Rivian builds a driver support experience as bold as its vehicles

Challenge

Rivian’s fragmented legacy stack was built for a small fleet and never designed to scale. It couldn't deliver the personalized, data-activated support experience that 175,000+ EV owners expected, or give advisors the control they needed to drive innovation.

Solution

Rivian partnered with Twilio to transform its customer experience with a single, AI-powered engagement platform. Beginning with Twilio Flex, the company unified voice, messaging, customer context, and employee workflows, then layered in Conversation Intelligence to provide real-time AI insights and guidance during every interaction. The result is a customer-first experience that empowers advisors and scales alongside Rivian's growing fleet.

Buying an electric vehicle from a direct-to-consumer brand like Rivian comes with expectations that didn’t exist a decade ago. Every support interaction carries the same standard as the vehicle itself.

The digital journey—every call, chat, and touchpoint—has to match the drive. When it doesn’t, the brand promise breaks. 

Rivian treats that standard as a design requirement. Customer service is engineered with the same rigor and precision as battery technology and vehicle hardware. The ownership experience is a continuous lifecycle—one that begins long before delivery and evolves with every interaction. With more than 175,000 drivers on the road and the recent launch of the R2 vehicle from Rivian, the pressure to scale that experience — across support, sales, and service — without compromising it is real.

The infrastructure powering Rivian’s customer experience hadn’t kept up. A legacy stack built around a patchwork of disconnected third-party tools left advisors siloed with disconnected data, and the engineering team perpetually reactive due to third-party software. The gap between Rivian’s growing success with an increasing number of drivers on the road and its support infrastructure had become impossible to ignore. Something had to change—and a simple vendor swap wouldn’t close it.

Rivian made a deliberate choice: build for the future instead of buying into another SaaS walled garden. Twilio Flex became the foundation, giving Rivian's engineering team API control to shape every aspect of its omnichannel customer experience without rebuilding from scratch. 

Layered on top, Conversation Intelligence brings real-time AI reasoning to every interaction. The result is a support architecture designed from the ground up around drivers navigating roads, not vendor roadmaps.

Rivian's original support infrastructure was built for a small fleet. At 175,000-plus drivers and counting, that set up started to stall. 

Rivian didn’t diagnose the problem from a boardroom. They started at the front lines—sitting with advisors, running the same click-heavy workflows they ran every day. 

What the team found was remarkable resourcefulness despite the tools: colleagues making it work with Slack workflows and Excel spreadsheets filling gaps the core systems couldn’t. Advisors toggled between dozens of tabs to answer a single customer question. When a call ended, they spent significant time manually logging notes before they could help the next driver. 

The team called it “the wrap-up grind.” Technical debt had grown to the point where the engineering team had no control to drive innovation — patching yesterday's problems, adding complexity to critical technology, and creating poor experiences for employees and drivers alike.

With the recent launch of the R2 and a path to millions of vehicles, the calculus was clear. The traditional automotive support model—where customers repeat their VIN three times and average handle time runs as long as 22 minutes—was the industry norm. For Rivian, it was the ceiling to break through.

“We were trapped in a patchwork of third-party tools that didn’t talk to each other. Our advisors were flying blind…toggling between dozens of tabs just to answer one single question. We weren’t just carrying technical debt. We were losing our ability to innovate at the same time.”

— Merry Mac Miller, Manager Digital Product, Rivian

Instead of playing SaaS roulette and swapping one rigid vendor for another, Rivian's product and engineering teams chose to build. They selected Twilio Flex—an API-first contact center solution that gave them the flexibility to shape every customer touchpoint. 

Rather than being constrained by a vendor's roadmap, Rivian's engineers configured every layer of the experience, from call flows and routing logic to queue assignment and the customer context surfaced to advisors. They weren't buying someone else's vision of a contact center. They were building their own.

On top of Twilio’s platform, Rivian is adopting the Twilio Conversations layer to unify and intelligently route every interaction. Twilio Conversation Intelligence serves as an intelligence infrastructure integrated with Conversation Orchestrator and using GenAI-powered Language Operators to transform live communication streams into structured signals such as intent, sentiment, and next-best actions. At the same time, Agent Copilot puts those signals directly in front of advisors in the moment.

The three-pillar result:

Voice calls, messaging channels, and chat interactions that previously lived in separate systems now flow through a single advisor workspace built on Twilio Flex. Switching between channels—or picking up a conversation mid-stream—no longer requires navigating multiple tools. 

Contact switching is officially a thing of the past. Advisors see a single workspace and a single view of the customer, regardless of how the customer reaches out.

Advisors don’t see tickets anymore. They see stories. 

Before a conversation begins, a customer’s complete history—past interactions, upcoming service milestones, delivery status, and personal context—is pulled directly into view. A leaseholder with 90 days left on a contract and a known vehicle preference isn’t a cold call. It’s a curated transition. A driver 180 miles from the nearest service center doesn’t wait until something breaks—Rivian is already coordinating mobile service before the driver thinks to ask.

Rivian built Ask Assistant as a force multiplier—a single entry point into the entire customer story, with AI-driven responses and intelligent next steps built in. Layered on top, Twilio Conversation Intelligence transforms live interactions in real time: Language Operators transcribe calls as they unfold, surfacing next-best actions and coaching insights to advisors in the moment. 

When an interaction ends, Agent Copilot’s automated summaries push directly to the CRM with 99 percent accuracy, eliminating the wrap-up grind entirely. And if the system detects an upcoming delivery or service milestone, predictive routing connects the customer to the right specialist before they say hello. The instincts of Rivian’s best veteran advisors scaled across the entire team.

Twilio's Global Customer Services organization was a key part of the migration: Professional Services worked through the end-to-end design and launch of Phase 1, partnering directly with Rivian's product and engineering teams to configure Flex, staffed a dedicated team, and migrated both voice and chat traffic with zero rollback. Personalized Support worked to triage issues live during cutover and stabilize day-one operations—keeping the launch steady under real traffic and giving Rivian's advisors a dependable experience from the very first call.

“Our goal is a borderless organization—a radical ecosystem where any employee, an executive or an intern, has the capability and the means to support any customer at any time.”

— Severin Andrieu-Delille, Head of Engineering, Rivian

The ambition behind Rivian’s support rebuild has an internal name: The Borderless Organization. The vision is that any Rivian employee, from executives to interns, has the data context and capability to support any customer at any time. The unified customer data fabric, the AI-powered advisor workspace, the real-time reasoning layer: together, they are what the Borderless Organization looks like in practice. Twilio Flex and the Conversations layer are the infrastructure that makes it possible.

One of the most immediate, measurable outcomes is that automated AI summaries are pushing interaction notes to the CRM with 99 percent accuracy. The manual wrap-up work that consumed part of every advisor’s day after each call has been eliminated, freeing the team to focus on the next driver rather than the last interaction’s paperwork.

With unified context and real-time AI assistance in place, Rivian is targeting a significant reduction in handle time—cutting the traditional 22-minute automotive support interaction to under 10 minutes. This is an explicit roadmap benchmark, not a historical outcome; the goal is to put time back in the customer’s hands. 

The North Star for the overall experience is a customer satisfaction score above 95 percent, which Rivian believes is achievable when instant AI resolution meets a context-aware human team. Efficiency without quality is a faster failure. Rivian is pursuing both.

For Rivian, this level of investment in support infrastructure isn’t a customer service strategy. It's a brand strategy. 

The vehicle is exceptional. The ownership experience—every call, every chat, every touchpoint from pre-delivery through years of ownership—has to be, too. That bar doesn’t move.

Twilio Flex gave Rivian the flexibility to move beyond legacy constraints and build for the future. Conversation Intelligence and Agent Copilot complete the stack—voice, messaging, contextual data, and real-time AI assistance unified in a single workspace, designed entirely around their drivers.

The fleet is growing. The R2 is here. And Rivian is building intentionally, with engineering rigor, and with the support architecture that will scale with its vehicles, its ambitions, and every driver who depends on both.