Twilio Segment, the world’s #1 Customer Data Platform (CDP), today unveiled its Developer Toolkit, a unique set of developer tools that gives companies unprecedented flexibility to customize their customer data stack and deliver truly differentiated customer experiences using the Twilio Segment CDP. The Twilio Segment Developer Toolkit provides companies with the most powerful data collection and integration capabilities on the market.

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“Twilio Segment CDP offers developers the valuable tools they need to build and maintain a modern data framework without requiring extensive time from engineers, allowing resources to be more effectively deployed to support customer experience efforts.”

“Every company is investing and innovating in digital customer engagement in order to compete. The trouble is, you can’t buy a one-size-fits-all SaaS software and expect to deliver a differentiated experience — if you can buy it off the shelf, so can your competitors. You need the tools to build something unique that is true to your brand and customers,” said Peter Reinhardt, CEO of Twilio Segment. “In this race for differentiation, software developers are a company’s most valuable asset. That’s why we’ve created this new Developer Toolkit. The companies who figure out how to empower their developers to create amazing customer experiences will thrive, while those who do not will fail.”

The End of Off-the-Shelf Software

When the SaaS industry took off, companies eagerly purchased off-the-shelf products that they would previously have had to build in-house. But what they saved in build and maintenance effort, they began to lose in differentiation and flexibility: by their nature, one-size-fits-all solutions make it harder to set digital products and experiences apart from the competition.

For this reason, the world’s most customer-centric companies now prefer to build a customer data stack that is unique to the needs of their business. However, the majority of companies do not have an infinite army of engineers or resources to build this infrastructure.

This predicament led to an explosion of martech solutions that focus on unique use cases. By the beginning of 2020, there were over 8,000 marketing tools available. As a result, the simplicity and ease promised by the off-the-shelf approach has transformed into a chaos of interconnected tools.

The Twilio Segment CDP solves this dilemma by providing companies with the best of both worlds — the flexibility to build their own, differentiated products and experiences in-house using a “building blocks” approach. They can combine new and existing solutions to customize their customer data stack any way that they see fit, creating unique, differentiated experiences for each and every one of their customers.

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Introducing the Twilio Segment Developer Toolkit

Today, Twilio Segment is introducing its new Developer Toolkit, which gives developers a set of new features that deliver an unprecedented amount of flexibility and customization when it comes to building unique customer experiences on top of the Twilio Segment CDP.

As a result, developers save thousands of engineering hours that otherwise would have been spent building and maintaining a data infrastructure from scratch, which allows them to focus on building core products and unique customer experiences.

The Developer Toolkit features enhance every aspect of the Segment platform, and include:

• Unparalleled flexibility with Destination Actions, which provides every customer with the ability to configure how data is sent to each application, down to the most minute details
• Infinite integrations with Functions, which provides the ability to add custom data sources and application destinations in addition to the 400+ already in the Twilio Segment catalog
• A universal data set with Multi-Instance Destinations, which connects a single data source to multiple instances of the same application so every team across the business can trust that they’re using the same data
• Data collection from more data sources than ever before with new and best-in-class web libraries, including Analytics.js 2.0, and mobile libraries like Swift and Kotlin
• Improved performance by batching events with Analytics.js 2.0, the most advanced analytics integrator available, which can result in a significant improvement to SEO scores

“The importance of creating a strong data foundation to power marketing and customer experience cannot be overstated. Marketing won’t work without good, clean data, and investments in technology platforms that are powered by sub-par customer data will beget sub-par results,” said Daniel Newman, Principal Analyst at Futurum Research. “Twilio Segment CDP offers developers the valuable tools they need to build and maintain a modern data framework without requiring extensive time from engineers, allowing resources to be more effectively deployed to support customer experience efforts.”

“Building the basic infrastructure needed to collect and unify customer data in-house is costly and requires constant support from engineers,” said Jane Kelly, Head of Growth at Retool, the development platform for building internal tools. “With Twilio Segment as our CDP, our developers are building on top of a strong data infrastructure from day one. Empowered by data they can trust, they have the freedom to develop new features and deliver world-class experiences that put our customers first.”

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