Avoiding Broken Brand Experiences

To help marketing, growth, and engagement teams see their work from a new perspective, Braze has partnered with Tom Fishburne, CEO and founder of Marketoonist, for a 10-part series of marketing-themed comics.

Each week, we’ll share a Marketoon exploring a different aspect of the customer engagement landscape—and hear a thoughtful response from a Braze employee based on their own experiences and insights.

This week: Braze Senior Product Manager Marion Nammack on broken brand experiences—and how to prevent them.

These kinds of broken, deeply frustrating brand experiences happen to all of us at one time or another. Even—or maybe especially—me. One upside of working at Braze is that when these situations strike, I have an inside understanding of what probably went wrong for the brand in question and what they could do to fix it going forward. (On the other hand, when I know that the problem should have been easy to avoid, it’s particularly irritating.)

A few months ago, I booked a flight back to New York from Denver—and then received an SMS from the airline at 7:15 p.m. on April 28 reminding me that my flight was departing...at 7:15 p.m. on April 28. I’m (unfortunately) used to flight reminders coming late, but this one was particularly annoying. At that point, if I’m not already on the plane, odds are that I’m probably not getting on, so you might as well hold off on sending a text.

Then about a month later, I had a very similar (and similarly frustrating) experience with the same airline. I’d booked a flight back to Newark Airport from Miami when I received an SMS from the airline letting me know that my 7:00 p.m. flight was delayed would now depart at 7:50 p.m. That’s really useful information and exactly the kind of message that airlines should be sending to their customers—or it would have been if it weren’t already 7:44 p.m. when it was delivered. After all, if the flight really were going to depart at 7:50 p.m., it would have been pretty obvious to the recipient (me) because we would have been on the runway.

It’s not always easy for airlines to provide customers with timely, relevant updates. That kind of outreach often depends on people manually inputting the relevant information at the right time...and like any activity dependent on humans, it’s subject to human error. That said, one thing brands can do to cut down on these kinds of broken experiences is to automatically filter out notifications that—like the ones I received—are unlikely to be relevant to the people receiving them.

For brands using Braze, our API trigger features allow you to leverage Liquid personalization to add conditionals to your messages—and that means you can do things like automatically abort the message in situations where there’s less than 10 minutes between the current time and a flight’s departure time. It’s not complicated; it just takes a little thoughtfulness and a little foresight.