SIGNAL 2022: All the New Product Announcements

SIGNAL 2022: All the New Product Announcements

Today’s consumers have unlimited choices as to which brands they do business with and how they interact with those brands across digital channels. As a result, business leaders are challenged by increasing cost and complexity of finding customers, reaching them, and winning them over as long-term, loyal customers.

In our SIGNAL keynote sessions, we shared our belief that thriving during this downturn requires both lowering customer acquisition costs, or CAC, and growing customer lifetime value, or LTV. Twilio’s Customer Engagement Platform is uniquely positioned to help brands to do just that, enabling more efficient, effective customer engagement that builds brand advocates for life.

In that spirit, here’s a quick recap of the five universal laws of customer engagement for durable brands shared in our keynote, and how Twilio can help make them a reality:

1. Engage customers in real time with a unified, data-first marketing solution    

In this economy, marketers are being asked to do more with less. Personalized, precise, and scalable customer engagement is now critical to achieving efficient growth, but challenging for marketers to deliver without quality, real-time data.

Enter Twilio Engage, the marketing solution that uniquely combines the power of a native customer data platform (CDP) and native omnichannel communications in one offering. Twilio Engage gives you a complete view of your customer with real-time, first-party data, then helps you build and scale personalized customer experiences across our native email and SMS or any of our 400 out-of-the-box integrations. Plus, important customer insights are continuously fed back into our solution, meaning you can dynamically refine your customer profiles and make smarter decisions for long-term, sustainable growth.

With Twilio Engage, you can now act on your data in real-time and across any digital channel from one solution.

We’re thrilled to announce that Twilio Engage is now generally available! And brands like Discovery Education, EasyHealth, Harry Rosen, and Winnie are already putting it to work. Click here to learn more about Twilio Engage!

2. Convert customers through every conversation

Customers crave the ability to engage directly with your business. According to our Conversational Messaging study, 80% of global consumers want brands to offer conversational messaging, and 95% said they would trust a brand more if it was easy for them to initiate a conversation.

As conversational messaging takes off, there’s a significant opportunity to use messaging more effectively for outbound marketing campaigns.  With ​​Message Scheduling (generally available) brands can schedule SMS, MMS, or WhatsApp messages for future delivery to nurture users at the right time. Marketers don't need to manually send messages at set times, developers don't need to set up cron jobs, and customers are more likely to engage.

Driving engagement and measuring the ROI of those messages used to be limited to a promo code or a complex custom application. Now, without additional software, Link Shortening (public beta) creates unique shortened links that include your branded domain. This translates to improved clickthrough rate (CTR) and greater deliverability since third-party link shortening solutions like bit.ly are often filtered out by carriers and never delivered to customers. With integrated Click Tracking (public beta) marketers can confidently measure the performance and ROI of every campaign. Organizations like Delta Airlines are using Twilio’s Link Shortening to improve the message content based on user engagement. By enabling brands to evaluate each message’s effectiveness they can optimize every campaign.

Learn more about Twilio Conversations, Message Scheduling and Link Shortening with Click Tracking!

3. Remove pain points from user verification

We’ve all been there – you’re trying to log into an account on a company’s website and you’ve been waiting (what feels like) forever for an SMS, email, or push notification to verify you’re you.  Wouldn’t it be nice if you could bypass that step, and instead offer your customers a VIP fast lane for verification?

That’s where Twilio Verify Silent Network Authentication comes in. At SIGNAL today, we announced that Silent Network Authentication (SNA) is now in public beta. This next-gen SIM-based technology authenticates real users in real time, without compromising security or the customer experience.  Finally – A truly passwordless verification solution!

We verify the device and phone number with your mobile operator without your customer having to do a thing. And we’ve partnered with 56 mobile operators across 30 countries, and are continuously adding additional carriers.

Learn more about Twilio Silent Network Authentication

SMS Traffic Pumping Fraud dramatically impacts businesses sending SMS one-time passcodes (OTPs), inflating cost-per-user and dramatically decreasing SMS conversion rates. Twilio Verify Fraud Guard (now generally available) uses machine learning to identify SMS OTPs that aren’t converting and protects businesses by proactively blocking fraudulent activity in real-time without blocking entire regions– a true win-win for you and your customer.

By enabling Verify Fraud Guard, your organization avoids the high cost of these fraudulent one-time passcode messages. In fact, one US-based social media company reduced their costs per user by 42%, and improved their conversion rate by 27% using Fraud Guard! Today, every single Verify customer can enable Fraud Guard within the Twilio console.

Learn more about Twilio Verify Fraud Guard!

4. Know your customer and personalize their experience

Twilio Segment is the #1 CDP, providing organizations with a unified view of their customer so they can deliver data-driven, personalized communications at the right time and in the right channel, delighting each customer. To that end, we’re excited to preview Twilio Segment’s new capabilities to meet these needs.

The first is Twilio Segment Profiles Sync (public beta in Q4). Profiles Sync makes Segments’s identity-resolved customer profiles extensible. It syncs customer profiles to the data warehouse so that data teams can enrich them, build models on them, and unlock complex use cases such as marketing attribution, churn prediction, machine learning, and more. Profiles Sync will enter Public Beta in Q4, and will at first support Snowflake, Google BigQuery and AWS Redshift data warehouses.

Customer profiles are also now portable with Twilio Segment Reverse ETL (public beta in Q4). This was one of our most requested Segment features, with good reason; once data teams have good customer profiles, they want to enrich them with data from other systems to create hyper-targeted audiences. But getting data out of the warehouse and into tools that other teams use is often difficult;

Instead, our Reverse ETL sends the data teams’ valuable analysis from the data warehouse through Segment out to all of the downstream tools a business uses with the same design, reliability, and observability that defines our events pipeline, Segment Connections. This makes it much easier to turn data analysis into personalized customer experiences. Like Profiles Sync, Reverse ETL is moving from private beta to public beta in Q4. It will also support Snowflake and BigQuery data warehouses.

Learn more about Twilio Segment Profiles Sync and Twilio Segment Reverse ETL here.

5. Be your customer’s trusted advisor

Twilio is partnering with Google Cloud's Contact Center AI (CCAI) to implement personalized virtual agents that can be deployed across Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and other digital channels. These virtual agents engage customers in a natural conversation without the need of a human agent.  

Today, we announced the public beta of the native integration of Twilio Voice and CCAI, including Dialogflow CX. This allows our customers to improve call deflection with conversational virtual agents through IVRs to handle common issues. With Twilio Flex, Twilio Voice, and CCAI, organizations can provide 24/7 customer service, serving over 30+ languages.

Further, Twilio enables virtual agents to leverage first-party data from Twilio Segment to understand each customer’s previous interactions with the brand and deliver personalized experience.

Click here to learn more about Twilio Flex and our Google Cloud Contact Center AI partnership, and the new announcements today.

Thanks again for joining us for Day 1 of Signal 2022! We hope you are as excited as we are about these announcements that further Twilio’s Customer Engagement Platform leadership.

Hope to see you for Day 2!

Joyce Kim is Twilio's Chief Marketing Officer and leads global marketing as Twilio executes its vision of becoming the leader in the emerging customer engagement category. Joyce brings over two decades of experience scaling commercial innovation and growth in the technology sector through large scale digital transformation and brand elevation strategies. Her expertise spans all facets of Go-To-Market including digital, brand, communications, channels and product strategy for global technology and SaaS companies.