Building the Next Generation of Journeys

Building the next generation of Journeys

Over the past few years, the kinds of B2C and B2B use cases businesses have sought our help in solving have grown in variation and complexity.

Today’s companies need to be able to deliver much more precise, scalable, and context-rich personalization in real time to reach every person with the most relevant message at the best time and on the right channel for conversion. Attempting to do this typically ties up engineering resources for months on end or requires teams to reinvent the wheel with every new requirement or activation channel.

We heard you loud and clear. We feel your pain. And we have fully redesigned the front and backend of our Journeys architecture inside of Twilio Engage to help you solve these evolving challenges.

Building on top of our new Journeys architecture, at this year’s SIGNAL San Francisco,we announced a number of new features to public beta that unlock highly personalized, real–time transactional customer journeys for businesses and evolve Engage into a rich data orchestration layer within the Twilio Segment customer data platform (CDP).

Event-Triggered Journeys

We’ve all heard the phrase: time is money. When it comes to some transactional use cases that’s literally true.

Timing and messaging matter when money and trust is on the line.

Sophisticated, yet common, abandonment use cases — like shopping cart abandonment, form applications, onboarding flows, or trial-to-paid account journeys — require more than just the targeted audience lists that power most traditional marketing campaigns. They require intent signals and event-triggered architecture to properly enroll members and make decisions.

For example, if you want to send a message to someone who left items in their online cart, a system needs to store and manage what those items are and make them available for personalization.

With Event-Triggered Journeys, Segment dynamically manages the state of a “cart” without needing developer support. Plus, resetting engagement timers and support forsimultaneous Journey entries ensures messagings are not only based on the most recent activity but also prevents interruptions during the user's shopping process.

Importantly, Segment is schemaless, so this pattern scales to whatever your business requirements and data are — meaning it’s also highly adaptable, supporting use cases beyond retail.

For a financial services company, a “cart” might involve automatically managing the state of multiple credit card applications and sending a personalized message for each if they’re abandoned. Event-Triggered Journeys will make this possible.

Just like Google powers intent-driven advertising, we’re creating intent-driven customer journeys. If you begin applying for a credit card but don't complete the form, it's like searching for something in Google: you have expressed intent for that credit card, therefore the ROI of a targeted and timely response is potentially much higher.

Contextual payloads

In the rebuilding of Journeys, we knew that real-time responses to intent signals from customers were crucial.

Now, Journeys in Segment will create rich contextual payloads that combine information from not only the triggering events, but also the data stored in the warehouse, as well as everything we know about a person in their Segment profile.

So when it’s time to send a nudge to your customer, we’ll make sure you have all of the relevant information you need to personalize that experience.

For example, we won’t just show you that someone has abandoned their online chart, we’ll show you exactly which items are in the cart and all their variant details — like name, price, size, color, image — and if that customer is a loyalty member with rewards points they can use towards their purchase.

By making all this important data available in a user-friendly interface and easy to send to all your downstream messaging tools, you will now be able to instantly respond to customer interactions with the level of personalization needed to drive revenue.

Improved Observability and Usability

Once you launch a Journey, how do you know if it’s effective?

Testing and launching campaigns is a lot of work.

To make it easier for customers to visualize exactly what is going on in a Journey, we’ve added deep observability so that each instance of a Journey has a clear audit trail of what happened. You’ll be able to see a clear activity journey path for each user as they perform different actions in real-time.

Get started

Excited to see what the next generation of journeys and rich data orchestration can help you unlock for your business? These beta features are available to all Engage customers, so you can dive in and start building today.

Don’t have Engage? Talk to your account rep today to purchase it.