Consumerism has shifted drastically in the last decade or so away from merely accumulating material goods to wanting to connect with brands on a deeper level and have great experiences.

Businesses who are achieving great success are offering consumers these experiences, and the key to nailing it is human communications and fostering greater customer engagement, and in this article, I’ll explain how you can put this in place too.

My name’s Ana and my background is probably a little bit different from most of you reading, I started my career in technology research and then I founded my own startup.

At the moment I'm at Twilio, and my role involves helping product managers to create amazing experiences and create great products with the help of Twilio.

Human communications

In this article, I'm going to write about something that is very close to my heart - human communications. The evolution has been that products are less and less about what they are, the material comfort they provide, but more about the experience they enable.

I believe communication is our main core piece of that experience. I want to convince you all that if you want to build a great product, you need to have your communications nailed down.

What do these products have in common?


What do Coca-Cola, a MacBook, UberRide or a Tesla car have in common?

It’s that the companies who actually created these products were not thinking about the object they wanted to create or the service they were putting together, but they were thinking about the experience the customers they wanted to address were going to have.

Apple has been very good at creating a brand that does that - sells an experience, sells the feeling, sells the ownership of this brand.

But the truth is that Coca Cola way before Apple was already creating events, sponsoring events, basically making people go to concerts, where the Coca Cola itself was just one of the drinks that were served there.

In the area of tech, in the area of companies that have been founded in the last 15 years, it's an obsession.

Tesla, for instance, the position they had was, 'we want to make and be the first ones to create the one and only electric car for everybody to use'. It's about being ecological, the core business is about being different.

If you look at Uber, it's how to make affordable riding across the city in a way that nobody else has done before.


Consumer priority shift

This all comes from the fact that consumers’ priorities have shifted in the past years. I'd say that 50 years ago, the main obsession of anybody was to get a house, get a car, buy clothes.

Basically, you wanted to have material wealth around you - that was the idea of an achiever.

Things have changed. Millennials have completely different values. They are thinking ecology, they're seeking fairness.


There is research to prove that buying things doesn't make us happy, that collecting things doesn't make us happy, what actually makes us happy is to experience and to do things.

Is that ironic? At the end of the day, we are producing things. It's a challenge, it's not easy to actually move from a mentality where you are producing a service or a thing to thinking how are your target or audience or consumers are going to actually take it onboard?

Where do you start?

How do you do that? I can give you a first starting point.

Think about human communications every time you create a product. Think about how humans relate. Make sure that each of your products is backed by the right communications.


If you add good communications to your products, you will be actually building amazing experiences. That's because it's the way it is, we live in a world where it's never been as easy to be as interconnected as we are today.

We have people speaking with people all the time, people speaking with machines all the time. These conversations, emails, SMS, etc, are becoming more and more like multi-party exchanges where you actually want to bring different people in.

So, make sure that you have the possibility for your product to actually reach out or enable the possibility to reach out to your customers and allow them to connect to their friends and family so they can share it.


Not all companies are actually well equipped to do that and that's where things can start going south.

Communication gone wrong

You can have the most amazing product, and then terrible communications and you're going to have, as a consequence, a terrible experience for your customer.


Your customers will not actually even want to hear from you. Let's look at an example.

Bad comms: an example

In the image below you can see a typical phone delivery message letting you know your parcel is on the way.

Let's say you have the typical reaction which is "Oh my God, I didn't remember that we had a delivery", you reply back, "I'm not there, please do not deliver, wait a moment". You send the message back, and nothing happens.


Why did the company even send you the message? It's nice to warn you, but you cannot do anything about it. It's so easy to let your customers down, it's so easy to actually break that trust that has cost so much to create, and it's just a matter of seconds.

At Twilio, we know that. We know that it's not a simple matter to build those communication flows, those engagement flows that actually go down well with your customers.

Twilio transformed customer engagement

We are all very different, we are all in different stages, in a lot of different contexts, so it can become quite complex.

What we did 10 years ago was to actually think about the complexity of the hardware that was below it - all the telecom networks - and put a layer of software on top of it, so that any company, any product, could build communications into the way they interact with their customers.


On this journey, we’ve supported companies that have created, scaled, and operated communications with the product. This is not something that is just ours, it's a trend, it's the fact that we have now very complex pieces of technology at the hands of developers and product managers, to each create different experiences, we have computer power.

These are the core of communications, but you still have analytics, you have payments, you have every single aspect of these building blocks that you have to think about so that they can build this amazing experience for your customers.


We are not here alone. But the fact that we are actually supporting so many customers worldwide means we are actually learning from them. We are learning what they like, what they actually want to give to their customers, and it is helping us to help them shape their future, and the future way they engage with their customers.


In some sense, we see that the winning brands, the winning product, the winning companies are those that are using companies like Twilio to build those amazing experiences, putting their customer at the core of their experience and then build experiences with the products around it.

Of course, your product will reshape and change as the evolution of the experience of your customer would change and evolve. It seems very easy to say, but how do you start?

How do we create successful customer engagement?

I'm going to show you a couple of things that we have at Twilio that we are actually giving out as part of our product to people to start playing with.

Artificial intelligence

One big example would be to leverage artificial intelligence. There's a lot of power there, there's the possibility of actually creating amazing things using machine learning and other techniques.

It's actually said that more or less, by the end of 2020 80% of all businesses will have some kind of chatbot automation put in place.

This is because when I'm calling Tesla or when I'm actually talking with Marks and Spencer, I don't really care if it's a machine or a person, as long as I get exactly what I want.

This is the key to the whole thing. It's having this experience.


Building these experiences is not easy. That's why when you get a product like autopilot or any product out there, you have the possibility, in this case, to train, to personalize it, to customize it to your product, and actually make sure that it's tailored to what you need for your environment.

We do this, making it simple for product managers, because we don't want everybody to have to be an engineer to be able to do this. We use plug and play tools and other ways that you can actually easily build a proof of concept and start testing how it works, how it reacts, how people react to that, to learn about the exchanges you have with your customers.

That's the interesting part of it, at the end of the day is your consumer, the customer, and not everybody is the same. Not everybody likes to be contacted in the same way, and it's difficult.

We understand that when you're putting together, let's say a way of exchanging with a customer, you like to mix different channels.

Twilio conversations

We put things like conversations together so that you do not have to force your customers to speak to you in a certain way but instead basically let them come together, discuss with you in any of the channels they prefer.


All this, of course, backed up with the analytics, the data gathering that you can have in one single place so that you can actually not only enable those discussions but also learn from those discussions, improve your business from those discussions, get prep products out of that.


It's just the beginning, Twilio is a company that has the full spectrum. On the basis of telephony, we were known as the SMS company but we do much more than that.

Most people don't know, because we don't have a brand that is visible. You're using us because you have Uber, so if you have an SMS, it's us sending it. But the important part here is that your success is out of our transparence.

We are transparent to you but we are giving you the network, we're giving you the channels, and we're giving you the building blocks for you to be able to create those products that are amazing and in any given channel that you require because remember, not everybody likes to be contacted the same way.


We've invested as a company in getting all these channels in one single place so it is easy for you and for anybody to come together and actually play with the channels and understand what is best given an environment or given certain customers.

I hope that by this stage, you are convinced like me that it is important that any given product, when it's designed, or what it's actually developed, implemented, put out there, comes with amazing communications.

It's all about experience. It's all about how your customers feel.

But I wanted also to show you, in this article, that it's not such a daunting experience or endeavor anymore to be able to put these in place because we have tools out there to support your communications.

There are very good products out there that you can use to plug and play into your own final services.

As we like to say in Twilio, we can't wait to see what you build.

Thank you very much.


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