Twilio: Customers Want Fast Answers From AI, Not a Friendly Personality

What customers actually ask for

Twilio surveyed 660 business leaders and also asked consumers what matters most when they contact customer support. According to Twilio, the answers were operational:

• Immediate issue resolution: 40%
• Speed of assistance: 40%
• Accuracy of information: 38%
• 24/7 availability: 38%

Tone, warmth and empathy did not appear on that list. Twilio adds that customers do not reject personality outright: 54% of consumers say they want AI with more human-like personalities. Brands, however, estimate that figure at 73%, and nearly half of consumers are neutral or indifferent as long as the system works.

Where brands are spending their effort

The company says 98% of organizations are adding features such as typing animations, synthetic pauses, warmer phrasing and on-brand scripted personalities. Asked about their priorities, brands named the following:

• Training AI to recognize and respond to customer emotions: 41%
• Personalization based on user data and preferences: 40%
• Natural conversation flows that mirror human interaction: 39%
• AI personalities aligned to brand values: 39%

Twilio argues that, apart from personalization, none of these directly improves resolution, speed, accuracy or availability.

Empathy is mostly context

Consumers were also asked what makes an interaction feel human or empathetic. The top answers were acknowledging their specific situation or problem (34%), offering multiple solutions when the first does not work (32%), using conversational language instead of scripted responses (30%), and offering compensation or refunds when something goes wrong (26%). Twilio says 91% of consumers report that personalized interactions feel more authentic.

The company's reading is that an AI agent cannot feel empathy, but it can produce interactions customers describe as empathetic through context. A customer who does not have to repeat an issue, or who moves from bot to human without re-explaining, feels understood, Twilio says. In its words, "All of it is data arriving on time."

When warmth backfires

Twilio warns that scripted sympathy can make things worse. An AI that says it understands how frustrating a problem is, then asks for an order number the customer already gave, raises expectations and then fails them. According to the research, 39% of businesses name weak emotional understanding as a top driver of AI dissatisfaction, second only to lost context between channels.

Twilio's Inside the Conversational AI Revolution report found that only 39% of consumers describe AI agents as helpful, while 51% say they feel robotic. The company interprets that as a sign of agents that know nothing about the customer, not of the wrong tone.

What Twilio recommends building first

The company says more than half of organizations now optimize for functional effectiveness before personality. Its advice is to give the agent history before a voice, and it points to its own products for this:

• Twilio Conversation Memory keeps persistent customer profiles across sessions and channels.
• Twilio Conversations models chat, messaging and voice as one lifecycle, which Twilio says removes the repetition customers cite most.
• Twilio Conversation Orchestrator triggers handoffs on conversation rules, and the payload into Twilio Flex carries history and a summary so the human agent does not restart.

Twilio also recommends designing a second option for when the first path fails, calling that a flow decision rather than a question of tone.

For support teams, the message from this vendor survey is to fix context, speed and escalation first. Personality is not ruled out, Twilio says, but it should come after the practical basics.