Twilio Supercharges Customer Profiles for Data Warehouse Portability and Extensibility

Twilio the customer engagement platform that drives real-time, personalized experiences for s leading brands,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.

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“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 research²”

“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 share¹. 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.

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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.

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