One of the trickiest parts of customer engagement is acting on a signal at the right moment.
In many ways, spotting the signals is relatively easy. But being able to decide which system can respond to them, which team owns the response, and whether the data is trusted enough to use is far more difficult.
This issue was at the crux of many of the major CX news and announcements from the past seven days. No more so than with Salesforce's eyebrow-raising $5.66 billion acquisition of Braze.
Indeed, in discussing the news, Patrick Stokes, President of Applications and Marketing at Salesforce, provided an insight into Salesforce's strategic thinking, stating:
“Braze was built to turn live customer behavior into personalized engagement at scale.”
Editor’s Pick: Salesforce Bets Big on Braze’s Action Layer
Salesforce has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Braze, the customer engagement platform known for high-volume, cross-channel B2C engagement.
Braze brings an event-streaming architecture built around live customer behavior. Its platform can coordinate engagement across mobile, email, web, in-app messaging, and other channels, while BrazeAI helps optimize content, offers, timing, and channel decisions.
Salesforce already has plenty of customer context through Data 360, Customer 360, Marketing Cloud, and Agentforce. What it has lacked is Braze’s reputation for converting a live behavioral event into a rapid, personalized response at consumer scale.
Stokes said: “Every interaction is an opportunity to wow your customers. Most of that wow comes from knowing your customer, and responding at just the right moment.”
That is the promise. The more difficult question is how quickly Salesforce can turn the deal into something useful for customers rather than another lengthy platform-integration project.
Databricks Wants Campaign Decisions to Stay Near the Data
Databricks is making a competing argument with CustomerLake Campaign Agents, now in beta.
The platform lets marketers build audiences in natural language, personalize experiences, and sync those audiences directly to engagement platforms such as Braze and Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
It also supports what Databricks calls Infinity Campaigns, agent-driven loops that adjust engagement as customer context changes.
The core proposition is for marketers to work from governed customer data already held in the Databricks environment, rather than copying data into a conventional customer data platform and waiting for technical teams to prepare an audience.
In outlining how this would work in practice, Kumar Ram, Global Head of Marketing Technology and AI Enablement at HP, said:
“Within 2 hours of starting with CustomerLake, we had data and attributes ready for audience building – versus 2 to 3 months with a traditional CDP.”
That is a striking claim, and it gets to why the data-platform vendors are increasingly interested in customer engagement.
If they can make trusted data usable by marketers without another migration or engineering queue, they can become part of the journey decision.
Optimove Makes the Zero-Copy Case
Optimove is taking a more targeted approach to the same problem.
Its new Zero Copy Customer Lists capability lets marketers define an audience from data held in Snowflake without copying, uploading, or ingesting that data into Optimove.
