Balboa Digital builds high-quality call center solutions with Twilio

Balboa Digital delivers high quality, affordable contact center solutions, including outsourced inbound and outbound call center, chat and email services for education, finance, automotive and other industries. Based in California, Balboa has a 100-seat call center located in its primary operations in Manila, Philippines. As a small and growing company, much of Balboa Digital’s success was based on its flexibility to meet its clients’ unique needs for technical integration and telephony support.

By 2012, client needs exceeded the capabilities of Balboa’s prior telephony vendor, and a migration to another telephony solution was imminent. It turned to Twilio as the standout platform that would help provide its clients with the highest quality call center solutions, flexibility to meet varied client needs, and at a very competitive cost. With Twilio, Balboa Digital migrated seamlessly to a new call center solution with zero disruption to its existing business.

Overcoming unreliable telephony

Balboa’s previous telephony provider, a VoIP office phone system, was not flexible enough to work with third-party systems. Balboa was unable to integrate its older telephony technology with its agent management system, creating idle times between calls and causing agent inefficiency. Call transferring was cumbersome, and the system lacked the required recording and reporting capabilities, so Balboa could not effectively monitor and coach agents. Reliability was another disruptive issue with Balboa Digital’s previous provider, and the company was so concerned with service levels that it had to find a second, emergency provider to use when the primary provider went down.

Through a rigorous vendor evaluation process, Balboa determined that traditional telecom providers required exorbitant costs to customize and still didn’t provide everything they needed out of the box. On the flip side, other open source solutions lacked sophisticated customer support and didn’t have a global footprint of telephony relationships.

Balboa needed to find a provider that delivered flexibility, comprehensive services, customizable solutions and great customer service – all at an affordable, competitive cost.

Onboarding agents is quick & cost-effective with Twilio

Balboa selected Twilio because the platform was designed for integration and came with competitive pay-as-you-go prices. With Twilio, Balboa Digital was able to quickly and easily onboard contact center agents anywhere in the world, at a low cost. Plus, many fundamental call center features are part of the Twilio platform: queuing, recording, conferencing, and reporting.

With Twilio, Balboa can easily replicate, improve, and integrate all its existing call center features -– directory, user availability, queue viewer, voicemail, conferencing, reporting and more – into custom software, while allowing for a gentle migration path. Thanks to Twilio’s flexibility, Balboa was able to parse migration into standalone call center functionality that provided immediate client value–without downtime. “The migration to Twilio was relatively invisible to clients, which speaks very highly of Twilio’s ease of use and flexibility to deliver extremely customized solutions,” said Kevin Wagoner, managing partner at Balboa Digital.

By integrating Twilio with Balboa Digital’s agent management software, the company created a highly functional contact center desktop, reducing clicks–and seconds–between agent activities and powering new efficiencies for its staff.

Today, Balboa’s distributed workforce relies on Twilio’s browser-based, customized soft phone capabilities for both inbound and outbound calling. When Balboa Digital receives an incoming call, Twilio communicates with the custom agent management system (e.g. to create call queues) and forwards the call to the agent via Twilio Client. For outbound calls, Balboa Digital agents connect with their client’s customers using screenpops with Twilio Client. When agents are calling leads—such as prospects who have expressed interest in higher education—Twilio enables the agent to dial out to a third party, for example, to a school, for a three-way conference. In both cases, Twilio records the calls, allowing Balboa to make recordings available for clients, supervisors, and agents.

High availability and quality of service

Balboa Digital’s decision to migrate to Twilio has been critical to winning new clients and keeping existing customers highly satisfied. According to Wagoner, “ROI is best measured by our growing list of happy clients. Our customers are wonderful business references and profess that Balboa Digital has always been able to say ‘yes’ to complex telephony requirements.”

Twilio has helped Balboa reduce costs otherwise spent on buying and shipping hard phones. Balboa also increased the speed that they can deploy new human resources globally, allowing the company to realize new revenue days sooner for each opportunity.
 

Balboa has achieved and maintained a high quality of service, signaled by low latency and clear voice, between calling parties, regardless of location. Twilio users saw impressive improvement in availability compared to the previous vendor. Balboa Digital has only had one outage that impacted the business for more than a few minutes in over two years.

By completing custom implementations with Twilio, Balboa Digital has removed inefficiencies in agent interactions, such as idle times, and the company has increased agent productivity by more than 20%. Because Balboa can instantly purchase local phone numbers with Twilio, Balboa Digital has increased contact rates as high as 30% and warm transfer rates as high as 20%. This has helped Balboa Digital remain competitive in its space as be an extremely valuable contact center partner, helping clients to better monetize leads.