Outsourced receptionist service provider Moneypenny has used Twilio’s contact centre product Flex to move from handling 10,000 calls a month through Twilio, six months ago, to 2.3 million in the last 30 days, also through Twilio.
Speaking at Twilio’s Engage conference, held at County Hall, London, last week, Sarah Baker, senior product manager at Moneypenny, said that with around 700 personal assistants (PAs) working for them in the UK and a need to deal with thousands of businesses really effectively, the firm needed a solution that would allow PAs to be “really quick at what they’re doing and be really proficient”. The solution also needed to help Moneypenny’s client businesses to look after their own customers.
“They want to be able to run successful businesses and we wanted to be able to deliver technology to them to allow them to do that. And so whether that’s just phone numbers or you know, automated chatbots or conversational ideas or even softphones,”
She added that Twilio did both of these by giving the company that in-house solution with Flex in terms of being able to handle all the omni-channel communications for PAs and in terms of its clients, they could also offer them soft phones, because lots of their clients are “on the go all the time and take their offices around with them wherever they are.”
Oliver Kelly, head of tech architecture at Moneypenny, said that previously, his company had several legacy systems that all worked in different ways and how they had to be interacted with could be “troublesome” and led to some “tactical” development to overcome problems. Also, both the company and its clients hated being forced by its old systems to work in a particular way. “Twilio gave us a platform we could make exactly how we want, so we could have better interactions with our customers to make them happen and deliver the best possible service”.
Kelly added that Twilio’s APIs have been really useful for developers and helped it bring products to life. From April this year, Moneypenny has rolled out Flex and in the process has added 50 PAs per month onto the platform. All PAs should be using the system by the end of the year. So far, the volumes the new system by Twilio has seen volumes increase from about 10,000 calls a month to over 2.3 million in the last 30 days.
Baker said the next big challenge for Moneypenny was to have one integrated platform that could deal with omni-channel with PAs using email, SMS, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp.
The company is also looking to putting more artificial intelligence capabilities into the platform. Baker said that Moneypenny had a lot of client knowledge and sector specific knowledge as well,
“which would be great for our PAs because we can get them information to make them a lot more efficient”
“It is also great for our clients because of all the information we can use to power automating products,” she said.
