How Suzy built data connections across its B2B and B2C businesses with Twilio Segment and increased customer loyalty

The big win

Suzy, an end-to-end consumer insights platform, needed to centralize and standardize customer data across both parts of its business (B2B and B2C) in order to develop more meaningful and sustainable relationships with both its consumer and enterprise customers.

Suzy turned to Twilio Segment to create a single source of truth for customer data, to bridge the gap between its B2B and B2C businesses and to take a more data-driven approach to customer engagement and product development so that they could retain more of their existing customers.

Suzy is an end-to-end consumer insights platform that integrates quant, qual, and high quality audiences into a single connected research cloud. Suzy lets teams conduct iterative research, with agency-quality rigor, in less time and at a fraction of the cost. One of Suzy’s competitive advantages in the market research space is Crowdtap, their proprietary consumer panel. Market research surveys designed in the Suzy platform are answered by real US consumers via the Crowdtap mobile and desktop application.

Suzy turned to Segment in January 2021 to centralize and standardize its customer data across all of its channels. In doing so, it was able to:

• Create a single, unified view of the customer (both enterprise and consumer), based on accurate, high quality and compliant data

• Deliver more personalized and timely communications to customers, using real-time data to support its Product, Audience, and Customer Success teams

• Establish an agile data infrastructure which could support the business as it rapidly scaled its operations and enable a data-driven approach to customer engagement and product development

A focus on customer data best practice from day one

Suzy’s business is built on providing clients with the data and insights they need to make smarter, faster decisions. So the need for accurate and accessible customer data was fully understood within the business – it was part of Suzy’s ethos and essential to supporting its growth plans.

With this goal in mind, Kevin Gammariello, VP of Product Analytics and Engagement at Suzy, worked with his team to define key consumer journeys, data “sources of truth,” and related marketing technologies for each of Suzy’s products. Through this exercise, the teams identified areas where centralization of customer data could help improve performance. For example, Crowdtap marketers previously had to rely on a cumbersome process of SQL queries and manual uploads to their automation tool in order to maintain their subscriber list. This was a time-consuming and ineffective way to drive consumer engagement.

Kevin was already familiar with Segment, having worked with the platform as an analyst stakeholder in a previous role. So he fully understood the benefits that Segment could deliver, both in integrating customer data from multiple sources and in enabling more personalized communications by activating this data across downstream marketing tools.

“Once we’d made the decision that we needed a CDP, Segment was the obvious choice. We recognized Segment as the standard bearers for the collection, management and activation of customer data. Personally, I was also hugely attracted to the company’s rich heritage within the developer space. The fact that the platform has been designed with developers in mind and has been stress tested over time means that you can really trust it.”

- Kevin Gammariello, VP of Product Analytics and Engagement, Suzy

Centralizing customer data and increasing speed and agility

The team brought in Segment to integrate customer data sources for both Suzy and Crowdtap into a single Customer Data Platform (CDP). In order to ensure accurate and efficient implementation, the team worked closely with Segment’s Professional Services Group to learn best practices, prioritize their many possible use cases, and discover efficiencies that could demonstrate value to stakeholders quickly.

One such efficiency involved the identification and design of key customer moments. Suzy’s Engineering Team had already built a robust data architecture to support product performance and innovation, so the team focused on translating this object-focused architecture into behavioral events. In doing so, the team was able to create a tracking plan that could scale alongside this architecture without over reliance on their always-in-demand Engineering resources.

With these key moments defined, alignment became another early priority. The team used Segment Protocols to act as a data communication tool between engineers, developers, product managers, and analysts. And Suzy leveraged Segment’s Mixpanel integration so that the team could visualize and analyze these first user moments in far more detail than previously possible.

“Just being able to access this type of trusted data in real-time through Segment is transforming the way that our teams can help customers. We’re able to offer a more personalized and relevant experience for customers, communicating at the right time and providing them with the support and information they’re looking for.”

- Bryan Silverman, SVP of Audience, Suzy

Generating a deeper understanding of customers and optimizing customer communications

In order to grow the B2C Crowdtap user base, Suzy’s Audience and Product teams knew that they needed to establish a culture of rapid experimentation across user acquisition, messaging, and experience. The team leveraged Segment to efficiently stand up Braze as its automated communications tool, with Segment-streamed events and user traits enabling nuanced onboarding and retention campaigns. The team also established consistent success metrics across a variety of tools through direct integrations with Google Tag Manager and advertising destinations like Facebook Pixel.

When optimizing user experience, Segment has provided a way to test new messaging and offers without a lot of overhead development work. For example, when the team wanted to test an ambitious new user engagement program, stakeholders were looking at a six month wait before resources could be focused on this new idea. Instead, the team was able to roll out an MVP test version of the new program with just one talented developer and Twilio Engage acting as a stand-in for an experimentation or feature flagging tool. The insights from this experiment became the building blocks for a follow-up initiative focused on helping new Crowdtap users “fall in love” with the platform on their very first visit.

“Segment allows us to easily stress test ideas in a fast and cost effective way. We can easily see if an idea has legs without embarking on a hugely complex and expensive experimentation initiative. And we can ensure that our product engineering teams are focusing on the innovation projects which are going to have the biggest impact on our customers and our business.”

- Nick Gauchat, Chief Product Officer, Suzy

For its enterprise business, Suzy’s Customer Success (CS) team prides itself on establishing and nurturing high-touch relationships with customers. Therefore, rather than simply deploying standard automated communications to drive B2B product engagement, Suzy developed an internal alerting tool for the CS team driven by Segment-centralized data. Staff now receive alerts when customers perform noteworthy behaviors like returning to the website after an absence or showing signs of in-product confusion, and this is enabling them to re-engage with customers in a timely and meaningful way.

At a broader level, having access to Segment is shaping the way that Suzy operates as an organization. The company has established several initiatives focused on optimizing operational performance and accelerating growth through the centralization and analysis of customer data. In fact, this data democratization has been so impactful that the Product Team now operates under a new rule: In order for a new product feature to be released, it must be tracked in Segment.

“We’re now starting to see the transformational benefits of working with Segment. We’re creating new teams and bringing in new skills based on the data and insight we now have at our fingertips. We’re making better decisions and becoming much more agile in how we exploit new opportunities and respond to customer demands.”

- Kevin Gammariello, VP of Product Analytics and Engagement, Suzy