Exploring the Vertical Stack: Avoiding Disconnected Layers

Today’s brands are living in an in-the-moment, technology-driven, mobile-first world—and so are all their customers. To break out of old habits and transform the way you’re speaking to your customers, you need to take a hard look at the technologies supporting your customer engagement efforts.

One key ingredient you may not be leveraging? A vertical engagement stack built on real-time, streaming data. To help you better understand what a vertical stack makes possible and how to leverage it effectively, we’ve put together a seven-part content series exploring all the ins-and-outs. Enjoy!

Nearly every brand these days depends on technology engage with their customers. And while it might once have been possible to do that effectively with a simple email solution and a lot of gut intuition, most modern brands are going to find themselves leveraging a variety of different softwares and digital platforms to understand, reach, and retain their customers.

That collection of technology is often described as a customer engagement ecosystem or as a marketing technology stack. Each individual solution that you leverage can have a significant impact—positive or negative—on your brand’s relationship with your audience. But it’s the way that these technologies interact (or, frankly, don’t) that can have the greatest impact on the brand experience your company is providing.

How you build your stack really matters. Having a best-in-class analytics solution or a top-flight customer engagement platform is great, but whatever technologies you’re leveraging must share data in real-time in order for the end-to-end customer experience to function without any kinks.

Why? Because actionable first-party data makes great customer experiences possible. Today’s consumers expect relevant, responsive customer messaging that provides real value, and you can’t make that happen if you simply don’t have the data needed to inform, target, and optimize those campaigns.But the task doesn’t stop at collecting the data. Nor at tweaking and implementing strategies based upon the data. The real challenge is doing it all in the moment. For companies struggling with disconnected technology layers, moving nimbly may be next to impossible. The reason being that less advanced systems work by batching data, or sending it over incremental periods, which can lead to stale, dated (i.e. less useful) information. And if that’s the case, broken (confusing and frustrating) customer experiences may follow.

Taking action

The right technology can offer your team a real-time interactive feedback loop. For marketing and agency leaders looking for such a solution, we’ve got you covered. Head over to the Braze Product page to learn about how you can build out the experiences of your (and, more importantly, your customers’) dreams.