Twilio SIGNAL 2025: What Did We Learn?

Twilio SIGNAL 2025 recently brought together industry leaders, developers, and innovators to explore the future of customer engagement. Zing was proud to be a key part of this event, not only attending but also sponsoring, hosting our own dedicated booth, and showcasing our expertise.

Zing Sales Director, Jordan Edmunds, even took the stage to deliver a compelling lightning talk titled “Beyond Implementation: Why scaling Twilio requires ongoing expertise”, sharing valuable insights with attendees. SIGNAL2025 underscored Twilio's commitment to empowering businesses to build exceptional customer experiences through a unified platform, AI-driven innovation, and expanded global reach.

Explore a detailed analysis of the key announcements and trends that emerged from SIGNAL 2025.

Key Takeaways

• Twilio is strengthening its ecosystem with strategic partnerships, including Microsoft.
• "One Twilio" vision emphasizes Segment integration for unified CX.
• Advancements in AI, particularly with Conversation Relay and Conversational Intelligence, are transforming voice and messaging.
• Twilio is expanding its global footprint and compliance offerings, notably with EU Data Residency.

Deeper Dive into SIGNAL 2025 Announcements

SIGNAL 2025 was marked by a series of significant announcements that highlight Twilio's strategic direction and its focus on addressing the evolving needs of businesses in the customer engagement space. Let's delve into the key areas.

Expanding the Ecosystem with Strategic Partnerships

Twilio's emphasis on strategic partnerships was a prominent theme at SIGNAL 2025, with its Microsoft partnership a particular stand out. This partnership signals Twilio's intent to integrate its communication capabilities more deeply into broader technology ecosystems.

Businesses are increasingly relying on a diverse range of software and platforms to manage their operations and engage with customers. By forging alliances with major players like Microsoft, Twilio aims to ensure that its communication solutions can seamlessly integrate with these existing workflows.

The potential benefits of this partnership are numerous. For example, businesses that use Microsoft Teams for internal communication, could leverage Twilio to integrate customer interactions directly into the Teams environment. This would allow agents to communicate with customers without switching between different applications, improving their productivity and providing a more cohesive experience.

We can expect to see tighter integrations between Twilio's communication APIs and Microsoft's Azure cloud platform, potentially simplifying the development and deployment of omnichannel communication workflows. This will empower developers to build more sophisticated and user-friendly applications that leverage the combined strengths of both platforms.

The "One Twilio" Vision: Unifying Customer Engagement

Twilio are also promoting the "One Twilio" message, which focuses on the integration of its communication services with Segment, the customer data platform (CDP) it acquired in 2020. This strategy aims to provide businesses with a unified platform for managing and orchestrating customer interactions across all touchpoints.

In the past, businesses often struggled with fragmented customer data, scattered across various systems and channels. This made it difficult to gain a better view of each customer in order to deliver consistent, personalized experiences. Twilio's acquisition of Segment was a move to address this challenge by providing a platform for collecting, unifying, and activating customer data.

The core idea behind "One Twilio" is to break down these data silos and empower businesses to:

• Gain a 360-degree view of each customer by combining data from various sources.
• Personalize customer experiences based on an understanding of their preferences and behaviours.
• Deliver seamless customer journeys across different communication channels.

By combining Twilio's communication APIs with Segment's CDP, businesses can move beyond siloed interactions and deliver personalized customer experiences. This unified approach is reflected in Twilio's new slogan: "Trusted. Simple. Smart."

• Trusted: Emphasizes the reliability and security of the Twilio platform which is critical for businesses that handle sensitive customer data.
• Simple: Highlights the ease of use and developer-friendly nature of Twilio's tools, making it easier for businesses to build and deploy communication solutions.
• Smart: Underscores the platform's intelligence, driven by data and AI, which enables businesses to deliver more relevant and engaging interactions.

AI-Powered Communication is Transforming Messaging

SIGNAL 2025 showcased significant advancements in Twilio's AI capabilities, particularly in the areas of voice and messaging. These advancements promise to transform the way businesses interact with their customers, making communication more efficient and engaging.

Conversation Relay

Twilio announced the general availability of ConversationRelay, a development that signifies the resurgence of voice as a key channel for customer interaction. Conversation Relay empowers developers to build sophisticated voice experiences using a "Bring Your Own LLM" model.

The resurgence of voice can be attributed to several factors, such as the increasing sophistication of AI-powered voice assistants, as well as the growing demand for more natural and human-like interactions. Conversation Relay does this by enabling businesses to create voice experiences that are both highly functional and incredibly engaging.

This approach means businesses can:

• Integrate their preferred large language models (LLMs) with Twilio's voice platform.
• Personalize customer experiences based on an understanding of their preferences and behaviours.
• Deliver seamless customer journeys across different communication channels.

For example, a customer calling a business might be greeted by a voice bot powered by a cutting-edge LLM. This bot could understand the customer's intent, answer their questions, and proactively offer assistance, all in a natural and conversational manner. This type of interaction can significantly improve customer satisfaction and free up human agents to handle more complex or sensitive issues.

Zing have participated in the beta program and have developed a demo to showcase Conversation Relay's potential. Our expertise in this area allows us to help businesses design and implement voice solutions that are tailored to their specific needs and help to deliver exceptional results.

Conversation Relay is particularly well-suited for "screening" use cases, such as:

• Triage: Quickly assessing customer needs and directing them to the appropriate resources or department as efficiently as possible.
• Lead Qualification: Automating the process of identifying and qualifying potential leads, allowing sales teams to focus their efforts on the most promising prospects.
• Appointment Scheduling: Streamlining the process of booking appointments and managing schedules, providing customers with a convenient self-service option.

The combination of advanced LLMs and Twilio's robust voice platform, creates new possibilities for creating engaging and efficient voice experiences. Businesses can now build voice solutions that are both functional and conversational, providing customers with a more satisfying and human-like interaction.

Conversational Intelligence

Building on its existing Voice Intelligence capabilities, Twilio is expanding its conversational intelligence offerings to include messaging content. This means that businesses will have a more comprehensive understanding of customer interactions across both voice and messaging channels.

Customers now interact with businesses through a variety of channels, including voice calls, SMS messages, chat applications, and social media. Each of these interactions provides valuable data about the customer's needs, preferences, and sentiment. However, if this data is siloed in different systems, it can be difficult to get a complete picture of the customer journey.

Twilio's expansion of conversational intelligence aims to address this challenge by providing a unified platform for analyzing customer interactions across all channels.

By analyzing the content of conversations, businesses can:

• Gain deeper insights into customer sentiment and intent.
• Identify patterns and trends in customer interactions.
• Personalize communication and tailor responses to individual customer needs.
• Improve agent performance by providing real-time guidance and feedback.

This unified approach to conversational intelligence empowers businesses to create more meaningful and effective interactions across all communication channels.

Branded Communications

Twilio is also focusing on enhancing branded communications, recognizing the importance of consistent and recognizable branding across all customer touchpoints.

• WhatsApp for Business Voice Calls: Twilio is set to launch General Availability for WhatsApp Business Voice Calls this summer, building on Twilio’s long-standing relationship with Meta. This will allow businesses to extend their voice communication capabilities to the popular WhatsApp platform, enabling richer, more interactive conversations with their customers.
• RCS: Twilio’s support for Rich Communication Services (RCS) will include automated failover to ensure messages are delivered even if RCS is not available. RCS offers a significant upgrade over traditional SMS, providing features like rich media, read receipts, and interactive elements. By supporting RCS with automated failover, Twilio ensures that businesses can take advantage of these enhanced capabilities while maintaining reliable message delivery.

Expanding Global Reach and Compliance

SIGNAL 2025 saw significant developments which will help globalised businesses to manage compliance issues.

Data Residency in the EU: Addressing Compliance Needs

The announcement of data residency in the EU is a major development, particularly for businesses in highly regulated industries such as financial services. This feature enables businesses to store and process customer data within the EU, helping them comply with GDPR and other data privacy regulations.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has imposed strict requirements on how businesses collect, store, and process the personal data of individuals within the European Union. These regulations have created significant challenges for businesses that operate globally, as they need to ensure that their data handling practices comply with the specific requirements of each region.

Twilio's introduction of data residency in the EU is a direct response to these challenges. Twilio is helping businesses to:

• Meet their GDPR obligations more easily.
• Reduce the complexity and cost of complying with international data privacy regulations.
• Build trust with their customers by demonstrating their commitment to data protection.

While this is a significant step forward, it's important to note that data residency is not yet available for all Twilio services. For example, Twilio Flex, the company's contact center platform, is not yet included. However, Twilio has announced plans to extend data residency to SMS later this year.

The Compliance Toolkit

Twilio are also introducing a Compliance Toolkit to help businesses navigate the complex landscape of communication regulations. The toolkit provides tools and resources to help businesses comply with regulations related to:

• Data privacy
• Messaging consent
• Call recording
• Other communication-related requirements

Twilio's Compliance Toolkit aims to provide businesses with a centralized resource for understanding and complying with communication regulations. The toolkit will include features such as:

• Information on relevantregulations in different regions.
• Tools for obtaining and managing customer consent.
• APIs for ensuring that communication practices comply with data privacy requirements.
• Guidance on implementing compliant call recording solutions.

The Compliance Toolkit will initially be available in the US, with plans to expand its availability to Europe later this year.

Summary

SIGNAL 2025 underscored Twilio’s vision for the future of customer engagement, a vision that deeply resonates with Zing's own commitment to innovation and client success. The announcements around strategic partnerships, the "One Twilio" platform, and the transformative power of AI in communications show the critical need for businesses to embrace intelligent, and compliant strategies. As a leading Twilio partner, Zing is well positioned to help organizations navigate these advancements, leveraging our expertise in areas like ConversationRelay and tailored integrations. We believe that by strategically adopting these new capabilities, businesses cannot only meet but exceed evolving customer expectations.