A Conversation with Kevin Niparko on Why We Built Segment Unify

This week was a big one for Twilio ! On Wednesday, we introduced Segment Unify, the latest evolution of our customer data platform (CDP). Segment Unify is a real-time identity resolution solution that gives companies and their data scientists powerful new tools for creating personalized experiences for their customers.

Also on Wednesday, we released Twilio’s fourth annual State of Customer Engagement Report, which takes a deep look at how personalization and digital technologies are transforming the ways businesses interact with customers and vice versa. Our report looks at these trends through two lenses: What business leaders think and what consumers think. Needless to say, we found some diverging opinions between these groups — gaps that Segment Unify is well positioned to address! ??

To find out more about what makes Segment Unify so relevant to businesses today, I reached out to Kevin Niparko , VP of Product for Twilio Segment CDP, to discuss more about what this exciting new product does, how it enables companies to build “golden profiles” of their customers, and why it’s so relevant right now.???

So, what is Segment Unify??

Segment Unify brings together all the digital signals a business has about its customers and unifies them around “golden” profiles, or golden customer records, which the business can then use to power all interactions with each customer. What makes this solution unique is that these profiles are updated in real-time, ensuring that companies are always using the most accurate data. This, in turn, removes the expensive and time-consuming hurdles that data teams face when building these “golden” profiles. With Segment Unify, companies can? deliver on the expectations that consumers now have for hyper-personalized experiences.

We know this is especially timely because our State of Customer Engagement Report revealed that there’s a big gap between business and customer perceptions around personalization. 46% of brands think they do personalization well, but just 15% of consumers agree. That’s a huge difference!

Part of the problem is that consumers are used to tech giants like Amazon or Netflix, where every one of their interactions with the brand is uniquely tailored to their interests, purchase history, browsing history, and so on. It’s actually a really hard data and infrastructure problem, and we’ve been hearing again and again from our customers about how they’ve been struggling to meet this high bar.

Being able to bring together all the online and offline signals into a unified view of where the customer is and how you can help them next — that’s incredibly powerful. Segment Unify gives businesses the ability to do that, quickly and effectively, without requiring a billion-dollar software development budget.

What do you mean when you say “golden profile?”

A golden profile or golden customer record is a way to connect all the different signals about a customer from across your business and pull them into a single, unified view of that customer.?

The technical term is “identity resolution” — figuring out that the customer ID in one database is the same person with a different ID in a different database, for example, and connecting the two together.?

But Segment Unify is not just about identity resolution, it’s also about being able to activate those identities, so you can deploy them in any of the applications you’re already using to interact with customers.

Some companies have tried to solve this problem by creating a “single source of truth,” the one perfect database that has the ultimate data on every customer from every application. But the reality is much more complicated. Behind most businesses today there’s a rich tapestry of databases, data warehouses, Kafka streams, and one-off integrations. It’s complicated — and with any global business, it’s inevitable.

With Segment Unify, we’re not trying to build a single profile and lock customers into our database. Instead, we’re gathering signals from across the enterprise and making them accessible to all the applications that can use them. And we’re making it easy for those applications to actually use these golden profiles. This is how we unlock hyper-personalized engagement, drive down acquisition costs, and increase customer lifetime value.

One thing I want to clarify: We’re talking about first-party data, data that is unique to the business based on relationships they have with their own users. We’re not enabling or using third-party data, the “data gossip” that businesses sometimes trade with each other behind consumers’ backs.

Why is this so important for businesses now??

We’re all living in an intense macro economic environment right now. With economic uncertainty as high as it is, customer lifetime value has never been more important. And what we’ve found is that customer experience is the engine for LTV, growth and customer retention. Twilio’s State of Customer Engagement Report found that 66% of consumers will abandon a brand if their experience isn’t personalized. That’s an existential threat! So much for brand loyalty, right?

The flip side is that consumers pay an average of 21% more with companies that tailor customer engagement well. So there’s a huge opportunity as well.

Not only that, but artificial intelligence and machine learning models are rapidly rising in popularity and will continue to play a critical role in how companies engage with customers. It’s super important that these models have accurate, real-time data. The last thing businesses need is for these models to keep delivering repetitive and frustrating content to customers because their data is limited or incomplete.

In short: personalize or perish. It sounds harsh, but the research is showing that this is the case. Personalization is the key to business success.?

The key to unlocking lifetime value is effective personalization, and the key to effective personalization is having an excellent understanding of who your customers are, in real time, across all the applications your business uses.?

What does Segment Unify look like in action??

One thing I will say about working on the public beta over the past few months: There have been so many amazing customer stories. The number of customer applications being built on top of Segment Unify is humbling to me.

For example, CrossFit. We all know someone who is a diehard CrossFitter and has such a close relationship with the brand that they can’t stop talking about the workout of the day and how great they feel since they started doing CrossFit. That customer relationship is critical to CrossFit, so they turned to Segment Unify to help them reinforce that relationship. ??

Their challenge was that they had a bunch of different MySQL databases that held information about their community. They wanted to know how they could help their community engage with CrossFit in a deeper way, but just getting the data in a consistent way was a challenge.

By using Segment Unify and building out a deeper understanding of each customer, CrossFit was able to gain a better understanding of the needs of their athletes, coaches, and affiliate owners. Segment Unify accelerated the time it took to build this holistic understanding, and it also delivered new insights about ways that they could help their community.

This all sounds pretty great for businesses, but doesn't a "composable CDP" do the same thing???

There’s a lot of buzz going around about Composable CDP. Our product philosophy has always been around composability and extensibility. You can connect and sync data from hundreds of sources. You can activate data across hundreds of really powerful marketing and analytics integrations. And you can now connect and activate data from any of the most popular data warehouses, including Snowflake, Google BigQuery, and AWS Redshift.?

Unfortunately, some of the loudest champions for the Composable CDP movement are niche, single-feature startups that aren’t able to live up to the promise that true CDPs deliver on.?

Successful CDP implementations require real-time data, operating at massive scale and high reliability, with identity resolution, governance, privacy, and compliance controls baked in. These capabilities need to work in concert; they can’t be stitched together across multiple disparate vendors. That just shifts the complexity from the vendor onto engineering and IT teams to figure out, and creates security and compliance liability as each vendor manages the customer data slightly differently.

Most significantly, without access to "golden profiles," companies run the risk of utilizing an incomplete package, which at the end of the day results in more work for them and a lack of personalization for their customers.

I like to say it’s like bringing a horse to a Formula 1 race. Oh, and you have to swing by the saddle-maker who will quickly assemble a saddle before you can enter the race. I guess you are technically eligible to compete? But you’re not going to win.?

What excites you the most about the launch of Segment Unify??

It’s been one of the most enthusiastic beta efforts I’ve ever been involved in. It’s been an amazing experience.

I’ve been working with CDPs for over a decade. What we’re doing with Segment Unify reflects that decade of experience — things I have learned, things I wanted to offer customers, and goals I have had for a long time. It also reflects tons of feedback and conversations I’ve had with Twilio customers.?

There are a lot of tools that claim to offer a 360-view of the customer or a “single source of truth” or the “one table to rule them all” — but it’s actually a myth. In fact, the single source of truth doesn’t exist and will never exist, due to the realities of global business.?

It’s true that there are a lot of legacy vendors and single-feature startups in this space. But none of them truly address the two biggest problems customers face: Managing identity resolution at scale (we’re talking millions of events a minute), and being able to activate that understanding across a variety of applications.?

That’s something that is unique to Twilio, and it’s why I’m so excited about the launch of Segment Unify this week. ?

Thanks to Kevin for this conversation — and for leading the launch of this exciting new product from Twilio! For more research data, check out our interactive data explorer for the State of Customer Engagement Report. To learn more about golden profiles and how they can empower you to deliver real-time hyper-personalization, visit the Segment Unify product page. ??