Twilio Segment: Transforming Customer Experiences with AI

AI News recently sat down with Hema Thanki, EMEA Senior Product Marketing Manager for Twilio Segment, to explore how the company leverages AI to enhance customer engagement and personalization. AI is revolutionizing this field by enabling organizations to offer tailored experiences that cater to the unique preferences of individual customers on a large scale.

During our discussion, we highlighted how Twilio leads this transformation while addressing the noticeable gap between businesses’ claims of personalized service and the actual experiences reported by customers.

Understanding Customer Engagement Through AI

AI News: How does Twilio use AI to provide personalized and satisfying customer experiences?

Hema Thanki: According to Twilio’s recent State of Customer Engagement report, an impressive 91% of companies assert that they frequently personalize engagement efforts. However, only 56% of consumers feel their interactions with brands reflect this level of personalization. Rather than implementing a truly “customer-centric” approach, many businesses remain “system-centric.” The proliferation of technology stacks and makeshift solutions results in fragmented data and a limited understanding of customers.

Each consumer is a complex individual with evolving needs and preferences. To genuinely place customers at the core of your business, it’s essential to understand who they are and how to meet—and exceed—their expectations. This insight allows for engaging them in a timely, relevant, and meaningful manner. These principles form the “engagement flywheel,” which drives adaptive customer engagement at scale.

Unlocking AI’s Potential with Twilio CustomerAI

Our recent launch of Twilio CustomerAI aims to empower countless businesses by enhancing their engagement capabilities. Through CustomerAI, brands can broaden their understanding of customer data and leverage it more effectively for deeper insights.

AI News: Can you share examples of how businesses might utilize Twilio CustomerAI?

Hema Thanki: Modern marketers need to not only analyze past customer behaviors but also anticipate and respond to future needs effectively. While AI and machine learning models excel in this area, developing them can be complex and typically requires data science expertise. Now with CustomerAI Predictions widely available, Twilio Segment equips marketers with predictive AI tools without needing technical assistance. This allows them to easily create targeted audiences, initiate customer journeys, and personalize multichannel experiences based on predicted lifetime value (LTV), likelihood to purchase, or any other tracked event within Segment.

For instance, companies like Box are utilizing Predictions to save time, boost campaign performance, and uncover revenue prospects. Chris Koehler, CMO at Box, noted: “As marketers, our goal is to connect with our customers in meaningful and relevant ways. CustomerAI Predictions has empowered our marketing team to forecast customer behavior with insights previously unattainable. We can now segment our audience based on predictive traits, such as propensity to attend in-person events or likelihood to purchase, which enables us to engage with them effectively throughout their customer journey.”

Emerging Trends in AI Personalization

AI News: What emerging AI trends should businesses and marketers pay attention to?

Hema Thanki: Companies that manage data within a customer data platform (CDP) while integrating AI can craft robust, personalized campaigns that resonate with their audience. Here are four important trends in AI personalization to keep an eye on:

• Personalized Product Recommendations: Using AI for personalized recommendations ensures that customers receive optimized content, fostering trust in your brand and encouraging repeat purchases.

Take Norrøna, an outdoor clothing brand in Scandinavia, which successfully constructed a comprehensive recommendation platform in just six months. They utilized Segment for both client-side and server-side customer data collection and management. Segment assigned unique IDs to each customer, ensuring that the data gathered remained accurate and organized through a defined schema.

Behaviour-based Email Campaigns: AI advancements are enabling the identification of user interaction patterns, allowing for the design of behavior-driven email campaigns. For instance, if a customer commonly interacts with specific types of email content, an AI-driven system can trigger related content to that customer. With Twilio Engage, email communication can be sent directly through the Segment application, leveraging first-party customer data effectively.

Dynamic Website Content: Gone are the days of static landing pages. Modern tools can now analyze user behavior and generate personalized website content in real-time. Segment’s website, for example, adapts its content dynamically based on visitor interests through integration with Mutiny. When a user arrives on the Segment site from a specific IP address, they are greeted with tailored landing pages that reflect their unique browsing behavior.

Predictive Customer Segmentation: Predictive Audiences enable businesses to reach users likely to take desired actions. With out-of-the-box audience templates, such as “ready to buy” or “potential VIPs,” AI can analyze profiles to create predictive segments. This capability allows businesses to proactively engage customers who might be at risk of churning through customized retention campaigns.

Best Practices for AI Models: Effective customer data serves as a foundation for AI, distinguishing market advantage. However, the quality of the AI outputs varies based on data integrity. If a company’s data is isolated, outdated, or incomplete, the results will mirror these issues. Twilio Segment has a proven track record of assisting organizations in establishing reliable data infrastructures that are crucial for a successful AI strategy. Our composable Customer Data Platform (CDP) ensures the data is ready for AI use, helping you collect, cleanse, and activate customer data through our API-first platform and over 450 pre-built connectors.

Operational Efficiency in AI Adoption: As businesses navigate global economic uncertainties, an increasing number of marketers seek AI solutions to enhance operational efficiency. Marketing teams frequently invest significant efforts in crafting and executing campaigns and customer journeys. With generative AI slated for public beta in 2024 within Twilio Engage and Segment CDP, marketers will soon be able to save considerable time, improve productivity, and optimize outcomes. The forthcoming CustomerAI Generative Email will allow marketers to convert simple text prompts into HTML within minutes, building on current features that suggest effective email content.

Additionally, marketers will benefit from CustomerAI Generative Journeys, which will automate the architecture of customer journeys. By simply defining the campaign type and target audience, Twilio Engage will utilize generative AI to construct the journey, streamlining processes and fostering growth.

Upcoming Events: Twilio Segment eagerly anticipates its participation in the AI & Big Data Expo Europe in 2023 as a proud sponsor. Visitors are encouraged to stop by our stand (242) to connect with our team and learn how Segment can assist in collecting, unifying, and activating first-party customer data. We will feature a session with Folkert Mudde from Albert Heijn, discussing their effective partnership that enhances personalization for over four million recognized users using Twilio Segment. Don’t miss this presentation on September 26 at 14:30 CET within the ‘Applied Digital, Data & AI’ track. Additionally, Arthur Viegers, SVP of Global Engineering at Twilio Segment, will engage in a panel discussion about ‘The Future of AI-Enabled Experiences’ on September 27 at 11:40 CET.

Join us for a complimentary webinar titled “Navigating SaaS Management: Enhancing Security and Operational Efficiency” featuring insights from Calero, Marsh McLennan, and Merck Group.