Webinar recap: Transforming business growth with communication, data, and AI

Webinar recap: Transforming business growth with communication, data, and AI

When companies focus on improving customer experience, they not only have a happier customer base, they also see positive impacts on revenue. According to Twilio’s 2024 State of Customer Engagement Report, brands that invested in customer engagement saw a 123% average increase in revenue compared to the prior year. 

But building out this experience without the right tools in place can feel like an uphill battle. Between mapping a maze of disconnected data points and systems, managing compliance, and reducing costs, creating a cohesive customer experience becomes a daunting task. 

To help companies navigate these challenges, Twilio’s Senior Product Marketing Manager, Bill Higbee, hosted a webinar on how businesses can accelerate growth and develop robust customer experiences using a combination of communication preferences, contextual data, and AI. 

Discover how you can meet changing customer expectations and deliver experiences that benefit your customers and your business. Access the full webinar, The secret to growth: Data, Communications, and AI, or keep reading for the cliff notes. 

The changing landscape of customer expectations

Personalization is no longer a nice-to-have but a necessity. Consumers want more than blanket communication—they need tailored experiences across multiple channels (email, SMS, voice, etc.) for each notification use case. In fact, 91% of consumers now expect brands to use their preferred communication channels.

This personalization goes beyond the traditional communication categories of notifications, marketing, security, and services. Instead of providing emails for all marketing-related communications, companies need to give consumers the ability to choose which channel they’d prefer for each communication.

For example, let’s say someone prefers order notifications by email. However, for shipping notifications, they prefer SMS. In this scenario, placing all order notifications in one channel type doesn’t satisfy the customer’s needs. Instead, companies need to consider each communication as a way to personalize the experience with their organization. 

The power of contextual data

You might be thinking that personalizing customer communication channels is all great in theory, but how do you put it in practice? This is where contextual data comes in. 

Contextual data allows you to map a consumer’s preferences to the right channel at the right time. By connecting demographic and behavioral data points, you can tap into insights about each customer’s relationship with your business. You can then apply those insights across sales, support, and marketing to create differentiated experiences for every customer.

By connecting contextual data sources across your business, you gain a holistic view of your customers across channels and enable personalized experiences that adapt to a customer’s life changes. This could include tracking their name updates after marriage or connecting data across email, SMS, and other marketing channels. 

The role of AI in customer engagement

If contextual data enables you to map customer experiences, then AI streamlines the process, predicting behaviors and turbocharging the level of personalization available to your customers. AI can help teams create targeted customer lists with predicted high conversion rates and eliminates the reliance on engineering teams for list creation. 

But AI capabilities don’t stop there. Consider all of the potential business benefits from leveraging AI, such as the blocking of fraud and enhanced support. 

Here are a number of the benefits Twilio customers have experienced through its AI-powered solutions:

• 569 million fraud attempts were blocked from June 2022 to October 2024

• 70% of support cases were deflected by Unified Profiles and Agent Copilot

• 70% increased accuracy of audience segments through AI-Powered Predictions

• 102% higher conversion rate than the average search engine marketing performance with Predictive Audiences

Twilio’s approach: A unified experience

In many companies, systems are locked between channels or departments of the business. For example, the email marketing department may not have access to SMS communications. When systems are disconnected, it can create a fragmented customer experience. 

Ultimately, to accelerate your organization’s growth and create an incredible customer experience, your communication channels, contextual data, and AI can’t operate in silos. They must be interconnected to create an experience your customers will love and a system that’s easy for you to use. 

Here’s what a personalized customer journey could look like if communication channels, contextual data, and AI are unified.

Stage 1: Opting in to business communications

• Customer perspective: Picture your favorite shoe brand. You opted in to receive emails and SMS from this company to stay in the loop on their different marketing promotions. 

• Business perspective: When the customer opted-in to this communication, Twilio Verify enabled the autofill of the opt-in form, allowing the customer to opt-in with one touchpoint. For businesses, this has led to a 3x uplift in subscribers. In addition, Verify Fraud Guard analyzes customer traffic patterns and leverages AI/ML models to block suspicious users. 

Stage 2: Personalized messaging

• Customer perspective: On Black Friday, you receive a personalized MMS with a picture of yellow sneakers. You love the style and go to purchase the shoe, but your size is out of stock.

• Business perspective: The customer received the message on the yellow shoes because they were part of an AI-generated audience that was predicted for a high conversion rate. The message was actually sent as an RCS message, but the customer didn’t have RCS enabled. Luckily, Twilio falls back on MMS in these cases and the customer received an image of the sneakers promoting the Black Friday sale.

Stage 3: Out-of-stock message

• Customer perspective: On the checkout page, the company asks if you’d like to be notified by SMS next time it’s back in stock and you sign up for notifications. 

• Business perspective: By allowing customers to sign up for back-in-stock notifications, you keep the door open and create another conversion opportunity for your customers.

Stage 4: Abandoned cart email

• Customer perspective: You’re notified a few days later that the shoes are back in stock, you add them to your cart, but don’t complete the checkout process. Later that day, you receive an abandoned cart email that reminds you that you want to purchase the shoes. 

• Business perspective: According to Baymard Institute analysis, the average ecommerce company loses 70.19% of checkouts to shopping cart abandonment. Sending abandoned cart emails improves conversion rates and increases revenue. 

Stage 5: Email receipt & delivery notifications

• Customer perspective: You go ahead and purchase the shoes, receive the receipt via email, and sign up for SMS delivery notifications. You’re notified every step along the way of the delivery process until they arrive at your doorstep. 

• Business perspective: If your business is concerned about sending illegitimate phone numbers, Twilio validates the number ensuring that it can receive SMS before you send to those contacts. If people submit fake emails and your business sends to those emails it could lead to your business being flagged as spam and getting blocked by email providers. Twilio Email Validation API helps companies identify these fake emails and protect their deliverability metrics. 

Stage 6: Voice for support

• Customer perspective: You try the shoes on and… they’re too tight. You call support because you don’t want to exchange your shoe for a different size and lose the Black Friday sale price. You choose to chat via voice and are offered the option to receive a text message when the next agent is available. You talk to the agent over the phone, exchange your shoes for the right size, and confirm the sale price.

• Business perspective: By using automated interactive voice response (IVR) service, you decrease the amount of time that your support team and your customer is on the phone. Meanwhile, Unified Profiles and Agent Copilot help your agents by providing real-time data to agents, helping them better understand customer activities, preferences, and enhancing customer interactions. Twilio has customers that cite a 30% decrease in average call handle time with IVR and have 70% call deflection rates due to Agent Copilot. 

By the end of this experience, it took longer than average to get your perfect fitting shoes, but the company made it easy for you to find out whether an item was back in stock, track delivery, and exchange your shoes. By alleviating your concerns and meeting you on your expected channels at the appropriate time, you had a positive experience that turned you into a repeat customer. 

From the company’s perspective, leveraging data to identify the right channels and the right person to target, led to higher conversion rates. The support of AI helped expedite all aspects of the customer’s experience from personalization to customer support. 

Unlock accelerated growth with Twilio

While improving customer experience may seem like an insurmountable challenge, it doesn’t have to be. With the right tools, like Twilio’s Customer Engagement Platform, you can personalize your customer’s experience through communication, data, and AI within a single platform. 

For more insights on this powerful combination, access the webinar on-demand. Or, if you’re ready to take your customer experience to the next level, reach out to Twilio’s team to craft your customer engagement ecosystem.