Twilio Supercharges Customer Profiles for Data Warehouse Portability and Extensibility

Launch Takes Segment’s Identity-Resolved Profiles to the Next Level, Powers Cutting Edge Customer Engagement Experiences for Brands

SAN FRANCISCO, March 29, 2023 — Twilio (NYSE: TWLO), the customer engagement platform that drives real-time, personalized experiences for today’s leading brands, today announced the introduction of Segment Unify. Unify is the real-time identity resolution solution that includes Profiles Sync, and offers access to Reverse ETL - also launching today. With Segment Unify, businesses can easily merge the complete history of each customer into a single unified profile, freely sync Segment’s identity-resolved customer profiles to their data platform, and activate these complete or ‘golden’ profiles in their customer experience tools of choice, including Twilio Engage and Flex. Ultimately, this empowers businesses to drive down acquisition costs and to increase customer lifetime value, by delivering hyper personalized engagement, campaigns and communications.

“By unlocking the power of the identity-resolved Segment profile for data warehouses, we're removing the hurdles that have long held back businesses and data teams from providing the deeply personalized experiences that today’s consumers demand,” said Kevin Niparko, VP of Product at Twilio. “Niche startups may offer to move data around with single features, but without ‘golden profiles’ or identity resolution, businesses run the risk of using an incomplete package. Elsewhere, brands are finding themselves cornered by legacy vendors who provide limited flexibility outside of their own systems. Today, we’re the only enterprise-grade CDP making it possible for data teams to unify, move, and activate customer profiles at scale and in one single, open and extensible platform.”

For three consecutive years, IDC has ranked Twilio #1 in Customer Data Platform (CDP) for market share.* Now, with this launch, Segment’s CDP seamlessly complements the data warehouse, empowering data teams to move data around freely, work directly off of real-time data at scale, and activate data that can reside in the warehouse. This unlocks the ability for data scientists to perform sophisticated data modeling and analyses on identity-resolved customer profiles in the data warehouse, before sending enhanced profiles back through Segment and out to downstream tools. 

For example, without any manual heavy lifting, a data team could model a ‘likely to convert, potential loyalty program member’ audience by combining behavioral and event data from an e-commerce website with relational data that resides in their data warehouse, like data collected from a contact center or customer relationship management (CRM) software. Next, this upgraded ‘golden profile’ can be sent downstream to tools like SendGrid or Google Ads for precise customer engagement. By using tailored content like product recommendations or a loyalty program invitation, the business in this example can activate remarketing campaigns or experiences that both drive sales and boost customer satisfaction.

Personalize or Perish: ‘Golden Profiles’ Unlock Massive Opportunity

Consumers today have skyrocketing expectations for digital experiences. Every business must deliver a real-time, sophisticated, personalized offering or their customers will turn to a competitor that does. This imperative is underscored by new research, published today, which reveals that 66% of consumers abandon brand loyalty if their experience isn’t personalized. This poses an existential threat to brands, and continues to be aggravated by the volume of digital signals and customer touchpoints that have exploded in the past decade. 

In a world where data science teams are too often burdened with the manual cleaning and processing of this data tidal wave, it’s not a surprise that outdated, inaccurate, and fragmented customer profiles are the norm, leading to impersonal and inefficient customer engagement. For over a decade, Twilio Segment has been on a mission to change this. With Unify, data teams can now leverage automation to merge the complete and real-time activity history of each customer across web, mobile, servers, and data platforms into a single identity-resolved profile. This provides companies with complete, accurate, and trusted customer profiles automatically, without the hassle of time-intensive data modeling or extra transformation upfront.

When all is said and done, personalization will propel the brands that can solve this data dilemma and deepen their understanding of their customers. In fact, Twilio’s new report reveals that consumers will spend an average of 21% more with companies that tailor customer engagement. But to truly seize this opportunity, the report points to the need for brands to deliver high impact personalization that can only be achieved with the help of profiles built with complete datasets from every relevant source and domain.

Introducing Profiles Sync and Reverse ETL: Unify, Move, and Activate Data Like Never Before

Today, Twilio Segment’s customer profiles break new ground by becoming portable, allowing businesses to model hyper-tailored audiences in their domain-of-choice, the increasingly popular data warehouse. Unlike legacy marketing clouds that confine customer records within ‘walled garden’ platforms, Segment gives customers the freedom to move their customer data and profiles to wherever they choose, making it easy to create solutions that meet their exact needs. While Segment is the source of truth for a brand’s data, it never ‘owns’ the data, nor does it need to in order to activate it. Importantly, profiles created with Segment are ‘golden’ because they are complete and portable across the CDP, data platforms and downstream customer engagement tools. Furthermore, profiles are uniquely kept up to date by sophisticated identity resolution technology that’s driven by the Segment Identity Graph. 

Profiles Sync sends identity-resolved profiles to the data warehouse where they can be enriched with data from systems of record. Here, data scientists can build for complex use cases that require trusted, high quality data such as marketing attribution, churn prediction, and the training of machine learning and AI models. AI and machine learning play a valuable role in delivering personalized customer experiences, but the models are only as effective as the data they are trained on. For example, a machine learning model that is not updated in real-time could retarget an ad to a customer that has already purchased that same product. A frustrating experience like this puts customer loyalty at risk. Complete, accurate customer profiles are the key to training innovative AI and machine learning models. Previously, creating these ‘golden profiles’ could take years for even the most advanced customer experience teams to perfect, but Profiles Sync makes it fast and effortless.

Reverse ETL makes it easy to pull enriched ‘golden profiles’ back out of the data warehouse and send them to any downstream tool in the tech stack. With this new capability, profiles that have historically been static and locked inside the data warehouse are now free to move: portable and accessible for analysis or marketing activation. With Segment’s open and extensible platform of 400+ pre-built integrations, which stands in stark contrast to the limited flexibility offered by legacy marketing suites, it’s easy for customers to handle activation in their customer engagement, marketing, and analytics tools of choice, in real-time. Teams can also use Functions to build custom integrations that align with their business’ specific needs, connecting to new tools or adapting existing ones with just a few lines of code. 

Additional Details:

• Organizations like CrossFit, MongoDB, Orchard, and Sanofi are already leveraging these features to create and activate hyper-tailored audiences in their domain of choice, the data warehouse.

• Segment Unify is Generally Available now. Prospective customers can get started with Segment Connections, which includes Reverse ETL. From there, customers can next add Unify which encompasses four related features: Identity Resolution, Profile Explorer, Profile API and Profiles Sync. More information is available here.

• Integrations with multiple solutions are available for Profiles Sync and Reverse ETL, including those from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Snowflake Data Cloud.

• The fourth annual Twilio State of Customer Engagement Report published today, revealing how investment in effective digital customer engagement drives revenue and helps brands adapt to shifting market conditions and evolving consumer preferences. The report focuses on the kind of real-time personalization that Segment Unify delivers, and finds consumers spend an average of 21% more on brands that personalize. 

Quote Sheet (Analyst & Customer Commentary)

“Businesses are struggling with consolidating and synthesizing their data, with just over 40% of firms reporting they have been successful breaking down data silos in the past few years according to recent IDC research,”* said David Wallace, Research Director, Customer Data and Analytics at IDC. “The Twilio Segment CDP provides a proven approach to unifying, unlocking and activating data across the organization by creating a real-time golden profile of each customer. With the launch of the new Segment Unify offering, data teams are now able to leverage these golden profiles in their data warehouse of choice to create AI and ML models, run analysis and drive more intelligent campaigns. This can ultimately be leveraged to deliver more personalized experiences for customers.”

“Over the past several years, the CrossFit team has built up our digital presence to further support and expand our tight-knit fitness community. This has given us more data and insight on our athletes than ever before,” said Jay Meyering, Sr. Manager of Data at CrossFit. “With Twilio Segment and our data warehouse working in lockstep, CrossFit has been able to transform our data landscape and evolve into a truly data-driven company. We’re now equipped to personalize experiences based on enriched customer profiles that we’re seamlessly pulling from the data warehouse, moving into Segment, and sending out to our downstream customer engagement tools. With this superpower, we're able to consolidate our source data and better understand the needs of our Athletes, Coaches and Affiliate Owners. From there, we’re boosting customer satisfaction with more targeted support, outreach, and competition opportunities.”

“In a digital world, it’s essential that we keep a real-time pulse on what our customers need, when they need it. To meet this demand, we were searching for a centralized system that would make it easy to collect, unify, analyze, and activate customer data across the entire business,” said Alexandra Dimitriu, Senior Marketing Ops Manager at MongoDB. “With Profiles Sync from Twilio Segment, we now understand the full picture of a user's journey. Today, we can create more comprehensive customer profiles by merging offline, online and sales data - all of which were previously locked in different systems. Meanwhile, Reverse ETL is enabling us to intelligently trigger personalized marketing campaigns based on information created by data scientists that were previously confined to analytics use cases. These new campaigns have shown increased loyalty, customer satisfaction and engagement with our developer data platform.”

“At Orchard, we remove the stress and uncertainty of buying and selling a home for our customers,” said Corey Egan, Director of CRM at Orchard. “Thanks to Twilio Segment, we can now create sophisticated, unified customer profiles easily synched to our Amazon Redshift data warehouse for data access and insights across the whole business. This enables us to build out tailored, personalized experiences for our customers, so our home advisors can engage them with the most up-to-date, timely, and relevant information they need to make buying and selling their home a seamless experience.”

“At Sanofi, we strive to create personalized experiences for our healthcare providers by delivering them the right information at the right time that best fits patients’ needs. In turn, they can provide lifesaving care to patients around the world. Delivering these custom experiences starts with a comprehensive view of each provider’s individual needs and interests,” said Seth Levenson, Head of Digital Architecture at Sanofi. “Thanks to Twilio Segment, we’re now able to have greater access to data-backed customer profile insights, in real-time, that can then be sent to any supported destination our teams already use today. This helps us highlight where we can make the most impact and better educate providers about new medicines and treatment plans.”

*Source: IDC Worldwide Customer Data Platform Market Shares, 2019: Calm Before the Marketing Cloud Vendor Storm, Doc #US46130720, March 2020; IDC Worldwide Customer Data Platform Market Shares, 2020 The Flight to First-Party Data Is On, and CDPs Win Big,Doc #US48052920, July 2021; IDC Worldwide Customer Data Platform Market Shares, 2021 Stellar CDP Growth Proves Value of Unified Data for CX , doc #US49493722 July 2022

*Source: IDC, Future Enterprise Resiliency & Spending Survey - Wave 11, IDC, December, 2022

About Twilio Segment
Twilio Segment’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) provides companies with the data foundation that they need to put their customers at the heart of every decision. Per IDC, it’s the world’s #1 CDP for 2021 market share. Using Twilio Segment, companies can collect, unify and route their customer data into any system where it’s needed to better understand their customers and create seamless, compelling experiences in real-time. Tens of thousands of companies, including FOX, IBM, Intuit, and Levi’s use Twilio Segment to make real-time decisions, accelerate growth and deliver world-class customer experiences. For more information, visit https://segment.com.