Q3 saw exciting releases around Twilio Segment focusing on three key themes- unified profiles, AI and personalization, and time to value. This post shares the latest Segment product releases and how they fit into these three themes.
When data is siloed in different tools, it’s hard for teams to get a complete view of their customer. This isn’t new.
What is new, however, is how companies can leverage both real-time data and data from the warehouse to adapt to our AI-driven world. At Segment, we believe the future of customer engagement is at this intersection of data, communications, and AI.
These intelligent interactions unlock value for customers as well as companies who use data to improve existing workflows and drive innovation. To do this, you need a unified view of customer data and a deep understanding of who your customers are and their preferences at the moment. Twilio is uniquely positioned to deliver on this future because companies can harness the power of not only Segment data, but Twilio comms data to power more intelligent interactions across the customer lifecycle.
In Q3, Segment introduced features around three key themes – unified profiles, AI and personalization, and time to value. In this post, we’ll share the latest Segment product releases and how they fit into these three themes.
Linked Audiences lets marketers build audiences using data from the data warehouse. Using our powerful, intuitive audience builder, marketers can take object data of any kind (think things like products, bookings, accounts, and more) and relate it back to the customer profile for easy activation in downstream tools.
The best part? Linked Audiences is a low-code interface that builds complex SQL that will query the warehouse, using parameters set by your marketing team, and return the qualified audience list back in minutes. That’s a win-win for both your marketing and your data teams.
Plus, Linked Audiences is built with a zero copy architecture, meaning that the warehouse is used as a single source of truth for activating data and the underlying source data is never copied - only the results for audience activation.
Linked Audiences is now generally available.
With Linked Events, data engineers only need to define the relationships between data sets one time in order to give marketers access to all the data they need to target, personalize, or analyze customer experiences in a downstream application. Even better – Linked Events builds on top of your existing data investments, leveraging your already cleaned and transformed data, which reduces time to value from months to hours.
Linked Events is now generally available.
Dbt is a common data engineering tool used to centrally manage warehouse models, jobs, and versioning. Our cohort of rETL customers who wish to leverage their own dbt models have commonly requested a native dbt integration. We now provide visibility into Segment model/syncs in dbt plus continuous integration checks to prevent breaking rETL syncs.
Git Sync allows developers to manage version control across Segment resources like Connections, Tracking Plans, and more.
Together, these features provide developers teams with the flexibility to work with their preferred tools.
Both these features are generally available.
A crucial piece to achieving warehouse interoperability is the ability to easily monitor and inspect what is happening to the data being synced from the data warehouse. That’s why this quarter, we’re announcing enhanced Data Warehouse Observability to give you unprecedented levels of visibility and transparency into the performance of data syncs to and from the data warehouse.
Observability provides a complete end-to-end view into each stage of data delivery, from the time Segment ingests data from the warehouse, to Source and Destination Filters, and finally whether the data was successfully delivered to the intended destination or not. It also enables you to implement proactive alerting that automatically triggers whenever data syncs from the warehouse fail or don’t otherwise work as expected, and notify the appropriate team members on channels like email and Slack to take action.
Segment’s Observability features are designed to make it easy to quickly evaluate, diagnose, and debug any issues with data syncs from the data warehouse. They bring accountability to extracting data reliably from the data warehouse with minimal data loss and ensure that data is available to other teams for activation in downstream tools. The immediate benefits of Observability tooling are increased uptime for syncing data from the warehouse and reducing the propensity of failed syncs. In the long run, you can build genuine trust into the performance of the data pipeline from the warehouse because these features bring tangible transparency and accountability for what is happening to your data.
Data Warehouse Observability is available now in public beta.
With CustomerAI Recommendations, we’re making it easy for marketers to build audiences of people who are most likely to purchase a specific product, brand, or product category, so they can target those audiences into any downstream channels connected to Segment, such as ad platforms, emails, or SMS.
Recommendations can help you quickly provide customers with more relevant experiences that improve conversions, boost upsell, and grow average order value.
Recommendations is now generally available in APAC, LATAM, and NAMER regions and will be GA for EU workspaces later this quarter.
Within Segment, you have unified profiles, which allow you to create a number of different attributes about a person,like their age, location, loyalty member status, or customer satisfaction rating; these are all considered traits that are saved to a person’s profile in Segment.
With Recommendation Traits, marketers can find each individual product or item that a customer is most likely to purchase, and save those items to the profile as a Recommendation Trait. Users can then send those traits downstream to any connected channel — whether that be an ad campaign, a dynamic email or web experience, or back to your data warehouse.
Ultimately, you’re able to create a deeper understanding of your customers and can better personalize all of their customer experiences for greater engagement, conversion, and loyalty.
This feature will be generally available in most regions, as part of CustomerAI Recommendations, at the end of this quarter, and will be GA for EU workspaces towards the end of this year.
We’re thrilled to announce that we are extending the power of CustomerAI to developers with Functions Co-Pilot, powered by OpenAI.
Functions Co-Pilot consists of two features that let developers make use of generative AI to extend what is possible with Segment.
The first, Functions Writer, generates code from natural language prompts. In other words, it turns what would previously have been weeks of integration coding into a simple prompt that’s about the same length as a text message or a Tweet.
For existing code, Functions Analyzer has you covered. Functions Analyzer scans your code, summarizes what it does back to you, and then offers recommendations for how you can optimize the Function.
The recommendations you receive from Functions Writer and Analyzer are based on proven methodologies from experienced subject matter experts. The underlying model combines context from your current workspace configuration, Segment’s vast library of example Functions and code templates, and general best practices for Javascript to arrive at the optimal solution for your use-case.
Think about all of the powerful tasks a Function can do - from integrating custom sources and destinations (including the data warehouse), enriching data with third party sources, transformations, and even tokenizing, encrypting, or decrypting data before it reaches downstream destinations. Now all you need is a couple of sentences and your trusty AI guide to unlock endless innovative, cutting edge use-cases that push the boundaries of what is possible with a CDP.
Functions Co-Pilot is currently available in GA.
This quarter, we’re launching an initiative to streamline data mappings to make it even easier to configure data that comes from any source to the requirements of third party APIs. Ultimately, this makes it faster to get started sending events, objects, and lists from sources to downstream destinations.
The first feature is called Suggested Mappings, which automatically generates suggested field mappings for data coming from a rETL source. This works by analyzing the schema of the data warehouse table, intelligently infers the relationships and data types, and automatically generates mappings between the warehouse columns and the destination fields in Segment. This significantly cuts down the time it takes to quickly send data to downstream destinations and also provides the flexibility to adjust and tweak the automated mappings to fit your unique business needs.
We’re also adding a sync mode that enables you to select whether you want to insert, update, upsert, or delete records. While not all Destinations support all four, we will have a guide that will inform you what sync modes are available for the destination and how the mappings you have set up affects data deliverability.
The streamlined process significantly cuts down the time it takes to orchestrate new integrations, start sending data to downstream destinations, and start activating data for all the great business initiatives that you use a CDP for.
Suggested Mappings is currently available in GA.
With Webhooks 2.0, we’ve streamlined the process of building webhooks to enable every user - whether they’re marketers, data analysts, product managers, or developers - to build custom destinations in Segment, whether they’re technical or not. Beyond democratizing integrations, Webhooks 2.0 complements Functions by enabling custom authentication methods to empower you with even flexibility and extensibility. Webhooks 2.0 also includes Delivery Overview support so you can observe, diagnose, and debug any potential data delivery issues to insure the health of the created webhook instance.
Streamlining the integration process makes it faster and easier to integrate every tool in your stack, and for the first time, orchestrating custom integrations can be a self-serve process that doesn’t require technical resources to implement.
Webhooks 2.0 is currently available in Private Beta.
Auto-Instrumentation removes the need for a traditional Segment instrumentation in your websites and apps. This instrumentation logic operates in the cloud, enabling instant, "over-the-air" deployment and updates without requiring engineering involvement. This means engineers no longer need to redeploy the app every time the instrumentation is adjusted, which speeds up the time-to-value.
Once engineers integrate the Analytics SDK into the app, they won’t have to manage analytics instrumentation again.
Marketers and analysts can easily control and configure the instrumentation as needed, deploying changes directly to their apps and receiving new data right away.
Auto-Instrumentation is currently available in Pilot.
As technology advances and your customers' expectations grow, your customer data should be ready. At Segment, we are always following the latest trends, ensuring your understanding of the customer can adapt as quickly as your tech stack.
Our annual look at how attitudes, preferences, and experiences with personalization have evolved over the past year.