Tag: Twilio

Singapore – Digital wealth advisory platform Endowus has partnered with customer engagement platform Twilio to enhance security on their platform and build client trust. 

Endowus worked with Twilio to implement various security measures to safeguard its ecosystem and comply with regulations. In particular, the platform needed an advanced verification solution to mitigate the increasing risks associated with bot sign-ups and fraudulent activities. 

This led to the implementation of Twilio Verify, which adds layers of protection by enforcing SMS OTP verification during critical user actions such as logging in or making a withdrawal – thus ensuring that only legitimate users interact with the Endowus platform. 

With Twilio Verify, Endowus also introduced WhatsApp OTPs for customers logging in from overseas, allowing them to securely and reliably access their accounts and make transactions from anywhere in the world. This has been particularly useful in instances where clients are travelling internationally and unable to receive SMS OTPs.

Endowus also leveraged Twilio Verify Fraud Guard, which can identify patterns matching fraudulent SMS schemes, then proactively block or flag these schemes and prevent them from ever reaching the client. For example, the tool can proactively monitor patterns such as the percentage of delivered OTPs which are subsequently successfully verified. 

A drop in verification rates could signal issues like compromised credentials, and Twilio Verify Fraud Guard can identify this occurrence early on and alert the company to investigate and take action quickly. 

Endowus is also looking to explore additional solutions with Twilio to further enhance security on the platform. This includes Twilio Verify Push, which sends a push authentication to a user’s smartphone or tablet, enabling them to securely confirm their identity with a simple tap.

Deepak Sarda, chief technology officer at Endowus, said, “We are constantly reviewing the security and privacy concerns facing our clients today, and it’s essential that we do all we can to mitigate these risks for them. We’ve been able to use Twilio’s standout solutions to significantly strengthen Endowus’ security safeguards, ensuring our clients can engage with our platform worry-free.”

Meanwhile, Robert Woolfrey, vice president of communications for APJ at Twilio, commented, “Investors are increasingly selective about who they entrust their capital to, so fostering assurance is key. This requires a non-negotiable commitment to a robust security posture. At the same time, businesses still need to ensure their user experience is as seamless as possible. With the right tools in place, there’s no longer a need to compromise security for quality – you can engage your customers immersively, meaningfully, and securely all at once. We’re proud to have partnered with Endowus to achieve this.”

Singapore – Customer engagement platform Twilio has teamed up with communications technology group Singtel to provide Singaporean businesses with Rich Communication Services (RCS) messaging. The move aims to offer secure and branded connections between businesses and their customers.

The collaboration allows businesses in Singapore to reach their customers directly to their mobile inboxes without compromising data security. It comes at a crucial time as Twilio’s report in 2024 reveals that 79% of Singaporean consumers trust a brand’s communication more if it features a verification badge, while 68% say branded text messages enhance the brand’s trustworthiness.

As Twilio streamlines the adoption of RCS messaging, businesses can benefit from an automatic SMS to RCS upgrade, while maintaining cost-effectiveness. Through the Twilio console, immediate testing can be facilitated and activation can be done without any code modifications.

Singapore marks Twilio’s first RCS Business Messaging offering in Asia, following deployments in the United States, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Brazil among others.

“As consumers grow increasingly savvy and discerning, they demand trusted and immersive experiences at every touchpoint. RCS messaging offers an enhanced alternative to SMS and bridges the gap between traditional messaging and the interactive experiences offered by over-the-top channels. It provides the perfect solution to deliver interactive, dynamic communications while assuring customers of the sender’s identity,” Robert Woolfrey, vice president, APJ, communications at Twilio, said.

“We’re thrilled to partner with Singtel to empower businesses in Singapore to deliver exceptional customer experiences and foster trusted, meaningful relationships,” Woolfrey added.

“Businesses in Singapore must adapt to the evolving expectations of consumers who are seeking more immersive interactions, especially through their mobile devices. Our partnership with Twilio, enables businesses in Singapore to tap on RCS messaging to deliver rich and interactive communications that can improve their engagement with their customers in new and exciting ways,” Terence Lai, vice president of digitalisation, products and partnerships at Singtel, said.

Singapore – Over half (56%) of consumers in the Asia-Pacific (APAC)  region say they will stop doing business with brands they do not trust, according to a report by customer engagement platform Twilio.

Twilio’s report highlights the importance of brand trust. It covers customers’ communication and channel preferences and highlights how these can influence trust.

With the rise of deepfakes in APAC, more consumers are finding it difficult to differentiate between trustworthy sources and scams. It has affected how consumers trust brands. 

Consumers are more likely to trust brands that use branded communications, such as messages with verification badges. In APAC, 68% of consumers will trust a brand’s communication which includes verification badges. Meanwhile, 57% of consumers say they find branded text messages more trustworthy.

According to the report, 55% of consumers would trust brands more if they use two-factor authentication while 54% demand quick response time. 43% of APAC consumers expect brands to respond within an hour, but only 31% of consumers report that they are satisfied with the brands’ response time.

Consumers also expect brands to communicate with them on their preferred channels. 86% of consumers expect brands to use their preferred channels, yet only 48% of brands actually do so. This presents an opportunity for businesses to improve their customer engagement.

Among consumers’ top preferred channels for businesses are email (81%), text messaging (SMS/MMS) (46%), and social messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger and Instagram (31%).

“In today’s discerning market, trust has become the cornerstone of customer-brand relationships. With tools like branded communications at their fingertips, businesses now have the unprecedented opportunity to build trust, strengthen brand recognition and deliver personalised experiences at scale. As richer communication channels emerge, the opportunities for deeper customer engagement will only grow,” Robert Woolfrey, vice president for Asia-Pacific and Japan communications at Twilio, said.

Singapore – Twilio, the customer engagement platform known for delivering real-time, personalised experiences, has launched ‘Rich Communication Services (RCS)’ messaging globally through its programmable messaging and verify APIs, offering businesses enhanced branded communication and seamless customer trust-building without the need for code changes.

RCS elevates traditional messaging by incorporating branded sender identification directly within customers’ default messaging apps, allowing recipients to instantly recognise and trust the source of the message. This update enables businesses to send branded, verified communications that foster trust and boost customer loyalty—all without requiring any code changes.

To expound, Twilio RCS offers branded messaging by automatically upgrading SMS to RCS on compatible devices, including business logos, taglines, and verified sender identification, ensuring trust and engagement. It enables rich content with interactive features like call-to-action buttons, carousels, and quick replies, driving higher engagement and conversions. Importantly, businesses can adopt RCS without code changes, as Twilio manages brand verification, carrier onboarding, and fallback to SMS when RCS is unavailable.

Twilio’s RCS expansion is driven by its 2024 consumer survey, where 75% of respondents said branded texts increased their trust, and nearly half (49%) trusted messages more when logos or check marks were present. This trust led to action, with 40% making repeat purchases and 25% making first-time purchases through trusted communication channels.

RCS is a crucial component of Twilio’s broader suite of solutions for trusted, branded communications across all channels, including branded caller ID and BIMI support for email. Twilio’s APIs empower businesses to deliver engaging, recognisable messages that cut through the noise and drive ROI.

Inbal Shani, chief product officer of Twilio Communications, said, “At Twilio, we believe building engagement with your customers should be as seamless and trusted as possible. RCS makes this a reality by delivering richer interactions, improved deliverability, and most critically, building trust in your brand, without changing a single line of code.” 

Paul Nashawaty, practice lead for application development and modernisation at Futurum, stated, “According to a recent study by Futurum Research, businesses using RCS have experienced a 32% increase in customer engagement and conversion rates compared to traditional SMS. Twilio’s latest announcement makes sense focussing on RCS solutions to help drive value for their customers. This is likely due to RCS’s ability to deliver richer, more interactive content, such as images, videos, and buttons, which can enhance the customer experience and drive higher ROI.”

Twilio’s RCS messaging is now available globally in public beta for Programmable Messaging and fully available in Verify. Previously limited to Android, Apple’s upcoming support for RCS on iPhones paves the way for broader adoption of the technology.

Singapore – Nearly half of retailers in Singapore (43%) face challenges with brand awareness during the initial stages of the consumer journey, according to a survey conducted by Twilio. 

The survey revealed that overcoming ad and email fatigue is the most significant challenge for 32% of retailers trying to build brand awareness. Other major obstacles include a limited understanding of consumer behaviour (29%), and difficulties in measuring the effectiveness of marketing efforts (28%).

Additionally, a significant number of Singapore retailers also face challenges in brand conversion (24%) and retention (22%). To address these issues, 45% of retailers leverage customer data to personalise experiences, 22% expand the number of channels used to connect with customers, and 18% increase the frequency of communications.

Fortunately, the survey found that many Singaporean businesses are on the right track, with 45% of retailers recognising the power of leveraging customer data to understand their customers’ needs.

The survey also highlighted Singapore consumers’ preferences for brand engagement. Notably, over 6 in 10 or 63% of consumers prefer interacting with brands through digital channels, including websites, mobile apps, email marketing, and e-commerce or social commerce sites. However, a quarter of consumers remain most responsive to brand interactions at brick-and-mortar shops.

Aligned with Singapore consumers’ preference for digital channels, Twilio’s survey found that local retailers are prioritising engagement strategies to strengthen their connections on these platforms. Over the next 12 months, Singaporean retailers plan to explore new customer engagement methods, including influencer marketing (29%), gamification (22%), and live streaming (18%).

Nicholas Kontopoulos, vice president of marketing for Asia Pacific & Japan at Twilio, said, “In an increasingly noisy and competitive landscape, retail businesses are challenged to retain their customers’ attention and ensure that they are considered at all stages of the consumer journey. Retailers must look beyond run-of-the-mill methods and consider how they can elevate their marketing efforts to create a more engaging brand experience and reach customers on their preferred channels. This can go hand-in-hand with using AI and zero- and first-party data to create more precise and personalised communications.”

“In order to increase top-of-mind awareness and enhance brand visibility at various stages of the customer journey, retailers are looking into ways to increase touchpoints with their customers. However, the brands that will truly stand out and cut through the noise will be those that understand the value of creating hyper-personalised customer interactions, especially as individualisation becomes more important to today’s customers,” Kontopoulos added. 

Singapore – Customer engagement platform Twilio has named Chris Koehler as its new chief marketing officer to drive global marketing strategy. 

Koehler brings over 25 years of expertise in customer engagement and marketing technology and a proven track record of driving growth and innovation at industry-leading companies.

As the new CMO, he will oversee Twilio’s global marketing strategy, focusing on expanding brand awareness in its key markets and amplifying product innovation. He will also play a pivotal role in growing market share across Twilio Communications and Segment and driving messaging and positioning for Twilio’s customer engagement platform, which combines communications, data, and AI to unlock greater value for customers.

Koehler holds a degree in B.S. in marketing from George Mason University and an MBA from Georgia State University.

Prior to joining Twilio, he served as Box’s CMO, where he helped lead the company to surpass $1b in annual revenue in fiscal 2024. He spent more than 25 years leading marketing, customer success, solution consulting, demand generation, and enablement teams at Adobe Systems, E*TRADE Financial, SunTrust Bank, and Claritas. 

In his new role, Koehler will report directly to Twilio’s chief executive officer, Khozema Shipchandler. He joins the company’s expanded management team of recent executive hires, including Inbal Shani, chief product officer for Twilio Communications, and Thomas Wyatt, president of segment. 

Shani joined Twilio from GitHub, where she led core product management, strategy, marketing, and design as chief product officer. As the CPO for Twilio Communications, Shani is responsible for all research and development capabilities, product innovation, and resiliency and trust initiatives for the Twilio Communications business.

Meanwhile, Wyatt joined Twilio from People.ai, where he served as chief product and strategy officer. As the new president of segment, Wyatt is responsible for driving product innovation and go-to-market execution. 

Talking about the appointment, Shipchandler said, “What particularly impresses me about Chris is his no-nonsense style and hands-on approach. Chris’ strong background in product will help strengthen how we market and position our increasingly sophisticated suite of customer solutions in this next chapter of the company.” 

Also speaking about his appointment, Koehler shared, “I’ve long admired Twilio as an innovative, developer-first company, and the opportunity to help build the next generation of customer engagement is exciting.”

“Having interacted with Twilio products as a segment customer, I believe Twilio has a massive opportunity to combine its leading data capabilities with its world-class communications platform to deliver the kind of one-to-one experiences that brands have been trying to achieve for years, but few have realised,” he added. 

Singapore – Businesses are increasingly integrating customer data platforms with AI and analytics to personalise customer experiences and drive business success, according to a new report from customer engagement platform Twilio.

Data from the report suggests that amidst the widespread adoption of AI, businesses are grappling with an exponential increase in data volume, with Twilio Segment processing a record high of 12.1 trillion API calls in 2023.

This increase is indicative of a larger trend towards more sophisticated, data-centric operations, emphasising the essential role of real-time data processing and seamless AI technology integration.

With this in mind, Twilio emphasises that the ability to quickly harness data insights through CDPs that are open and interoperable with data warehouses is a critical competitive edge, enabling businesses to efficiently collect, unify, and activate data across various platforms.

Going into detail, other key findings of the report claim that data integrity is essential for deriving meaningful customer insights and leveraging AI competitively, as the effectiveness of AI hinges on the data it’s trained on. 

Additionally, data warehouses continued to spike in popularity as one of the most popular destination categories for customer data in 2023, as businesses pave the way for deeper analytics and AI-driven insights.

Talking about these findings, Kathryn Murphy, SVP of product and design at Twilio, said, “In 2024, more and more brands will turn to AI to deliver better, more personalised experiences for their customers. Our report showcases the essential role customer data plays in maximising AI’s effectiveness.”

“At Twilio, we’re seeing a significant trend towards leveraging the interconnectedness of AI, data warehouses, and digital communication channels. The ability to interoperate with data warehouses is essential, ensuring that CDPs act as a pivotal technology for brands eager to leverage AI and data to forge even stronger relationships with their customers,” she added. 

Meanwhile, Chris Hecht, SVP, corporate development and product partnerships, at Databricks, commented, “As businesses look to break down data silos and rely on a unified data platform to power their analytics and AI initiatives, the importance of data sharing and data quality has never been more apparent.”

“Our collaboration with Twilio Segment signals our dedication to ensuring that organisations leverage the full potential of their data – no matter where it lives – and can effectively bridge the gap from data to insights using cleaned and verified event profile data”, he added.

Singapore – Yahoo Advertising has announced an integration with the Twilio Segment Customer Data Platform (CDP) to improve ad reach and relevance while avoiding the use of third-party cookies. Advertisers can fortify their businesses and leverage first-party data across multiple screens, even in a cookieless environment, because of Twilio Segment’s integration with Yahoo ConnectID. 

Segment users will be able to synchronise hashed, cookieless data with their real-time customer profiles because of strategic partnership with Yahoo Advertising and seamless integration with Yahoo ConnectID. This integration allows them to expand the scope and relevance of their campaigns.

Yahoo uses a comprehensive identity strategy across all digital landscapes. Their identity solutions, which include Yahoo ConnectID and Next-Gen Solutions, support addressable and non-addressable inventory.

This comprehensive suite of identity tools enables advertisers to safeguard their business’s future within the Yahoo DSP, allowing them to retain control and maximise ROI in a world where identity is restricted. Marketers can leverage a unified customer perspective through this integration to reach the full potential of addressable advertising and ensure personalised consumer experiences, even as support for cookies and other traditional identity methods dwindles.

Dan Richardson, Director, head of data at Yahoo APAC, said, “Data collaboration is

essential to allow brands to get the most value from their first-party data. This integration means delivering better advertising experiences to customers, and gives advertisers what they want most – greater relevance, reach and measurement. In a world with fewer online user identifiers, Yahoo ConnectID offers a differentiated and future-proofed approach to all businesses.”

Speaking about the partnership, Liz Adeniji, regional vice president, Asia-Pacific and Japan at Twilio Segment, said, “A recent Twilio study found that about 7 in 10 businesses in Asia- Pacific have already turned to using first-party data primarily due to the inadequate visibility over third parties’ data safeguards, management of consent and regulatory compliance. Our new integration with Yahoo will make it easier for these businesses to use their valuable first-party data in a much more meaningful way, in real-time, and most importantly, with utmost relevance to their intended audience.” 

She added, “This will enable them to unleash the potential of first-party data across screens to deliver more personalised and engaging campaigns.”

Singapore – Customer engagement platform Twilio announced that it will enable companies to create personalized, customer-aware experiences powered by OpenAI.

Through this integration, Twilio clients will be able to use OpenAI’s GPT-4 model to fuel new generative capabilities in ‘Twilio Engage’, the company’s multichannel marketing solution built on the segment customer data platform, as a result of this integration. 

This collaboration with OpenAI will formalize opportunities that many in Twilio’s community of more than 10 million developers have already been experimenting with. For instance, it’s possible to build a ChatGPT plugin for Twilio, which gives users the ability to access Twilio directly from ChatGPT’s interface, creating a new channel for brands to serve their customers better.

Furthermore, developers can create voice-activated chatbots, and feature capabilities can even range to build  serverless SMS chatbots. These builds validate the potential of OpenAI and Twilio’s ongoing and aligned efforts, and the value it can bring to customers looking to enhance customer engagement strategies.

Talking about the integration, Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio, said, “Experiences like ChatGPT are coming to the enterprise to power groundbreaking experiences in sales, service, content, marketing and more. Twilio CustomerAI enables companies to build customer-aware interactions – giving the language models context about the customer they’re helping. Without customer-awareness, any ChatGPT-like experiences would be generic and unhelpful. But with CustomerAI, companies can transform LLMs into the most helpful, knowledgeable agent imaginable at scale.”

Meanwhile, Brad Lightcap, COO of OpenAI, commented, “As AI drives down the cost of intelligence, it is increasingly possible for companies to deliver a deeply personalized experience for every customer. We know how much people want this, and we’re happy to be working with Twilio to bring it to the world. Twilio’s customer data platform will enable today’s and tomorrow’s large language models to unlock deep personalization at scale for every business.”

Singapore – Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Twilio have announced an extension of their strategic partnership, aiming to empower Twilio customers with advanced artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. 

This collaboration, unveiled at the AWS Summit in New York, marks a significant step in the evolution of Twilio’s Customer AI roadmap, which seeks to provide personalized and real-time experiences for leading brands.

Moreover, the key focus of this partnership centers around predictive AI technology, which will merge Amazon SageMaker’s AI capabilities with Twilio Segment’s Customer Data Platform. The forthcoming features will enable businesses to gain deeper insights into their customers, allowing them to deliver more relevant and personalized experiences promptly.

Shawn Nandi, director of technology, industries at AWS, expressed excitement about Twilio’s AI innovation and its potential to revolutionize customer engagement. He emphasized that AWS is committed to supporting businesses in enhancing customer experiences through AI and machine learning.

In a statement, Alex Millet, senior director of product at Twilio, outlined their vision for Twilio CustomerAI, which aims to enable businesses to foster trusted relationships with customers at a digital scale. He highlighted that the ultimate goal is transforming how marketers, contact centers, developers, and data teams deliver world-class customer experiences.

Previous AWS and Twilio partnerships include Twilio Segment’s status as an AWS Marketplace partner and deep product alignment, featuring partnerships that leverage Twilio’s Programmable APIs and integrations with more than six AWS products.