Speed is the name of the game for digital transformation in the pandemic era. With direct physical contact limited, going virtual is necessary for both consumers and organisations.

Expectations for ease and safety have heightened amid an increased understanding of the risks that arise from complacency. Online communication is the lifeblood of the new norm; that’s how we work, shop, connect with our family and colleagues and stay sane.

The value of communication infrastructure has shifted from the pure physical, like towers, satellites and copper wires, to digital software. It has affected both consumers who use the applications and developers who innovate the technology.

Serving both the end-users and DevOps with these tools is Twilio. The leading cloud-communications platform builds APIs to integrate and support all digital channels, from voice and chat to video and live streaming, with web, desktop and mobile software.

APIs enable developers to set up the omnichannel system that best suits their organisations at an accelerated speed, thus giving users more convenience and time-saving to connect and conduct their business.

When Covid-19 turned into a pandemic, the Australian government tasked Fred IT Group to complete the design and build of a new electronic prescription platform in eight weeks, instead of a typical six-month timeline — Fred did it by upgrading its eRx Script Exchange service with Twilio Programmable Messaging API.

Patients who wish to order their prescriptions through their local pharmacy can now seamlessly do it via WhatsApp. This technology is built using Twilio’s solutions.

“Twilio has allowed us to grow at scale and fast, meeting consumer expectations and changing behaviours. We’ve also recently launched a WhatsApp integration capability, providing digital prescriptions and meeting our customers where they are communicating,” Fred founder and CEO Paul Naismith said. eRx is currently being used by 21,000 doctors and 95% of pharmacies in Australia and has provided over 11 million digital prescriptions.

Optimising and integrating communication channels isn’t the only thing Twilio has to offer. Its Segment CDP (customer data platform) has the smarts to improve customer engagement and experience by gaining better insight into what customers want, and realising it. That is how vacation rental company Vacasa crafted its personalised messaging and tripled its bookings.

Before implementing Twilio Segment, Vacasa had no clear view of how the guests and homeowners interact with its website in real-time. It didn’t know how they started, where their last conversation left off, and what their preferences were. It had various touch points but no way to see all the separate data silos together as one big picture. Twilio Segment changed that.

Segment unified Vacasa’s data and provided a single source of truth for its teams to observe the customer journey, and devise strategic decisions to give what the customers wanted. Then Twilio Programmable Messaging and SendGrid Email API opened up the path to best reach the customers with the right message through their preferred channels.

“Capturing event activity with SendGrid webhooks, building a customer data pipeline in Segment, then passing it into our data warehouse to create an accessible schema has been a complete game-changer – it allows us to get communication out to customers within a few hours rather than a few days. We can get an exact look at event history to see whether we need to send emails to people that have received the alert email but didn’t open or take any action.”

“We are now able to slice and dice raw data to inform tactical product decisions,” said G Scott, Vacasa’s Director of Marketing Analytics. “This has changed how we prioritise ad campaigns and warranted an investment in building out a guest app, which has proven to pay dividends.”

Omnichannel customer engagement solutions make for a better and more personalised customer experience. Twilio’s technology can also be applied to personalisation by the organisation via API access, which means crafting solutions fast and deploying them as SaaS. Why be the same when you’re as different as your customers?

Don’t just hear it from us; to further explore how start-ups and global enterprises have built with Twilio, we suggest following this link.