Over the past fifteen years, mobile has redefined modern life—shifting how individuals interact with their friends and family, upending industries, and fundamentally shifting how brands communicate with their customers. Today, more than 2.3 billion people engage online using smartphones and other mobile devices, and consumers are active on mobile at even higher rates in established economies. This shift has made mobile engagement and automation an essential part of every company’s long-term success, and a major competitive advantage for brands that get it right.

Since its launch in 2011, the Braze platform has been helping brands to effectively reach, engage, and retain their customers across mobile devices and other key digital platforms, supporting more relevant and impactful experiences in the moment and at a massive scale. Given this focus, we’re pleased to announce that Braze has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Mobile Engagement Automation, Q3 2020. In this report, Forrester evaluated 9 mobile engagement automation solutions providers on a set of 31 distinct criteria. Braze received the highest scores in both the Current Offering and Strategy (tied) categories. Braze also received the Wave’s top scores in the orchestration, data integration, and delivery criteria and the highest possible scores in the criteria of:

Read the full report here.

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Coordinated, Real-Time, Customer-First: The 3 Essential Pillars of Successful Customer Engagement

Meeting the expectations of today’s consumers requires more than just the ability to send a push notification. There are three key pillars we believe are necessary for brands looking to provide brilliant customer engagement experiences and we believe that this report validates our understanding of what it takes for companies to forge more meaningful, valuable, and human connections with their customers.

1. Customer-Centric Strategies

90% of today’s consumers become annoyed with brands who send them irrelevant marketing messages—and consumers who don’t feel understood tend to seek out new brands to engage with. To avoid that fate, successful companies listen to their customers and leverage technology to understand each individual’s real-time context and then engage with them in ways that demonstrate empathy and respect for their unique preferences.

The customer should come first, and then the channels used to engage them should follow. Marketers have to be able to serve up experiences that speak to their customers and their unique behaviors and preferences; that’s the only way they can truly put their customers at the center of their strategy. That’s why we architected Braze with both a channel-agnostic and intrinsically cross-channel approach—and ensured that intuitive personalization and orchestration features were built right into our platform.

In the report, Forrester notes that Braze is “one of the few mobile-first platforms that has invested heavily in building enterprise-grade email capabilities,” and says that “US-based companies looking to couple mobile messaging and email in a mobile-first platform should consider Braze.”

2. Real-Time Engagement

Exceptional customer experiences are built on data. But while companies usually intend to leverage the information they collect to support smart, data-driven marketing, only about 0.5% of collected data is actually ever used or analyzed—which means that the majority of customer data being collected never supports any meaningful action. To make the most of the information they hold, marketers need to be able to get actionable insights in the moment and to turn those insights into timely, impactful experiences.

To make it possible for brands to engage customers in the moment with empathy, we built the Braze platform on a foundation of real-time stream processing and ensured that our solution was designed to be seamlessly integrated with other best-in-class technologies. Instead of disconnected, broken experiences, Braze customers are able to serve up thoughtful messaging that speaks to the moment, allowing brands to keep customers happy and engaged throughout each individual lifecycle. As Forrester puts it, “Braze delivers customer engagement built on rock-solid data integration capabilities” and “offers a myriad of partnerships with contextual data providers.”

3. Breaking Down Boundaries

Brilliant customer experiences don’t happen in a vacuum—and making them happen is a particular challenge for brands struggling with organizational or data silos. If left unaddressed, these disconnects between the technologies and teams touching different aspects of the customer experience can lead to inefficiencies, contradictory user messaging, and the kinds of frustrating interactions with your brand that can leave consumers looking for other options.

The only way to improve outcomes for your brand and your customers is to challenge the status quo. That’s a key reason that we built Braze with an intuitive user interface (UI) and flexible integrations—to help teams break down the internal barriers that have stood in the way of providing exceptional, ongoing experiences to their customers at scale.

Braze Canvas, our platform’s customer journey orchestration feature, was described by Forrester as “one of the most intuitive and robust in this evaluation, visualizing not just journeys, but also testing, test results, and journey analyses.” With Canvas, marketers are able to easily and intuitively understand the impact of their strategy, seamlessly test new hypotheses or engagement flows, and iterate to improve customer experiences and outcomes over time.

Another way that Braze is helping brands break down the boundaries that constrain their efforts is through our comprehensive technology and agency partner program, Braze Alloys. We know that to reach consumers effectively, you need to ensure that you have the right technology ecosystem—one that allows you to slot in best-in-class technologies for all your different customer engagement needs and to connect them together to support responsive, relevant, and deeply human brand experiences.

In the report, Forrester notes that Braze Alloys “enables customers to connect with a range of tools, from data visualization to retargeting.” The upshot? Whether you’re looking to use Braze with a customer data platform (CDP), a machine learning-powered recommendation engine, behavioral analytics providers, or all of the above, our platform is built to make that possible.

Special Thanks

Supporting real-time, coordinated, and customer-centric marketing have been core focuses at Braze since our founding. We believe our recognition as a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Mobile Engagement Automation, Q3 2020 reflects these focuses and the work we’ve done over the past nine years to make that vision a reality.

To every brand and individual who makes up the Braze community, we thank you. We wouldn’t be here without the feedback, communication, and continued efforts of our employees, our customers, and our partners. With your support, we look forward to continuing to forge the path ahead and shape the future of customer engagement—a future built on empathy, insight, and consideration.