How CPG Europe used Twilio FLEX to build a stronger foundation for remote customer engagement

Building great customer experiences is just like building anything else—you need the right tools, an experienced team, and quality products to ensure the final result will stand the test of time.

No one understands that better than CPG Europe: a leading provider of construction materials, including everything from adhesives, passive fire protection products, and far more. Their business is a sprawling, international operation that customers rely on to deliver the highest quality products and top-of-the-line experiences every time.

Their primary customers are architects, project managers, construction site workers, and other building specialists who have to be able to handle questions or concerns about products at a moment’s notice.

“They’re working with our products daily,” Alexander Ortmann, IT project manager at CPG Europe, said. “They need to be able to reach us with technical questions, they need to order our products in an easy way—and because of that, we need to be reachable over multiple channels at any time.”

According to Ortmann, the need to reach customers under one simple umbrella is what first led them to Twilio: “Originally I was just looking for a SIP provider. It was always quite a mess, because we had several different telephony providers and even several providers in just one country, which was difficult to maintain.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the UK, the team faced an even more difficult challenge—maintaining customer relationships under new, rapidly changing circumstances, with many employees unable to come into the office. This led them to adopt Twilio Flex: a powerful remote contact center solution that enabled CPG Europe to simplify their customer experience by bringing agents and customers into one streamlined communications ecosystem accessible from anywhere with an internet connection.

The importance of flexible solutions

Prior to using Twilio, CPG Europe was balancing a variety of different telephony providers—which meant complexities in keeping track of contracts, managing costs, troubleshooting technical problems when they did arise, and a variety of inevitable issues in a patchwork system. “I investigated,” said Ortmann, “and I found that Twilio worked best for our company because of its flexibility.”

As a conglomerate of international brands, CPG Europe is regularly acquiring new companies and employees that need to be integrated into the broader work stream.

“Let’s say we have a new merger and need 30 new telephone numbers and a new SIP trunk,” Ortmann said. “With the Twilio portal, I was able to add most of those things on my own.”

That simplicity allowed for more time to focus on critical business operations instead of technical minutiae.

As the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, the team knew that expanding to a fully remote contact center would be essential to their continued success; some of their teams had used a contact center solution in the past, but it lacked essential features like real-time view and real-time reporting, which limited their ability to measure performance and review contact history.

The pandemic accelerated the need for a solution that could offer these crucial features while also integrating a distributed, complex business operation into one simple system.

“We used the time during and after the first UK lockdown to adopt FLEX and prepare the environment for our agents,” Ortmann said.

Doing so was crucial for business continuity because it meant that calls could be routed to employees who were working from home without any slowdowns that might negatively impact customers.

Rather than rely on a variety of different site-specific numbers or physical constraints, Flex also allowed them to merge all of their phone numbers into one IVR system that was simple and consistent for all of their UK customers.

“The customer can go through the options and always reach the right person without having to be transferred between teams,” Ortmann said, “which naturally makes things easier for our agents as well.”

Flex has also enabled them to launch specific features to help their customers, like an emergency mode that lets customers leave a message even when a line is facing technical issues, and customizations enabling managers to set time-specific messages for holidays and other business interruptions to inform customers of when they can expect to hear back.

How the cloud enables global expansion

CPG Europe is using the power of Flex to continue expanding their engagement options and provide customers with the best experience possible. Bringing all of the European countries they serve into the Flex ecosystem is next on the agenda, but according to Ortmann, that’s just the beginning of how they’ll leverage the true power of cloud-based, omnichannel engagement.

“We started with calling functionality, but we’re also planning to integrate more channels like chat, SMS, and so on,” said Ortmann. “With Twilio, you can start small—but there are no boundaries for where you can go in the future.”

That flexibility is allowing CPG Europe to scale their offerings at the right pace for their customers and employees while they establish a powerful communication infrastructure that can continue to evolve with the needs of their business for years to come.