Twilio is Missing a $10.2 Billion Opportunity

Twilio provides APIs that power email, sms, and chat deliverability for many market leading contact centers. In March 2018, Twilio launched Flex as a full contact center solution. This product originally catered towards enterprises looking for a more out of the box full graphical user interface.?

Zendesk, a Twilio customer, inherently became a competitor with this launch. In June of 2022, Zendesk was taken private for $10.2 billion on $1.58 billion in revenue.?

Today, Zendesk is still a Twilio customer and Flex finds itself in an awkward position, branded as a “digital engagement center” that tries to compete with CRMs and contact centers. Being caught in the middle is a conundrum.

Flex is a huge opportunity for Twilio. There is more upside in competing for Zendesk deals as a contact center.?

Having built and sold products in the contact center space and directly working with over 300 Zendesk admins in 2023, I’ve never heard Flex in conversation amongst these leaders. Flex should be competing directly to win these contact center deals. I’ve found the below missing:

1. Trust: Contact centers are primarily sold to Chief Customer Officers and their teams. In this market, measures to cut costs are top of mind and when there is little user interface difference between contact centers, there is a huge opportunity. Flex needs to brand itself as the most reliable one that these Zendesk customers are already using because existing solutions are built on Twilio’s APIs.?
2. Pricing: Flex’s pricing model needs an update to be comparable to how buyers make decisions. You can’t shift two behaviors in a sale.?
3. Sales motion: There is a huge outbound opportunity here to compete with Zendesk deals. Twilio is the backend provider of communication already. Flex should be in every Chief Customer Officer’s conversation.?
4. Branding: Flex needs to be defined as a contact center or CRM. Different leaders make up these buying decisions. Twilio needs to make a branding decision for Flex.?
5. Ease of Use:? In its current form, you can't even onboard yourself to Flex.? This must change in order to compete.
6. Data Visibility: This is where Flex can thrive. Zendesk and Intercom are limited in their contextual capabilities. Great contact centers need the ability to not only communicate but also ingest enough data to give teams the context they need to respond correctly.?
7. Integrations: Flex will go above and beyond by enabling teams to communicate and solve support inquiries, whether that be an order refund or subscription update. Teams will not have to switch tabs or applications to support their customers.?

I’ve stored 17 pages of notes where existing contact centers fall short and understood why over a dozen teams switched software providers.?

The math to make this decision should be simple: Is Twilio willing to lose Zendesk as a customer in order to win the contact center market?

If maximizing value capture is the goal of Twilio leadership, this answer should be clear. There is a huge opportunity in building and selling strong contact center SaaS. Twilio has traditionally been an API focused organization, yet there is now more value to be gained competing in the contact center market.?

Comment below and I’ll draft the new website and go to market motion as an exercise.?

Here is post #2, How to Scale Twilio Flex .