Salesforce + Braze: Making the next customer moment count

Let’s picture Tracy, a longtime customer of the fictional outdoor brand Mountains Unlimited. She’s got a trip on the calendar and a new jacket on order and a delivery that has *gasp* gone missing. She has already contacted support. Her neighbors haven’t seen it.

Then her phone lights up with a push notification: “Ready for your next adventure? Flash sale is on! 🚨”

Damn, she thinks. That timing would have been perfect… a week ago. 

Now, she wants to know where her jacket is. She stares at it for a minute. Actually, this notification kind of inadvertently pisses her off. I’d BE for my NEXT ADVENTURE, she thinks to herself, if you had picked a better SHIPPER. 

A moment that could’ve been ideal and trust-building turns counterproductive, in fact, for poor ol’ Mountains Unlimited, who more or less had noble intent… 

This moment is why Salesforce’s agreement to acquire Braze caught my attention last week. I mulled it over on the weekend and I really do think there’s a tremendous opportunity to make the ‘next interaction’ with a customer a lot more useful.

(For the uninitiated, I should add: Braze is what’s known as a customer engagement platform. Basically that means it just helps brands respond to what people do in an app with emails, texts, push notifications and other in-app messages. They have some interesting cross-channel stuff, as well.)

Their proposed acquisition points toward a pretty enticing future… companies will be able to connect responsiveness with more of what they know about their relationships with their customers. 

In Tracy’s case, the next message could actually help resolve her delivery problem instead of pitching her on another camping trinket. Once the jacket arrives, the brand can pick up the conversation about her trip. How are her old boots doing, anyway?

I want enterprise AI to help teams build experiences that are that thoughtful.

Getting there means turning a good intention into a rule the business can actually run…

Marketing needs to know when to hold its horses. Service needs to define what counts as an unresolved problem. The admin needs to understand which journey is affected. And so forth.

Each person holds something the others need. Give them AI and they can move faster. Give them a shared place of understanding for the change and they can move forward together.

That is the ambition behind what we are building at Tribal. Bring business and technical owners into the same plan, grounded in the system context they need to understand and review a change. Start with the backlog request everyone wants delivered. Make the decisions clear enough for the team to act on them.

Tracy gets her jacket. The brand earns the chance to talk about her next foray into the woods with the bears and the mosquitos and such.

Let’s give the people building that experience the ability to deliver on the promise.

Source: Salesforce’s October 20 announcement

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