The pandemic has forced companies to change the way they interact with customers. Whether it's the way they provide goods and services or the way they communicate, there is a common denominator, and that is that everything is forced to be digitally driven much faster.
To some extent, this is what prompted Twilio to acquire Segment for $ 3.2 billion today. (We wrote about the deal over the weekend. Forbes unveiled the story last Friday.) When you get there, the two companies adapt well and expand the platform by giving Twilio customers access to valuable customer data. Chee Chew, Twilio's The chief product officer says that while it may appear that the company is turning in the direction of the customer experience, they don't necessarily see it that way.
"Many people have thought of us as a communications company, but we see ourselves as a customer engagement company. We really think about how to help companies communicate more effectively with their customers, "Chew told ProWellTech.
Laurie McCabe, co-founder and partner of SMB Group, sees the move linked to the pandemic and the need for companies to serve customers in a more fully digital way. "More and more customers are realizing that delivering a great customer experience is the key to surviving the pandemic and thriving as the economy recovers, and they are willing to spend to do so even in uncertain times," said McCabe. .
Certainly Chew recognized that segment it gives them something they lacked by providing developers direct access to customer data and this could lead to some interesting applications.
"Segment's data capabilities offer a complete view of the customer. It really overlaps with everything we do. I consider it a horizontal addition across the channels and extending beyond. So I think it really helps us move forward in a different way [...] towards the holistic view of the client and enabling our clients to build intelligence services on top, "he said.
Brent Leary, founder and principal analyst of CRM Essentials, believes Segment helps deliver a powerful data-driven development experience. "This move allows Twilio to influence the data-insight-interaction-experience transformation process by removing friction from developers using their platform," explained Leary. In other words, it gives developers that ability Chew alluded to, to use data to build more varied applications using the Twilio APIs.
Paul Greenberg, author of CRM at the Speed of Light, and founder and principal analyst of 56 Group agrees, "Segment gives Twilio the ability to use customer data in what is already a powerful communications platform and hub. unified, and since it is, in effect, API for both, flexibility [for developers] it's huge, "he said.
That may be the case, but Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research, says the company needs to see that the pure communication parts of the platform like SMS are becoming increasingly commodified, and this deal, coupled with the acquisition of SendGrid in 2018, gives Twilio a place to expand their platform into a much more profitable data space.
"Twilio needs a broader growth path and it appears that its strategy is increasing the stack, at least with the acquisition of Segment. Data movement and data residence compliance pose a huge problem for companies when building their next-generation applications, "said Mueller.
As Chew said, at first the problems were related to creating SMS messages in applications and this was the problem that Twilio was trying to solve because it was what the developers needed at the time, but as it goes on, it wants to provide a more unified customer communications experience and segment should help advance that capability in a big way for them.