Redefining customer engagement: Put your data to work

Customer data platforms are now an integral part of the modern tech stack for businesses, helping them to use their data in an intelligent manner.

Customer engagement as we know it, has been altered forever. The pandemic led to a rise in customer expectations, and forced businesses to shift the bulk of their customer interactions to digital, resulting in an influx of customer data. Ved Antani, managing director and vice-president, engineering, Twilio India, says, “This influx of data resulted in an increase in demand for customer data platforms (CDP), making it an integral part of the modern tech stack for businesses of all kinds, to use their data intelligently and efficiently.”

Twilio is a cloud communications platform as a service (PaaS) company.

With the increasing restrictions on collecting, storing, and processing third-party data, CDPs have become pivotal in the quest to uphold privacy while simultaneously making customer engagement more personal. In fact, according to the 2030 Today Report by Twilio Segment, 73% of respondents believe that a customer data platform will be critical to their customer experience efforts in the coming years.

To enhance customer engagement, businesses today are looking beyond basic personalisation to hyper-personalisation, using customer data to deliver seamless and meaningful customer experiences.  “Marketers want to run hyper-personalised campaigns at scale and keep track of every single customer interaction to quickly build experiences that are tailored to a customer’s specific habits and preferences, and ultimately meet customers on their preferred communication channel,” says Antani. “Our goal is to democratise personalisation, so that businesses of any size can deliver exceptional customer interactions, across touchpoints.”

However, this comes with its own set of challenges. As pointed out in the State of Customer Engagement Report 2021 by Twilio, even as the volume of digital interactions increased by 54% over the past year, almost half of organisations still face challenges getting accurate customer data. “Brands who fail to effectively tap on first-party data and translate this into actionable insights and engagement will lose out on competitive advantage,” adds Antani.

So how do marketers deliver seamless customer experiences and secure insights from customer data? Marketers need to start with a solid foundation of actionable insights, says Antani. They should be able to move quickly from idea to execution. However, traditional marketing clouds, built for a bygone era, slow them down, as they lack the ability to collect customer data into one unified view. These limitations have led companies to rely on additional tools, or depend on time-stretched data teams, as they try to personalise experiences for customers at scale, he explains.

“Keeping this in mind, we built Twilio Engage—an omnichannel growth platform that empowers businesses to use any combination of tools, data integrations, analytics, and channels they need to build and optimise marketing campaigns, faster than ever before,” he says. With Twilio Engage, marketers can accelerate campaign delivery, personalise every interaction, use any combination of tools, data integration, and analytics, reach every customer every time and monitor every campaign in one place.

In the big data era, having the ability to access and act on customer data in real-time is crucial. This helps elevate customer experiences, which translates into better business outcomes. The tailwinds propelling CDPs forward are only getting stronger. “While moving from an old model economy to a new one, business leaders must think critically about how to ride this latest wave of change and what digital engagement and transformation mean for them going forward,” he adds.