Originally founded as a Cloud-based software company, Braze has recently found its footing as a dedicated customer lifecycle engagement platform. In 2017, the company formally called Appboy, was rebranded as Braze with an entirely new leadership line-up. Braze also conducted another round of funding in October 2018, bringing its total investment to USD 175 million.
Braze offers an end-to-end mobile customer experience tool, powered by next-gen tech such as artificial intelligence, data visualisation, and omni-channel support. It’s used by leading companies across the world including Urban Outfitters and OkCupid.
Today, we are reviewing Braze’s flagship product – its mobile-based Lifecycle Engagement Platform.
Inside the Braze Lifecycle Engagement Platform
Braze is clearly designed for next-gen customers who are tech-literate and always connected. That’s why the platform features seamless workflows, and attractive visualisations – replacing old-school spreadsheets and hard-to-navigate interfaces.
Braze isn’t just meant for marketers – its robust CRM capabilities let sales teams make informed decisions, and omni-channel orchestration makes interaction management far simpler for your contact centre. Let’s review its features in greater detail:
- Cross-channel personalisation – Braze supports nearly every interface you could think of, from mobile and email to web and tvOS. Depending on channel-specific requirements, you can send personalised push notifications as well as in-app messages that are informed by contextual customer data. There’s also targeted response compatibility guided by in-the-moment customer behaviour, as well as cross-department collaboration tools
- Lifecycle engagement – Braze comes with a dedicated module called Canvas that offers a bird’s eye view of your sales and marketing campaigns. As Braze puts it, you can “see the forest and the trees,” thanks to powerful drill-down and detailed analytics. Canvas is powered by AI to help create relevant content for more meaningful customer experiences. You can scale Canvas as your capabilities grow, integrating data from voice, SMS, chatbots, and more
- Optimisation and AI – As you’ve probably guessed by this point in our review, AI plays a big part in the Braze ecosystem. The platform generates in-depth campaign reports, each embedded with insights and self-service analytics tools. There are also AI-led predictive recommendations at key moments of truth, shaping better decisions around content and customer targeting
- Data agility and management – Braze has a built-in data streaming tool, called Currents, a real-time engine for enabling high volume data flows. If you need to take real-time action to improve customer experience, Currents is a pretty useful feature to have around. Importantly, Braze is compliant with all major data security standards, boasting an ISO 27001 certification that lays particular stress on information security. The company recently partnered with Europe-based privacy and compliance firm to ensure continual adherence to GDPR
- Partner network – Braze has an impressive partner program called Alloys. This spans providers in a variety of tech-fields, from email and social media to workflow automation and analytics. Some of its most notable partners include Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Facebook, Google Cloud, Looker (now part of Google) Twilio, and Four Square
Why the Braze Lifecycle Engagement Platform Makes a Difference
Braze is a powerful and comprehensive lifecycle engagement platform that’s relevant to any customer-centric enterprise. Its preferred start-ups and established enterprises alike, thanks to its rich portfolio of capabilities.
And despite its exhaustive functionalities, Braze is surprisingly easy-to-use and has a clean, minimalist interface. We particularly liked its ability to stream data in real-time, leverage AI without any complex coding, and experiment with channel combinations using the Braze Intelligent Suite. You can also define customer profiles based on key demographic information, helping to further optimise your messaging.
What We Think
If marketing is a focal point in your strategic game plan for the next year, you can’t go wrong with Braze. Its customers have witnessed remarkable results from implementing Braze – for instance, Urban Outfitters saw a massive 146% uptick in average revenue per recipient for a campaign that used Braze.
If you aren’t convinced by the numbers, the platform’s fluid UI design, rich visualisation capacities, and organic utilisation of AI technology are definite pros. It also has both web and mobile SDKs for easy interactions across platforms. Finally, its vast (and growing) library of partners means that you’ll never run out of integrations or ecosystem support.
Getting started with Braze is incredibly easy – you have to answer a quick questionnaire of marketing goals and organisational targets and Braze automatically recommends a package for you. This, we think, is the final cherry on the cake, if you’re looking to upgrade your customer experience capabilities.
