According to Twilio’s latest State of Customer Engagement Report, Filipino consumers cite transparent communication (75%), accessibility and responsive customer service (73%) as the most effective ways brands can build their trust.

Amid firms’ rapid adoption of AI, the Department of Information and Communications Technology has been drafting its own guidelines on the ethical and trustworthy use of AI-related technologies.

Likewise, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas recently said it will issue regulations aimed at mitigating potential risks in the use of AI in the financial sector.

According to Mr. Kontopoulos, brands’ ability to personalize customer engagement through AI will impact their competitiveness.

“If you’re not doing this, you’re going to find yourself quickly falling behind your consumers’ expectations as well as your competitors who are servicing them.”