SIGNAL Day 2: Building for the future

From October 20-21,  Segment joined SIGNAL, Twilio’s annual customer and developer conference, alongside 50,000+ developers, product leaders, enterprises, and startups. View all the sessions on-demand here.

The final day of SIGNAL had it all — valuable insight from business leaders at FOX, Allergan, and Peloton, lessons on leadership from a former First Lady, and so much more. 

If Day 1 was about the future of customer engagement, Day 2 offered guests a chance to learn how leading companies are building for that future, today.  

Let's take a look at the main highlights from the final day of the conference.

Lessons from a digital-first media business

Day 2 of SIGNAL got started on a high note.  We heard first from Daryl Bowden, EVP of Technology at FOX, about how he was able to align his teams around a common data framework to optimize engineering resources, deliver personalized digital experiences to millions, and achieve record scale for events like the Super Bowl.

FOX Corporation is a leading media company that produces and delivers compelling news, sports, and entertainment through a portfolio of brands, available in over 80 million U.S. households. 

With the rapid increase of cord-cutting and accelerated adoption of digital viewing, FOX needed to deliver more personalized and compelling digital experiences for consumers across its portfolio. Unfortunately, separate tech stacks across brands and disconnected data slowed teams down and prevented advanced customer data strategies. 

After partnering with Segment, FOX was able to build a single view of their users to accelerate digital adoption, optimize engineering resources, and create better customer relationships across all of its brands and platforms.

As Daryl explains, leveraging all the different touchpoints across their brands allows his team to create more personalized experiences for users: 

When we're sending push notifications, they should be tailored to things you actually care about. And most importantly, when we make product decisions, they should be based on user expectations and preferences

Today, with Segment’s data infrastructure, FOX is saving an incredible $1.2 million a year thanks to a 75% reduction in customer data QA labor and engineering resources.

Exercise classes with a personalized touch

In this session, Dara Treseder, Peloton’s Head of Global Marketing & Communications, shared how Twilio Segment is helping Peloton use real-time data to understand its members and deliver them personalized experiences.

Peloton has transformed the fitness industry, with a combination of technology, content, and best-in-class instructors to empower their community. As a digital-first business, what sets Peloton apart, is not just great exercise classes — but a personalized experience. 

With the power of Twilio Segment, Dara and team are better able to deliver personalization by leveraging high-quality, actionable customer data. 

Whether it's recommending a class based on your interests, connecting you with community members who have similar interests, or sending you congratulatory texts after you hit a PR, Peloton is constantly thinking about how they can better engage their customers at every step of the journey. 

For other businesses looking to become leaders in the digital space, Dara offers this advice: “Build a culture where people are using data… actually analyzing the data you have, and using it to make decisions.”

A moderated conversation with Michelle Obama

As if the first half of the conference wasn’t exciting enough, Twilio Segment had the distinct pleasure of welcoming Michelle Obama in this inspiring session at SIGNAL.

Mrs. Obama, while serving as the First Lady of the United States, transformed the position, becoming a role model, champion, and inspiration for many across America and around the world. Today, she is the New York Times bestselling author, advocate for health and wellness, and continues her work to promote civic engagement and voting rights.

She began the session with insight into leadership. In the wake of the pandemic, Michelle suggests that leaders should strive to “nurture promote, and show empathy and compassion for [your] team. That allows us to lead, particularly in these times.” 

Twilio’s Chief Diversity Officer, Lybra Clemons, then joined the discussion to open a dialogue about race in America through the lens of Mrs. Obama’s personal experience as a corporate lawyer, mother, and First Lady. 

The discussion culminated with some perspective for businesses looking to create spaces where people can safely discuss their ideas. According to Michelle, “Safe spaces need to be diverse spaces.”

How to give your customer experience a makeover

Segment’s Sherry Huang then welcomed Christine Li, Director of Marketing Technology at Allergan, to the Signal stage. As a global pharmaceutical company, Allergan had traditionally followed a B2B2C model: products had to be administered by healthcare providers, who then educated patients about said products. 

But today's consumers do their own research; they want to know more about the brands they choose to use. This led Allergan to ask: how can we connect more directly with consumers, and strengthen the brand relationship (instead of leaving it all to healthcare providers)? 

After mobilizing to build out a direct-to-consumer approach, Christine found, like many other companies, that the data about their 4M+ consumers was completely siloed across their numerous brands, digital products, and providers.

With Segment’s help, Allergan was able to build a centralized system connecting data across its website, apps, and digital loyalty programs. This development offered the marketing team a unified view of their customers, and an opportunity to provide their users with better digital experiences.  

Christine and team took their newly unified data and developed a digital loyalty program to communicate directly with consumers. Their focus was on delivering in-app personalization to encourage cross-promotion for two of their brands, Botox and Juvederm.

This initiative yielded promising results for Allergan, resulting in a 12% increase in conversion rate for patients redeeming the cross-trial offer. 

The future awaits…

Thank you to all of the 50,000+ attendees, developers, and product leaders who joined us at SIGNAL. We’re building the future of customer engagement here at Twilio Segment, and hope you’ll build it with us. 

We can't wait to do it all again (in person) next year!

Don’t forget you can register for free to watch all videos from SIGNAL here.