Datacom powers agile, responsive communications with Twilio
Time to read: 3 minutes
Challenge
Datacom faced long lead times when setting up and modifying phone lines with traditional carriers, making it hard to respond quickly to client needs. To maintain its high standards for responsiveness, Datacom needed a faster, more flexible solution.
Solution
Datacom now uses Twilio Phone Numbers to rapidly configure new phone lines and scale capacity as needed. With Twilio Voice, it delivers tailored, outcome-driven contact centre experiences in days rather than weeks.
Datacom is a leading IT solutions provider in Australasia, headquartered in New Zealand. The company designs, builds and manages IT systems and processes for clients across operations, cybersecurity, cloud, digital platforms and other enterprise applications.
Businesses and government agencies across Australia and New Zealand rely on Datacom’s contact centre solutions. However, long lead times with traditional telecommunications carriers made it challenging to quickly provision new services or make changes. In some cases, Datacom’s clients had to wait four to six weeks ─ the industry standard ─ for carriers to provision new numbers or change interactive voice response (IVR) systems.
Recognising that these long lead times weren’t meeting clients’ high expectations, Datacom needed a solution to enhance its responsiveness. The company also sought to improve the programmability, scalability and resilience of its contact centre offerings.
“As a business process outsourcing (BPO) provider, we need scalability, flexibility and the ability to quickly turn things on and off to meet our customers' requirements. We don’t want to deal with the delays we get from traditional telecommunications carriers when delivering critical citizen services.”
Dean Fox, Director – Transformation, Datacom
Enabling rapid deployment of phone numbers
To enhance its responsiveness, Datacom adopted Twilio Phone Numbers, enabling it to rapidly setup and configure phone numbers for calls, SMS and messaging services like WhatsApp – all through Twilio’s cloud platform.
With Twilio, Datacom can quickly provision new lines and scale capacity across multiple markets without managing multiple telcos. This flexibility is crucial for both planning initiatives, such as promotions, and urgent situations like when a government client needs to launch an emergency information hotline in response to a major bushfire or flood.
For clients already partnered with a traditional telecom provider, Twilio’s solution serves as a valuable backup, offering greater flexibility and scalability when needed. It also enables Datacom to conduct system and routing tests without disrupting live numbers, ensuring seamless operations.
Using Twilio Phone Numbers, Datacom can now configure new phone numbers in days ─ far faster than the industry standard of four to six weeks ─ and make changes quickly. This agility means Datacom can better respond to client needs.
“We deal with a lot of disaster relief type of work and being able to stand up infrastructure quickly and then bring it back down again is important to us. Traditionally, we’d have to hold a big chunk of capacity, just in case we needed it. But now, we have unlimited capacity that we can stand up over a weekend or even less. Twilio gives us a lot of flexibility that the traditional carriers in our region don’t.”
Dean Fox
Delivering engaging voice experiences with speed
Datacom also leverages Twilio Voice to deliver tailored, outcome-driven contact centre experiences, including dynamic voice interactions that provide critical information to customers.
One of the biggest advantages is Twilio’s programmability, which has streamlined the deployment and modification of voice solutions like IVR systems. Previously, making changes required highly skilled engineers with expertise in session border controller infrastructure and carrier relationships. Now, routine provisioning tasks can be managed by less experienced employees, freeing senior team members to focus on more innovative, high-value projects for Datacom’s customers.
IVR modifications – such as updating call routing or adding new menu options– are also simpler and faster. Traditionally these changes took four to six weeks due to complex dependencies on legacy infrastructure and telecom providers. With Twilio Voice, Datacom can now adjust IVR workflows at the carrier level, independent of any specific contact centre platform.
This carrier-layer approach also enhances redundancy and resilience, ensuring seamless operations, even during peak demand or unexpected disruptions. By removing infrastructure constraints Datacom can improve customer experiences without major overhauls.
Beyond being able to leverage this approach to build custom solutions for technology clients, Datacom also uses Twilio Voice to manage its own operations – including servicing their customer’s incoming enquiries, sales calls, requests and service desk operations.
“One of the main reasons we picked Twilio was to give our engineering group the flexibility to lean in and deliver the things they are looking for and not be reliant on partners that potentially can’t deliver. Now, they have all the tools at their fingertips to build world-class customer experiences in minutes.”
Dean Fox
Continuing to seek new ways to improve client experience
Using Twilio has helped Datacom to eliminate technical bottlenecks and long wait times, enabling faster, more flexible service delivery – without outages.
As client and consumer expectations for contact centres continue to rise, Datacom is actively exploring new ways to enhance its services. For instance, it uses Twilio’s Elastic SIP Trunking solution that improves the speed, flexibility and agility of setting up and managing call centre operations. This is especially valuable for fluctuating call volumes, ensuring resources are used efficiently.
Datacom is also exploring Voice Intelligence to analyse and extract insights from unstructured voice calls at scale. By turning conversations into actionable data, Datacom aims to unlock consistent, scalable and highly personalised customer experiences.
“We’re excited to see how Twilio’s Voice Intelligence capabilities and other items in Twilio’s roadmap take shape. We aim to build on the value we’ve already created at the top of our stack and enhance it further by integrating these new features.”
Dean Fox
