How Engineering and Marketing Solutions Partner Slalom Supports Brilliant Customer Engagement

For all types of businesses, from startups to global enterprises, solutions partners can serve as trusted advisors, helping them select, evaluate, and combine the best stack of technologies to support their company's specific customer engagement needs. Braze customers across a range of industries regularly team up with Braze Alloys solutions partners—leading consultancies, agencies, and solutions partners—for:

• Engineering services: Assistance with the technical aspects of implementing and integrating Braze and other platforms
• Marketing support: Providing high-level strategy and the day-to-day details of campaign management
• Full-service solutions: Contributing both engineering services and marketing campaign support

We sat down with one of our Braze Alloys solutions partners, Slalom—a modern consulting firm focused on strategy, technology, and business transformation that serves over 30 markets across the US, UK, and Canada—to discuss the role played by solutions partners in modern customer engagement. Slalom helps clients deliver stronger results by leveraging the right marketing tech for improved customer relations and collaborates with clients to help meet their business objectives.

Slalom's Customer Engagement Philosophy

Unlocking modern customer engagement strategies is what Slalom helps their clients achieve. The team meets this ambitious objective by identifying their customer engagement challenges and by creating strategies to address these problems in the short-/mid-/long-term. Slalom also sources leading technologies by walking clients through successfully implementation and adoption of innovative tools like Braze, and supporting them with strategic counsel every step of the way.

One of Slalom’s core principles is to "Do what is right, always." And that comes down to selecting the right technology partners for its clients. "Slalom as a whole is platform-agnostic in its approach, which allows us to be unbiased in our platform recommendations and do what is right for our clients,” said Brian Cahill, Director, Media & Entertainment for Slalom New York. As a trusted advisor to its clients, Slalom’s goal is to find best-in-class partners and select the most effective solutions to meet clients' customer engagement needs.

Key Customer Engagement Challenges That Slalom Helps Brands Solve

Slalom guides their clients to adopt leading customer engagement technologies and use them to their full advantage. This results in championing cultural change within organizations to further their customer engagement best practices, deliver more timely and relevant communications, and more. Here's how.

1. Taking full advantage of the MarTech stack and identifying capability gaps.

"MarTech stacks have become very complex," said Erica Kilbride, Director, Data & Analytics for Slalom New York. "There are multiple platforms, data sources, and organizational units. Ideally, however, the customer has a single, frictionless experience across these boundaries that allows them to obtain the experience they are seeking."

Slalom helps its clients align all of these pieces with their specific customer engagement goals and desired business outcomes while keeping ahead of constant changes within technology.

2. Helping clients champion change within their organizations to help evolve their MarTech stack and strategies.

Companies struggling with ineffective legacy programs and tech stack components can feel the pain in a variety of ways, with team members having to deal with:

• Labor-intensive processes for manually integrating systems
• Inaccessible or inconsistent data
• Platform stability issues
• Being incapable of properly conducting targeted marketing in the right channels

Slalom guides its clients to overcome these challenges by getting organizational buy-in. "Since MarTech stacks touch multiple departments within the company, changing technologies often requires consensus and a shared vision," said Cahill. "If brands are misaligned internally, gaining consensus is difficult, making substantive change extremely challenging."

That's why Slalom's focus includes helping companies to:

• Manage change, including training and adoption
• Overcome risk aversion associated with change by implementing updates incrementally
• Upskill employees to embrace technical change with training and open office hours
• Evolve at the broader organizational level to instill a modern culture of data, testing and learning, and improving data literacy across the company

3. Maximizing customer engagement by optimizing their communications for maximum timeliness and relevance.

"With near uniformity, organizations focused on maximizing customer engagement understand the importance of driving relevance and timeliness in their communications," said Erica Kilbride. "Customer engagement platforms (CEP) like Braze offer a cross-channel engine that encompasses both."

By helping its clients combine customer insights from across channels (mobile, email, SMS, web, and more) into a single platform like Braze, Slalom empowers companies to make more effective decisions, supporting strategic actions in the moments that matter most while unlocking best-in-class personalization capabilities.

“Some marketing cloud solutions piece together channel-based marketing technologies, each with its own customer identifiers, orchestration, and deployment capabilities. This can result in customer outreach that is dated or irrelevant due to delays in leveraging customer actions and deploying timely communications,” explained Kilbride.

That's why Slalom turns to Braze as "a single platform that can orchestrate across all these channels from within one tool, leveraging a single customer view," added Kilbride. "For organizations that place value on relevance and timeliness of communications, solutions like Braze have become a mainstay in our modern MarTech architecture recommendations."

4. Getting access to the engineering resources they need to implement new technologies or get the most out of tech they've invested in.

Slalom offers a broad range of business and technology consulting services ranging from program/project management, strategy and operations, change management, and organizational effectiveness to all things data and analytics (including data strategy and management, data engineering and visualization, and machine learning/AI) to software engineering, user experience design, CRM, and cloud enablement and security across all major cloud providers. Frequently, Slalom assembles cross-functional teams to support projects (e.g., training and adoption support while launching a new CRM).

"We focus on outcomes, and that means we consider all aspects of a project that are necessary for success," said Cahill.

Find the Right Solutions Partner

It's not always easy to find the right solutions partner, and that's why we launched our Braze Alloys Solutions Partner Program in 2019 to streamline the process of matching clients in need with trusted partners. In addition, we created our Solutions Partners Certification Program to assess and validate our solutions partners’ expertise specific to our Braze platform. With that Braze stamp of approval, brands can be confident that they’re working with confirmed experts in the space, capable of helping them take their customer engagement efforts to the next level.

Could your brand use support building out your customer engagement strategy? Check out our Braze Alloys Solutions Partners Hub to find a team of trusted advisors who can help.

Slalom is a modern consulting firm focused on strategy, technology, and business transformation. In 40 markets around the world, Slalom's teams have autonomy to move fast and do what's right. They are backed by regional innovation hubs, a global culture of collaboration, and partnerships with the world's top technology providers. Founded in 2001 and headquartered in Seattle, Slalom has organically grown to over 9,000 employees. Slalom has been named one of Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For six years running and is regularly recognized by employees as a best place to work. Learn more at slalom.com. ​