Setting up a call center is a major undertaking, and by the time it is up and running, the hardware that powers most of the phone connections is already out of date. Twilio, which has long offered the kind of APIs and services that allow companies to recreate their physical communications hardware in software, today launched a new service for call centers in partnership with Google and LiveOps.
Starting today, LiveOps will offer its users a subscription service that bundles a Chromebook or Chromebox with a high-quality headset and Twilio’s VoIP services. The whole system is built around Twilio CX and will allow a call center operation to almost completely bypass any legacy hardware. Instead, they can just subscribe to the service, a box arrives at their door and a new employee can be up and running within minutes.
With the LiveOps package, users also get to 7,500 minutes of calling through the WebRTC Twilio client. Given that this is a Chrome OS-based service, users will also have access to Google’s services for deploying and managing Chrome devices inside an organization.
As Twilio’s CEO and co-founder Jeff Lawson told me last week, the company found that call centers are an area that can be especially valuable for its customers. Some of its enterprise users have built their own solutions on Twilio’s APIs, for example. But Twilio also wanted to be able to offer companies that don’t have that kind of technical knowledge in-house to be able to use its services. “With Twilio CX, we now have a full solution that doesn’t incur any capital expenses,” he told me.
While LiveOps is currently the only company to offer a bundle like this, chances are that other Twilio partners will offer similar services in the future.
