Updates enable brands to adapt to changing data regulations, reduce pressure on engineering resources, and build a customer data foundation for advanced machine learning

Segment, the world’s leading customer data platform (CDP), announced a suite of new platform updates designed to give enterprises the speed, flexibility, and agility needed to thrive as digital-first organizations and meet the real-time, hyper-personalized expectations of consumers. The announcement was made at CDP Week, a week-long event designed to help companies create superior customer experiences using first-party customer data, and comes on the heels of the news that Twilio has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Segment to create more personalized, timely and impactful engagement across customer service, marketing, analytics, product and sales.

Marketing Technology News: RevJet Announces Version 5.0 of its Global Ad Serving App Suite

“We’re in the midst of the most competitive digital sprint we’ve ever seen, and the winners will be those with organizational agility and a true understanding of their customer base,” said Peter Reinhardt, CEO and co-founder of Segment. “Creating a successful digital-first experience hinges on harnessing reliable customer data, but that’s become increasingly difficult for businesses to do. We’re committed to helping companies access good data, so they can drive business growth and unlock the future of personalized experiences.”

The battleground is digital

Positive, seamless customer experiences have always been a key differentiator for successful brands. For years now, businesses have worked to deliver highly personalized, consistent customer experiences across online and offline touchpoints — often embarking on a slowly phased digital transformation to do so.

However, in the past six months, the way we do business has changed drastically. Global supply chains have been disrupted, entire workforces became virtual overnight, and many brick and mortar companies are now suddenly having to conduct business exclusively or mostly online. Suddenly, companies find themselves in a truly digital-first world, overwhelmed with an influx of direct customer interactions at a scale previously thought impossible to handle.

A platform for the digital-first world

Enterprises need an infrastructure that can not only handle the demands of this new scale, but also one that gives them the ability to drive customer growth in a digital-first environment — whether that is through new digital products and revenue streams, predictive machine learning, or consumer privacy compliance. Delivering real-time and hyper-personalized digital experiences while simultaneously driving growth is no small feat.

Segment’s suite of new platform updates are designed to set companies up for success as they tackle these competing imperatives. Today Segment announced:

• New low-code features for business teams: Brands require continuous and agile experimentation to optimize the customer experience, but dependencies on engineering resources or app release cycles can leave these critical initiatives in backlog for weeks or months — leading to missed revenue opportunities at a very critical time. Edge Functions allow brands to enrich and transform mobile app events instantly as they flow into Segment, while Destination Actions give users the ability to better control the behavior of their data in downstream data destinations.
• Flexible identity resolution: No two businesses have the exact same customer journey. Unlike the black boxes of other CDPs, Segment’s Identity Configuration UI gives businesses the ability to easily define their user identity resolution rules to achieve an accurate single view of the customer to power personalization.
• Data preparation for machine learning: Data lakes offer companies a faster path to creating cutting-edge customer experiences using machine learning. Segment Data Lakes significantly reduces the time spent cleaning and preparing customer data for machine learning, so companies can connect their data to a Data Lake and instantly drive advanced analytics and AI initiatives.

Marketing Technology News: OZY Media Announces Chris Rantamaki As New Head Of TV

A platform for the privacy-first world

At the same time that businesses are accelerating their digital growth with new experiments and strategies, the external environment brings upon constantly shifting demands, such as consumer privacy regulations and expectations. Segment’s platform ensures enterprises are able to adapt and adjust to external market trends while continuing to focus on digital growth initiatives.

Today, the company also announced new platform updates that make it easy for companies to:

• Comply with local data regulations: As more countries around the world pass privacy and data residency laws, Segment will introduce new functionality to help customers control their data collection, starting with the ability to configure endpoints to collect data exclusively in APAC, EMEA, or in the US.
• Keep up with browser changes: As companies navigate new browser developments like Safari Intelligent Tracking Protection (ITP) and the death of the third-party cookie, In-Domain Instrumentation makes it easy for companies to collect user data via their own domain, without any proxies or additional infrastructure. This helps them to stay compliant with browser updates while saving time and costs.
• Align with IDFA restrictions: At this year’s WWDC, Apple made a number of privacy-related changes around the IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers). Segment continues to support privacy-first changes and has released updates to its SDK and integrations to enable customers to easily adapt to these changes.
• Limit PII visibility by default: Customer data collection can sometimes contain sensitive information about users. As of today, all personally identifiable information (PII) is automatically masked within the Segment application, unless workspace owners are explicitly granted access.

“The ongoing market shifts caused by the pandemic will have long-lasting implications for enterprises, making it crucial that they put the right digital foundation in place to power and support their future,” said Daniel Newman, Principal Analyst at Futurum Research. “Based upon our extensive research of the CDP landscape, we believe Segment’s new features and updates will help enterprises thrive as digital transformation continues to accelerate.”

Marketing Technology News: Moore Announces Bryan Lank Appointed as Chief Business Development Officer