Braze: expanding the reach of customer engagement for impactful results

Braze: expanding the reach of customer engagement for impactful results

In the world of customer engagement, businesses looking to effectively connect with their audience need to tap into the power of personalization, AI, and multi-channel strategies. No longer just a marketing team’s mission, customer engagement has a huge impact on customer satisfaction, and every team within a brand plays a vital role in shaping memorable and authentic experiences. To best position your employees for the future, technologies like Braze make it easy to create interactions that resonate with users on an ever-evolving roster of relevant messaging channels and digital touchpoints. 

To discuss how Braze has expanded their customer engagement platform to countries around the world and partnered with Twilio along the way, we sat down with Ido Bar Oz, Senior Director of Global Strategic Alliances

Q: What is Braze’s mission and how do you help your customer’s innovate their customer engagement?

A: At Braze, we’re all about customer engagement: we have built a platform to help brands create lasting customer relationships through compelling, relevant experiences. We make it easy for teams to unify and take action on any amount of data from any source, so they can gain rich insights into each customer’s journey. Brands can then use real-time orchestration and AI-powered tools to identify the best opportunities to engage and reach customers in the moments that matter most. Finally, we make it easy to deliver memorable, tailored experiences across channels and digital touchpoints, all from one centralized platform.

Ultimately we want to help our customers boost productivity, optimize onboarding, increase engagement, reduce churn, and improve acquisition.

Q: How do you define your customer, who they are, and their responsibilities?

A: We have 1,500+ employees solely focused on customer engagement. Marketing continues to be a key interface to how we engage with customers and prospects, and how we continue to re-engage and drive loyalty back to brands. 

Today, there are so many different ways and different touch points across the digital landscape — everything from in-person touch points to messaging to email to the coolest new VR experience. There are also many different ways brands can engage their customers, and the brands that thrive across this diverse landscape have marketing teams that also partner closely with many functions across the business. 

Braze’s investing has been around thinking of the landscape broadly, with marketing as a central point. For example, we see marketing partner with product managers and data engineers who are thinking about a more robust picture of the customer. 

Everyone has a digital footprint and is at some point in their digital maturity. Where we see Braze customers being most successful is when they’re trying to solve this challenge of, “Hey, I really wanna think about the best ways to engage my customer across all of these digital footprints.” While they may not be ready to unlock every single one today, that's their vision and their aspiration. It’s not really industry-agnostic or region-agnostic, it’s more maturity-agnostic on what they’re trying to accomplish for their business.

Sending communication through a variety of channels is really about how to manage that complexity of multiple users through multiple channels in a sophisticated way that drives specific business outcomes around those use cases that were mentioned earlier. 

Q: How do you and your team think about innovating and scaling your solution while still taking care of your base users with Twilio? 

A: We are constantly innovating on our platform to help our customers more easily create the best, most relevant experiences for their consumers. We take a number of inputs into our planning, for example emerging use cases we hear from our customer base.

If you take something like SMS, we consider the customers using Braze and Twilio, and the use cases that they’d want to support, and then we bake those into a native SMS integration. So we are always using a lot of the existing customer proof points and how they were using the channel to build a more robust and marketer-friendly experience off the back of Twilio. 

What Twilio has allowed us to do is not worry about the downstream support, scalability, and number acquisition—basically everything that goes into sending and receiving messages on the nuanced channel that is SMS. We can throw the message over the fence to Twilio and rely on our partnership to deliver that to the end user wherever they are in the world. Because we’re sending on a global scale with Twilio right now.

Q: How do you work with and guide your customers when it comes to the best practices of multi-channel marketing?

A: We offer a number of resources and learning paths to help our customers make the most out of their multi-channel marketing program. Each year we pen our annual survey, the Braze Global Customer Engagement Review, which gives us insights into our customers’ priorities, as well as areas of maturity and opportunity. For example, one key statistic in that report is that 41% of marketers believe that they lack the technology for creative ideas. 

So you know, talking here about best-in-breed technologies, we speak a lot about breaking down data silos. And Braze has been successful over the last 10 years in breaking silos between different channels, between data, between teams. But with all the changes that are happening in digital communications, there’s a lot of focus on and work to do when it comes to the education of first-party data. We need to consider how to collect it, work with it, and govern it. 

Q: What are some of your big initiatives this year? What is your North Star?

A: The way that we talk about the platform and how customers are utilizing Braze today is very much grounded in that overall vision of how we enable customers to drive this next generation of customer engagement. We see that in three core buckets. 

• First: How do we better understand customers and bring in all of those different real-time data sources? Because it all starts with understanding your customer. So we are investing in how we think about the world of data and really providing that rich insight to our brand so they can deliver those great experiences. 

• Second: How do you create those great experiences? How are we thinking about delivering that really compelling creative? How do we think about the different personalized journeys or personalized authors that really get down to that one-to-one level? Obviously AI plays a big role in that, which is why we launched our Sage AI by Braze™ solution, which empowers marketers to work smarter in crafting, scaling, and adapting memorable messaging experiences.

• Third: We never want to be on fewer channels than our customers. So how do we make sure that we’re engaging customers on the most relevant channels and digital touch points that matter to them? This is why we are investing in how our platform is architected and how we support new channels as they grow in popularity, like WhatsApp.

As you can imagine, we’re making a number of investments across the board to really bring those outcomes to life. Because ultimately this is all in service of how to help make customer engagement better. We are proud to be a part of creating amazing, tailored experiences for a consumer, and that, in turn, drives more value, more loyalty, and, ideally, more dollars for the business. 

Future-proofing your customer engagement strategies is vital in today’s digital landscape

Braze helps businesses stay ahead by continuously innovating and adapting to new technologies and market trends. The platform’s architecture is quite literally designed to support emerging communication channels, ensuring that businesses can quickly integrate new touch points as they become relevant. With Twilio as a partner, Braze ensures that businesses are not only prepared for current challenges but are also well-equipped to tackle future ones.