Braze Customer Engagement Platform

Braze is a well-rounded tool that enables our team to operationalize key campaigns that have a direct impact on our business results. The multiple options available in Braze for automation and flexibility in setting-up A/B tests is very important. We also like the flexibility in creating individualized customer journeys that factor in messaging channels, trigger events and timing. The team at Braze has always been helpful in supporting us with proactive conversations and quick responses when we need help. The available product guides, training, and resources available as self service online are extensive and provide easy insights on how to use available features to take our campaigns to the next level.

My favorite part of Braze was the ability to contact users in-app, without any overhead or bottlenecks from our engineering team. We also appreciated their privacy focus, as that's something very important to our company and end users. User Segmentation was also a great tool in the app that we used to understand our range of personas in order to customize the experience to specific ICP's.

1. Multi-channel campaign orchestration - it allows us to build journeys across multiple channels (email, SMS, push notifications) 2. A/B testing - it's fairly simple to set this up and activate it. We often test subject lines and send times 3. One of the core reasons we picked Braze was its integration with Tealium (our CDP)

Any customer engagement platform that uses real-time customer data requires a direct connection to the website or app. This means that multiple teams are going to be involved in the deployment and maintenance of the integration, which can be difficult. I wish there was more autonomy within the Braze dashboard with the data being sent into Braze, but I don't think that other platforms provide anything more than Braze with this.

I didn't like how it could be un-customizable at times, especially with in-app pop-ups. Our end users are very sensitive to us using third-party vendors, and we have a very specific and niche design language that we use within the UI. If we give them a pop-up that doesn't follow that visual pattern that is so established, it can very quickly break down trust in our product. We also looked into implementing content cards into a homepage experience using Brave, and it wasn't feasible after exploring those capabilities, mostly more struggles around customization

1. It can be quite costly depending on what you and the business intend to use it for e.g. some of the predictive AI features can only be unlocked at a significant cost 2. If you don't factor in consultancy services (either with Braze or a 3rd party) upfront this is a miss, particularly during the key onboarding weeks as there is a significant learning curve 3. Reporting (to date) hasn't been fantastic although I've seen this identified on their roadmap for improvements which is positive