The year 2020 has been a year of changes; many were unexpected, but almost all were rather predictable. Besides the pandemic itself dominating news headlines and boardroom conversations in terms of its business impact, many firms were forced to adapt to trends they’ve likely monitored and were aware of but decided to hold off for as long as possible. Among these trends are digital enablement, transition from on-premises to cloud, automation / AI and remote work.
It’s important to note that each of these trends above share a common element: data. For firms in all industries, data has truly become the new oil. Gone are the days where big data was an emerging trend; it’s very much a reality and will remain so. With growing volume and complexity of data across the businesses, leaders within the C-suite now face a series of challenges they must address. Aberdeen’s CX Executive’s Agenda 2020 survey showed that 78% customer experience (CX) leaders, including those in marketing, sales, contact center, customer service, field service and commerce roles currently struggle with using data to do their jobs.
As business leaders pursue implementing these data-centric capabilities, technology providers are pushed to increase M&A activities to bring these capabilities to end-users. Twilio’s acquisition of Segment in November 2020 is one of these instances.
Staying Relevant With Customer Data
When asked about the top challenges why they struggle with using customer data, CX leaders shared that they don’t have enough data to ensure the relevancy of conversations with their clientele. They also cited that they share lack of human resources and technology tools to manage this data as well as eliminate disparate views of data across all sources.
This is where Twilio’s acquisition of Segment comes into the picture. Twilio is a cloud-based communications platform, enabling firms to communicate with current and potential customers across various channels, including voice, email, messaging, WhatsApp, and video. Segment is a customer data platform, enabling organizations to connect customer data across all relevant sources for a truly unified view of CX insights.
For CX leaders to achieve desired results when communicating with customers across any channel, it’s these communications must be based on context. More specifically, it’s critical that each conversation across all channels is tailored to individual customer behavior and preferences (in a consistent manner) by using data available across all sources. Hence, Twilio’s acquisition of Segment is an important move to ensure greater personalization of CX activities across interaction channels.
Staying Compliant With Customer Data
As CX leaders aim to address the above-mentioned roadblocks by operationalizing connected CX data within their customer engagement platforms, they also aim to ensure compliance with data privacy regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. Segment’s capabilities automatically detect and classify personal data in real-time, enabling CX and IT leaders to reduce the time and effort they spend managing activities to monitor and ensure compliance, and spend more time on utilizing data to achieve business objectives. As such, the acquisition of Segment capabilities will also enable Twilio to incorporate greater data privacy capabilities to combined capabilities.
Once firms establish a strong data foundation, this ultimately enables leveraging AI and automation capabilities to their true potential. To this point, I expect that once the firms finish integrating combined capabilities, we would likely to see innovations in this area where CX leaders can use the communications platform enabled with AI capabilities to assist with real-time customer journey management.
What’s your take on this acquisition? If you’re currently using or planning to use Twilio or Segment capabilities, please share your thoughts on your expectations regarding how this acquisition may impact your activities.
