SIGNAL 2023: Twilio’s CustomerAI vision and product announcements
AI.
Everyone is talking about it, and we’re all discovering new ways of using it every day.
But how will AI shape the future of customer engagement? What should brands bear in mind when they use AI to deepen customer relationships?
Meet Twilio’s CustomerAI technology
At SIGNAL 2023, we showcased?CustomerAI, a set of capabilities woven throughout all of our products that couples the power of large language models (LLMs) with real-time customer data flowing through Twilio’s Customer Engagement Platform. CustomerAI will help you to truly listen to your customers, interpret the signals they’re sending you across channels, and activate them through personalized experiences for every individual.
It starts with enabling you to?perceive?your customers: to see them, hear them, and digest that information in a way that helps you determine what they want.
Then, we help you leverage that perception to?understand?your customers. We provide tools that help you synthesize all that data, and find the insights that drive personalized customer engagement for each person.
And then, we’ll help you?activate?those insights, engaging each customer at the right time, in the right place, and through the right channels. That’s the key to truly personalizing their experience based on everything they do.
At SIGNAL, we explained how all of this works together to become a flywheel for customer engagement, while also announcing new features to help our customers make this virtuous cycle a reality.
Let’s talk about what CustomerAI looks like in practice, across the stages of the flywheel, and how it can accelerate better engagement.
CustomerAI helps you perceive customer behavior
Your AI is only as good as your data, and that data can be messy. Without unifying it and making it intelligible across your organization, it’s not helpful.
You need to be able to harness the right data in the right way in order to perceive and understand your customers’ behavior at any and every part of their journey.
That’s the driving vision behind?Twilio Segment’s?composable customer data platform (CDP). It can help you with specific tasks, like adding events from your website, or support you in orchestrating an entire journey. You can choose where you start, whether that’s getting data from SaaS products into your data warehouse, or activating existing data with reverse ETL. That way, you can achieve your goal more quickly and efficiently.
As the #1 CDP in worldwide market share for the fourth year in a row according to?IDC, Segment helps brands reduce or eliminate the complexity of their data by unifying it all in one golden profile, making that data easily usable. And now with?Twilio’s Zero Copy Architecture—pilot coming soon—you don’t even have to move the data from your data warehouse or make copies of it. Now you can just query it directly with a click for use, whether that’s for segmentation, audience building, personalization, and more.
Segment is now expanding the golden profile with?Segment’s B2B Edition with Linked Profiles, in private beta in Q4.?It enables brands to understand each individual’s relationships to others. Users can link?any?customer information from?any?part of your business?to?a profile, enabling them to model beyond the individual to multi-user accounts, households, and more
That’s not the only data hurdle we’re tackling. Voice data has always been a challenge because it’s unstructured and hard to analyze. However, it remains a critical customer service channel, where every call holds vast amounts of data.?Twilio’s Voice Intelligence—newly available in public beta—brings structure to voice data, using a transcription and language operator tool that deploys conversational speech recognition to intelligently extract insights.
CustomerAI helps you understand your customers
Comprehensive data requires a deeper understanding to activate well, and Twilio continues to invest in tools to help brands do just that.
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One huge investment we’ve made is in?CustomerAI Predictions?in Segment, now generally available. We know that predictive models aren’t exactly new, but the ability to run them natively in your CDP is.
And that’s what Segment does: it makes engagement predictions easy. All you have to do is know what you want to predict—maybe it’s the date a customer will buy or possibly churn—and Segment will do the rest. You can use that data to plan when to send them an SMS text message with an offer to drive them into the store.
You also want to show customers you understand them when they come to you with questions or concerns. That’s why we’re making the?Twilio Flex contact center?even more powerful with?GenAI Agent Assist, in private beta in Q4.
In partnership with Google Cloud, Flex customers can deploy GenAI Agent Assist to help them:
Additionally,?Flex Unify— coming soon in public beta—will natively surface Segment’s rich customer profile data to agents in real time. This will help them see all of the rich details about a customer, like real-time purchase and return data, and click-stream activity, so they can tailor their conversation accordingly, empowering contact centers to increase customer lifetime value and boost sales conversions.
CustomerAI helps you activate your customers through personalization
Being able to activate customers on the flywheel depends on three capabilities: deliverability, action, and insights.
You can’t engage customers if they aren’t receiving or seeing your messages. That’s why we’re focusing on deliverability with our?Traffic Optimization Engine features,?including:
Receiving a call, text, or email is only half the battle. Making each touchpoint relevant, and every journey cohesive, is key to driving action. We know that can be difficult and time-consuming, which is why we’ve invested in tools that simplify the process.
CustomerAI Generative Journeys, in public beta in 2024, will power your customer journey builder with?Twilio Engage. It will be easier for marketing teams to build smarter audiences, content, and campaigns. Just describe who you want to market to, and Engage will do the rest.
CustomerAI Generative Email, in public beta in 2024, will even draft the perfect email based on your goals. All you have to do is enter simple text prompts that turn ideas into HTML in seconds.
While reaching a customer is critical, building trust in every communication is essential to driving action. We’ve all gotten spam calls or unwanted texts from unknown senders. The odds of you engaging are low if you suspect it isn’t the brand you know and love. With?Trusted Communications, brands can leverage capabilities like?Branded Calling, now in private beta. Essentially, a call that would’ve been marked as spam or screened gets picked up, because the brand’s logo pops up and the end consumer knows it’s safe to engage.
Trust goes both ways and no business wants to spend money on fraudulent accounts. Twilio Verify gives businesses a single API to make sure they know who they’re talking to;?Twilio Verify?Fraud Guard, now generally available, furthers that goal by using machine learning to proactively protect brands from SMS pumping attacks. That layer of protection now comes out-of-the-box for every new Verify customer and across every verification.
Beyond deliverability and action, communications should?bring in new data?to help you continuously improve your customer’s experience. That’s where?Perception Engine?comes in, currently in pre-release. It enables you to add the most important details of a conversation across channels—like an address, preference, or request—to your customer’s golden profile, all without training a machine learning model. This enables you to develop more relevant, timely, and engaging communications that are more likely to be read and acted on by customers.
We hope you are as excited as we are about these announcements unveiled at SIGNAL. Don’t miss all of the exciting keynotes and breakout sessions we have around what’s possible with Twilio and CustomerAI, now available on-demand for free on the?SIGNAL platform.
Interested in learning more? To dive deeper into each of these announcements and capabilities, take a look at detailed blog posts on: