What It Takes to Deliver Increased Customer Value: Introducing Braze Continuum

Today, more than ever, it’s essential for brands to build their marketing efforts around a nuanced understanding of their customers and to ensure that they have the tools and strategic vision they need to provide those customers with relevant, timely experiences. But making the jump from what your brand is doing now to what today’s consumer demands can be a major challenge.

That’s where the Braze Customer Success team comes in. We have a simple, clear mission: To inspire the brands we work with by showing what technology can make possible, advising them on how to execute the most successful marketing strategies, and working together to build a bridge between the possible and the actual. To help our customers make the most of their customer engagement efforts, we’re proud to announce the launch of Braze Continuum.

The Continuum is a set of tools designed to complement the Braze platform, making it possible for customers to reach their marketing goals and see increased value on an ongoing basis. How does it work in practice? It all comes down to 4 steps.

Braze Continuum Step by Step

When it comes to reaching any goal, the starting point is alway understanding what you want to achieve. The same is true when it comes to ensuring our customer can reach their marketing goals. The reality is that Braze customers operate in many different countries and industries—so they’re often looking to accomplish very different things when it comes to their overarching marketing strategy.

So, Braze Customer Success Managers (CSMs) facilitate an open discussion early on to produce what we call a “definition of success”—that is, a list of clear goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) unique to each customer.

Once we have a solid understanding of where a customer wishes to go, it’s time for us to assess the maturity of their existing engagement capabilities. Without a full picture of which tools, tactics, and technologies a given brand leverages currently—and the outcomes they’re seeing—it’s difficult to plot a clear way forward, which makes this step essential.

In order to assess things effectively, we put together the Braze Continuum Scorecard, a structured collection of 150+ criteria that allows Braze CSMs to consistently classify our customers based on where they fall in connection with the four stages of customer engagement maturity: Activate, Accomplish, Accelerate, and Ace.

At Braze, we prioritize data-driven decision making. That’s one major reason that we took the time to develop and leverage our Braze Continuum Benchmarks. This exclusive report continuously refreshes and offers Braze CSMs visibility into their customers’ performance across a range of channel and engagement metrics, all within the context of their specific industry.

Things start to get exciting in the third step of the Braze Continuum process, where we define a success plan to help us put customers on the right trajectory when it comes to their marketing goals.

This exercise isn’t limited to a Braze feature adoption roadmap—though, of course, we all love watching our product team develop and refine the platform and seeing how customers take advantage of new or previously unexplored functionalities. To ensure that this process is successful, it’s important we address the human aspects of customer engagement, too. That means digging in to make certain that all Braze users have the right skills and knowledge to drive the most value out of our platform. To help out, our CSMs make a point of highlighting exactly the right content at the right time: From training sessions and workshops to inspiring customer stories and thought leadership articles.

The Braze Continuum helps us do one more thing effectively: Stay focused on our mutual goals and work closely and effectively with our customers until we achieve them. Every quarter, we revisit the first three steps and, through Executive Business Reviews (EBRs). Holding in-depth discussions with key stakeholders and leaders to ensure that we’re still on the right track. At Braze, we like to keep aiming higher, so we’re not afraid to go after stretch goals, too, even if it can mean heading into uncharted customer engagement territory.

Final Thoughts

So, the big question—does it work? In a word, yes! Here’s what BlaBlaCar, one of many Braze customers that managed to “Ace” it, says about Braze Continuum:

To learn more about Braze Continuum, reach out to your CSM or Account Manager for additional information about how to take advantage of this high-touch, high-value side of the Braze Customer Success experience.