Profit Increase From Improved Conversion Rates

Evidence and data. Interviewees reported that Twilio Messaging, Voice, and Segment CDP helped improve conversion rates by enabling their organizations to deliver more timely and personalized customer interactions via phone calls or SMS, MMS, and WhatsApp messages. They also shared that Segment CDP unified their customer data across touchpoints, providing them with more visibility into user behavior and preferences and allowing them to trigger targeted communications at key moments in the customer journey. Interviewees described the benefits of easier two-way communication with Twilio:

• The CIO at a retailer reported that their sales team was able to overhaul its calling process with Twilio, making it easier for sales agents to reach customers at every step of the journey. The interviewee reported a significant increase in sales and partially attributed it to Twilio improving their call success rate: “Last year, our phone sales increased by about $150 million. … On our old phone system, we had about a 7% call delivery rejection rate, and we now have got that down to about 2%. The Twilio Super Network got us about a 5% lift in the number of calls that actually reach end customers.”

• The same interviewee described how the improvement in reliability with Twilio Voice led to higher customer engagement and retention: “We have fantastic customer retention stats, and Twilio’s part of the puzzle. We get great feedback on call quality from customers and that is super important to us. When we were using [our previous provider] for dial paths, that was a constant fight. Since we’ve been on Twilio, that has become a nonfactor.”

• The director of product management at a financial services organization reported that their organization used Twilio to build a CEP, where their agents could have a central portal to reach out to customers and track their purchase journeys. The interviewee stated: “With 10-digit texts going out through Twilio, we made it much more efficient for our team members to send more texts to our clients, follow up with them more, and create higher engagement. Ultimately, that led to more clients moving forward, increasing conversion rates and closed loan volume. … This delivered over $1 billion in additional gross loan value.”

• The director of product management at the financial services firm also reported an improvement in response rates: “When we deployed Twilio and [the engagement platform we built with it], we saw a 37% lift in client text message response rates. We found that the increase in response rates led to more clients closing with us and better conversion rates.”

• The same interviewee summarized the value of the Twilio platform on customer communication: “Twilio has allowed us to leverage existing data to enable our team members to communicate with clients in exactly the way we want them to communicate with clients. It has allowed us to keep up in terms of the evolution of AI and how it influences communications and workflows.”

• The director of IT in the healthcare space noted that Twilio helped them reduce the number of missed appointments from patients, protecting them from the revenue and productivity losses associated with no-shows: “We built in automated follow-up workflows with Twilio. Because of the programmable SMS and voice APIs, there are reminders that patients get at certain time intervals. They get automatic confirmations without someone from our team having to reach out. … The two-way engagement has helped us go from a 55% to 60% appointment confirmation rate to about a 75% to 80% confirmation rate.”

• The same interviewee added: “Because patients can quickly confirm [with staff] if they are coming in for an appointment or need to reschedule, they don’t have to pick up their phone; it’s simply done through a text message and a two-way campaign. Then we can quickly backfill that provider’s time. … We’re also seeing an eight- to 10-point improvement in customer satisfaction because of these Twilio capabilities.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite organization has 50 million customer sessions each year that are impacted by Twilio Messaging or Voice interactions.

• The organization’s baseline conversion rate on comparable sessions is 3.0%.

• With Twilio, the composite increases conversion rates by 10%, or 0.3 percentage points.

• The composite organization has an AOV of $250.

• The composite has an operating margin of 10%.

Risks. The profit gain from an improvement in conversion rates will vary depending on:

• The share of sales impacted by Twilio Messaging or Voice workflows.

• An organization’s baseline conversion rate.

• An organization’s AOV.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $8.4 million.

Profit Increase From Improved Authentication Success Rate

Evidence and data. Interviewees reported that Twilio Verify improves authentication success rates by optimizing verification delivery and completion across channels and geographies. The interviewees described how this improvement impacted their organizations:

• The chief growth officer at a medical records company noted how Verify helped their organization seamlessly authenticate users while maintaining its adherence to key compliance frameworks: “With HIPAA, we are required to have an multifactor authentication of some sort on our system. … We force clients to use Verify to get into our system every day. … Verify changed the game for us. It’s all automated and managed by Twilio. From an authentication standpoint, it’s much more reliable, and we can scale it to anything.”

• The same interviewee went on to say that Twilio Verify enabled them to streamline verifications while simultaneously protecting against fraud: “Verify not only authenticates for us, but it also verifies the phone number and makes sure it’s a real person that’s booking the appointment. We used to fight that battle all the time, where a competitor would take up all the appointments in the schedule. With Verify, we know that it’s a real person and a real phone number. It’s not a bot.”

• The director of IT at a healthcare organization agreed that Verify had significantly boosted their authentication success rate, noting that Twilio’s global carrier relationships and automatic channel fallback ensured users could successfully login: “From an authentication perspective, Twilio has a more reliable delivery methodology, so one-time passwords and SMS or Voice [authentications] actually get to whoever needs them. … Because of Twilio, we’ve made the delivery, the login experience, and the customer experience more consistent across all of the channels.”

• The director of IT went on to report that, “Previously, our authentication success rate was in the high 80s, and now it’s almost 96%.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite organization experiences 6 million authentication attempts each year.

• Before implementing Twilio Verify, the organization’s authentication success rate was 91%. After implementing Twilio Verify, this rises to 95%.

• Fifteen percent of the failed authentications result in abandoned purchases for the composite organization.

• The composite organization has an AOV of $250.

• The composite has an operating margin of 10%.

Risks. The profit increase from improved authentication success will vary depending on the following factors:

• The number of authentication attempts an organization experiences.

• An organization’s baseline authentication success rate.

• The share of failed authentications that result in abandoned purchases.

• An organization’s AOV.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $2.0 million.

Sales And Customer Success Agent Time Savings

Evidence and data. Interviewees reported substantial time savings for their sales and customer success teams after consolidating onto Twilio Flex’s single unified interface. Before Twilio, some interviewees reported that agents were switching between different interfaces to pull up customer context, but Flex consolidated a customer’s profile into a single screen, enabling agents to work more efficiently with them. Interviewees described a number of productivity-boosting use cases:

• Interviewees praised Twilio’s routing engine, which uses real-time customer data and interaction history to direct inquiries to the best-fit agent, reducing transfers and hold time. The CIO at a retailer stated: “[With Twilio], we are dynamically looking at where the customer is in the journey, and how we can direct them to someone with the least hold time. We were able to take our average hold time from about 5 minutes per caller down to sub-60 seconds.”

• The same interviewee added, “On the service support side, we’ve been able to scale our organization while holding headcount flat.”

• Interviewees reported that using Twilio allowed them to route calls more efficiently and its API-based approach reduced the time spent resolving data errors within the sales platform. The director of IT at a healthcare company stated: “Our customer service reps and sales engineers are saving time on call messaging and routing. Twilio’s Voice program and SMS have helped reduce triage time. The second bucket of time savings is data enrichment, data management, and eliminating a lot of duplicative data entries within the CRM. ... And then from a workflow and API perspective, we have less errors. On average, we’re saving 6 to 8 hours per agent per week.”

• Interviewees shared that Twilio’s programmable triggers automated routine tasks like appointment reminders, follow-up sequences, and updates, freeing agents to focus on higher-value conversations versus manual outreach. The chief growth officer at a medical records company described how automation impacted their team: “Our customer service team can automate so many things now. We use SMS to do tons of client-facing automations. With a little bit of AI help, we can use Twilio to do calls, even branded calls, which are answered much more frequently. … This is [from] being able to use the Twilio infrastructure to do task automation.”

• Interviewees also said that Segment CDP’s unified customer profiles and behavioral triggers helped their sales teams surface real-time buying signals, allowing them to prioritize their time on accounts likely to convert. The director of product management at a financial services company described Twilio as the backbone of a CEP that streamlined the sales process: “We built an application on top of Twilio to help our salespeople work their pipelines in a more streamlined way. … Our 3,000 sales agents saved 15% of their time on reaching out to their sales pipeline and managing their book of business.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite organization has 400 sales and customer success agents.

• In a given day, these employees dedicate 60% of their time to interacting with customers.

• Using Twilio Flex and Twilio’s Voice and Messaging APIs, the sales and customer success agents are 15% more efficient in managing customer interactions.

• The fully burdened hourly rate for these employees is $28.

Risks. Sales and customer success agent time savings will vary depending on:

• The number of agents.

• The share of time they spend interacting directly with customers.

• The fully burdened hourly rate for sales and customer success agents.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $4.7 million.

Improved Availability With Twilio

Evidence and data. Interviewees shared that migrating to Twilio’s cloud infrastructure reduced unplanned communications downtime. Twilio’s Super Network routes traffic around carrier outages with built-in failover capabilities, reducing the revenue losses associated with outages. Interviewees detailed the improvement in reliability:

• The director of IT at a healthcare organization described how legacy system outages led to communications outages, but that Twilio had significantly improved their uptime: “We were previously using a custom-made middleware solution, but it didn’t have the right infrastructure and failover capabilities. Now our failover is in the 99.9 percentile range, and message reliability rate is also above 99%. … We also see a 40% reduction in API latency, which has been a significant win.”

• The same interviewee went on to estimate the business impact of the reliability improvement: “With our legacy system, we had anywhere from 6 to 9 hours of downtime per year, whereas with Twilio, it’s been between 1 and 2 hours per year. One hour of downtime generally costs between $300,000 and $350,000 because of all the appointments [that could be impacted].”

• The chief growth officer at a medical records organization agreed that Twilio had improved their uptime and detailed the impact of any outages: “If there is ever a day that we cannot get a text out to remind a patient, that is money lost. … Now, unless there is a broader cloud attack, we have no disruption with our messaging at all, or voice.”

• The same interviewee added: “Twilio is extraordinarily dependable and prevents any issues. Uptime-wise, we have not had to go offline with messaging in years.”

• The engineering director at a financial services firm added that although their legacy system was fairly stable, uptime had improved with Twilio, and its support team made the response process even smoother. The interviewee stated: “We also have seen a slight uptick in performance and stability, and I give very heavy props to Twilio on their support and response times. If we do have an issue, they’re actually working with us in [our instant messaging solution]. The response time is fantastic, and they jump on calls with us very quickly to get ahead of things.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• Before implementing Twilio, the composite organization has 20 hours of unplanned downtime annually that impacts their messaging or voice interactions.

• With Twilio, the composite reduces this unplanned downtime by 60%.

• Each hour of downtime costs the composite organization $200,000 in lost revenue.

• The composite organization has an operating margin of 10%.

Risks. The scale of the benefit will vary depending on the following factors:

• The amount of unplanned downtime in the legacy environment.

• The hourly revenue loss associated with an hour of downtime.

• Whether an organization incurs additional costs from downtime, such as fines or regulatory penalties.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 20%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $477,000.

Compliance And Fraud Time Savings

Evidence and data. Interviewees stated that Twilio consolidated their communications logs with a single set of APIs, making manual data collection for regulatory frameworks easier. Additionally, interviewees said that Twilio Verify reduced fraud in their organizations, saving staff time on incident investigation and response. Interviewees described a number of time-saving opportunities from Twilio:

• Interviewees shared that Verify improved user authentication, helping fraud teams prevent account takeovers while minimizing manual identity checks. The chief growth officer at a medical records company described the developer effort required for previous instances of fraud: “[Previously], we spent so much time on people who could not protect their accounts on their own. We were spending probably $100,000 a year just on developer costs to keep implementing new checks and balances and turning up all of our fraud limiters. Now, we’re just turning on Verify.”

• In addition to time savings related to fraud, the same interviewee described efficiencies related to preparing for compliance tasks: “Without Twilio, we wouldn’t be able to function as a HIPAA-compliant system. We do a two-way inbox that’s protected within the system so we can send out HIPAA-compliant text messaging. … Between verified blocking entry and our SMS process now being so buttoned up with Twilio, we don’t have to dedicate any one person to being a compliance officer. Previously, a DevOps employee was spending 30 hours a week on fraud and compliance.”

• The director of IT at a healthcare firm agreed that Twilio provided time savings worth half an FTE on compliance-related tasks, noting, “We’re saving about half of the time that was spent on getting data that we would need in terms of audit trails.”

• Interviewees also reported that Twilio’s PCI-compliant payment capabilities helped them securely process and transmit payment information, reducing compliance workload and audit preparation time. The CIO at a retailer described the value: “We got our phone system out of PCI scope through their PCI payment product, Twilio Pay. There’s a lot of toil that we eliminated within the team. … Not having to deal with auditors was a nice win for sure.”

• The chief growth officer at the medical records company also praised Twilio’s Fast Track for A2P offering, noting that it simplified A2P 10DLC registration and carrier compliance: “We have the Fast Track for A2P, which is the single greatest investment I have ever made in anything. Anyone who is doing A2P should have that turned on and should be doing it without any question in their mind whatsoever.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite organization has 10 employees supporting authentication, fraud monitoring, and compliance workflows.

• On average, these employees dedicate 15% of their time to these manual tasks.

• With Twilio, employees reduce the amount of time spent on manual compliance and fraud tasks by 50%.

• The average fully burdened annual salary for compliance and fraud analysts is $106,000.

• A productivity recapture of 75% is applied since not all time savings are redeployed productively.

Risks. The compliance and fraud time savings will vary depending on:

• The amount of FTE effort dedicated to fraud and compliance-related tasks.

• The average fully burdened annual salary for compliance and fraud analysts.

• The specific compliance frameworks that an organization must meet.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $133,000.

Cost Savings From Consolidating Onto Twilio

Evidence and data. Interviewees reported that implementing Twilio allowed them to retire a variety of legacy point solutions previously used for customer engagement. Additionally, interviewees shared that because they moved from multiple communications tools to just one, their internal teams saved time on tool management. The interviewees described the cost savings:

• The director of IT at a healthcare organization reported a range of products being retired: “Our previous middleware solution was eliminated, which saved us half a million dollars annually. We also had an SMS gateway service that was between $80,000 and $100,000 per year. On top of that, we have between $150,000 and $200,000 in infrastructure cost savings, so I would say it could be up to $850,000 a year in total cost savings.”

• The chief growth officer at a medical records organization reported that they retired legacy email while also reducing their development costs: “We have eliminated our external email provider, and we can do all of our texting within our own platform with Twilio. We also saved a ton of money in development costs because we can do it all ourselves with Twilio and do not have to work with external groups.”

• The same interviewee added: “Video is so inexpensive with Twilio. It’s crazy how cheap it is. … I’m saving $80,000 a year compared to [previous video provider].”

• The CIO at a retail organization agreed that the ease of developing on Twilio led to substantial cost savings: “We felt like we were spending about $600,000 a year just maintaining the old system. … Previously, we had six people on our team running the phone system team. That’s now down to three, and frankly, it’s three because we want to have a little bit of redundancy. That team also spends most of its time now innovating within the platform and delivering business solutions instead of configuring users and figuring out where we made mistakes. Our user provisioning is completely automated at this point.”

• The CIO also praised Twilio’s pricing model relative to their legacy solution: “[Our legacy system] was lumpy and unpredictable, and there was a lot of capex underneath that from the phone standpoint. … I think the predictability of Twilio’s cost was something that we were very excited about. We can measure it and model it.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite organization uses a variety of products from Twilio — including Messaging, Voice, Verify, Segment CDP, Email, and Flex — and retires legacy CCaaS platforms, standalone SMS gateway services, email providers, and other fragmented communications infrastructure. Collectively, these costs amount to $800,000 per year.

• Previously, the composite organization had four FTEs dedicated to managing its legacy suite of communications tools. With Twilio, it requires only two FTEs for equivalent tasks. The two Twilio management FTEs are included in the cost section of the TEI model.

• The average fully burdened annual salary for platform managers is $179,000.

Risks. The cost savings from consolidating onto Twilio will vary depending on:

• The specific tools an organization is able to retire with Twilio.

• The speed at which an organization is able to replace legacy products with Twilio capabilities.

• The number of employees dedicated to managing the legacy set of tools.

• The fully burdened annual salaries for platform managers.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $3.4 million.

Unquantified Benefits

Interviewees mentioned the following additional benefits that their organizations experienced but were not able to quantify:

• Improved data hygiene and a unified customer view. Interviewees noted that Twilio helped their organizations centralize customer communications and identity across different channels, making it easier to track interactions and maintain accurate contact information. With tools like Twilio Segment CDP and programmable messaging and voice APIs, the interviewees’ teams could standardize how they captured communications events, reduce duplicate contacts, and maintain a more consistent view of each customer. The CIO at a retailer noted, “We’ve definitely seen big improvements in data hygiene, from Twilio’s ability to use Lookup and some of the SendGrid [email] tools and to be able to make sure the agents are capturing numbers correctly and caller ID correctly.”
  The same interviewee went on to say that: “Previously, we really struggled with tracking every single call and how it progressed through our building. … We have definitely executed on that data more [with Twilio] by feeding it back into our marketing engine. That is visibility that we did not have previously.”
  The director of IT at the healthcare organization noted that their team used data from Twilio to build a real-time reporting dashboard on metrics such as SMS delivery rates, phone call follow-up rates, and error resolution rates. The interviewee noted that Twilio enabled their team to build and access these reports more quickly: “Previously, we had a custom report that took two people spending 8 hours a week to maintain, and this was brought down significantly because of the reporting dashboard that we have with Twilio. … People also spend less time chasing down reports and everyone gets that information a little bit faster.”

• Greater customization with Twilio. Interviewees praised Twilio’s customizable, developer-first platform, noting that it allowed their organizations to design communications workflows that precisely matched their customer journeys rather than being constrained by less flexible out-of-the-box software. Through programmable APIs across Messaging, Voice, Authentication, and Segment CDP, their teams could iterate on features and integrate communications directly into customer-facing applications. The director of product management at a financial services company noted, “Because Twilio lets us build our own UI on top of theirs, it’s an exponential difference between what we’ve been able to build and how we’ve been able to evolve compared to what we would get from an out-of-the-box CCaaS solution.”
  The chief growth officer at a medical records company agreed on the merits of the developer-first approach, adding that: “Whenever we are given a chance to plug something else in, it is already there and ready to go. We just use Twilio. I would say in a given month, we probably save $4,000 in what would be external fees for using various systems to do what we do.”

• Early value from deploying Twilio’s AI capabilities. Some interviewees reported that they had experimented with some of Twilio’s AI capabilities, such as conversational AI and AI-assisted routing. Long term, their organizations aim to use these capabilities to automate routine workflows, improve response times, and support human agents with real-time insights. The CIO at a retail company noted that Twilio’s AI features are designed to be LLM-agnostic, allowing their organization to integrate the models they choose into their Messaging and Voice workflows. The interviewee stated: “We have deployed conversational AI with Twilio. I think it works really well. I love that they allow us to bring different models along with us. I think their stance on being agnostic to the LLM is definitely one that resonates with us, especially as that space changes on a daily basis.”

• Enhanced customer trust with Twilio’s branded calling features. Interviewees shared that Twilio branded calling helped their organizations display their verified business name and logo on outbound calls, increasing answer rates and customer trust while reducing the likelihood of legitimate calls being mistaken for spam. The chief growth officer at the medical records organization reported: “We use Twilio to do branded calling, so calls are answered much more frequently. We don’t have to spend so much time calling now.”
  The same interviewee went on to describe how features such as branded calling drove improved customer trust: “Texting is working, and phones are working, and videos are working, so no news is good news. That is how we gauge trust and retention. … Twilio just works, so trust-wise, I do not have to worry about any issues.”

• Additional value from using multiple Twilio use cases together. Interviewees reported realizing the greatest value from Twilio when they used multiple products together. By combining channels like Messaging, SendGrid, and Voice with customer data from Segment CDP, their organizations were able to create more seamless and personalized customer journeys, improving employee productivity and customer experience. The director of IT at a healthcare company described the “better together” story of using Segment CDP alongside Messaging and Voice: “With Segment CDP, we can classify and connect all of our data. We previously had four fairly disjointed systems that we are now able to bring under one roof. Because of how things are connected, one big thing that we have seen is real-time event streaming, where we can see how a campaign is doing and we can make changes on the fly. That helps us figure out how to get more engagement.”
  The CIO at a retailer also described synergies from combining multiple Twilio use cases: “Because of the way Twilio’s platform works, you get a lot of control over how different products integrate. With a lot of the competitors, there are predefined integration points, where with Twilio, you can really weave different products together to create a custom journey.”

Flexibility

The value of flexibility is unique to each customer. There are multiple scenarios in which a customer might implement Twilio and later realize additional uses and business opportunities, including:

• Easier expansion into new markets, product categories, or service types. Interviewees shared that Twilio’s APIs and existing carrier relationships helped their organizations more easily expand and diversify their product offerings. Interviewees added that its support for multiple languages and regional communications channels allowed their organizations to localize customer experiences without having to hire translation staff. This flexibility enabled their development teams to rapidly test and deploy new offerings and scale communications as demand grew. The director of IT at a healthcare organization described the benefit: “We would have taken longer to launch a lot of our programs [without Twilio]. We’re able to reuse some of the templates, reuse some of the APIs, and scale our messaging and voice API. If we didn’t have Twilio, we probably would have needed to hire more staff for multiple language support or to help out with targeting other demographics.”
  The chief growth officer at the medical records organization noted that Twilio’s Video API allowed them to expand into telehealth, enabling them to support more patients: “With Twilio Video, we’ve been able to expand much more in the telehealth realm to do a lot more virtual visits, which is more revenue for the practice and also more patients who can be seen geographically. Video alone has been a significant driver because telehealth is where our marketplace is going.”

• Building sellable applications with Twilio. Although most interviewees’ organizations used Twilio exclusively to communicate with their own customers, the chief growth officer at a medical records organization reported a dual use case: using Twilio to engage with its own clients and building applications with Twilio’s APIs that it resold to other clients. For example, it built Video, Messaging, and Voice-based applications that it resold to clients at highly competitive prices, and two of the applications generated more than $1 million in revenue for the organization. The interviewee stated: “All the things that Twilio launches as products, we find ways to package those up and resell them in some way that makes it sticky for the client, but also unique. … With Voice and branded calling, we have so many other things that we can offer to [our clients] at a cost that’s pretty inexpensive compared to doing it externally.”
  The interviewee went on to add, “We’re saving our clients $2,000 a month, just in fees of not having to go to external subscriptions and to use what we have already built into their system.”

Flexibility would also be quantified when evaluated as part of a specific project (described in more detail in Total Economic Impact Approach).