Zebrands: Boosting the customer experience to improve people's lives

Challenge

In order to keep up with its rapid rate of growth, Zebrands, a Mexican retailer offering a range of products designed to improve people's daily lives, including mattresses and travel luggage, was looking to centralize its customers' data. The company wanted to be able to deliver tailored marketing campaigns as well as provide a better customer experience through its contact center.

Solution

The company had already been using Twilio's Segment platform for capturing data and unifying customer profiles. They then decided to integrate messaging, including SMS, WhatsApp, and voice, before adding Sendgrid for email marketing campaigns and, finally, the Flex contact center solution.

Introduction

Zebrands is a Mexico-based company offering comfort products designed to improve people's quality of life. Its product lineup includes: beds, mattresses and pillows, storage items, white goods, home fitness accessories, and travel luggage. The company has experienced rapid growth, reaching more than 1000 employees and 160 stores in Mexico, and is now planning a regional expansion, starting in Brazil, and expects to reach more than 1000 stores in the medium term.

Zebrands prides itself on its commitment to innovation and adoption of the latest technology, which it makes use of across the entire value chain, from product manufacturing to delivery to the end customer.

Why Twilio?

To keep up with their rate of growth, the company also wanted to leverage technology to further boost its marketing efforts. They wanted to gather all of their customers' data in one place to have a better understanding of them and show them targeted marketing campaigns. This led Zebrands to implement Segment, Twilio's customer data platform.

"We knew who our customers were, but it was difficult for us to apply that knowledge to improve the customer experience," says Nicolás Rodríguez, senior software engineer and technology manager for the payments team at Zebrands. "By using the Twilio Segment technology, we were able to begin to collate that information and provide a solution tailored to our customers."

The company was also using several different communication tools to communicate with its clients. This led Zebrands to adopt the Twilio contact center platform, Flex, the integrated voice and text platform (WhatsApp and SMS), as well as Sendgrid for email marketing campaigns. In this way, all of the company's customer-facing communication channels were integrated into a single platform to enable contact center agents to deliver faster, more efficient responses to customers.

According to Abraham Romano, Zebrands' Chief Product Officer (CPO), the main draws of this technology were the ability to centralize data and the flexibility to customize the Twilio platforms.

According to Carolina Arévalo, account executive for Twilio Latin America, Twilio Flex also employs the latest advances in artificial intelligence in both messaging and voice, which is a major differentiator for contact center agents.

"That's where we are a perfect match for contact centers by helping them respond quickly and provide a great customer experience," she said.

Implementation

Implementation of the various Twilio platforms was done in stages, starting with Segment, followed by unified messaging and voice, and finally, integration with Flex. They followed a process to personalize the tool and adapt to the specific needs of contact center agents.

According to Rodríguez, one of the reasons they chose Twilio was its scalability, as the company was undergoing rapid growth and international expansion.

"Integrating Segment was initially about gathering a lot of information from different places. But that enabled us to start using the tool to create more specific marketing campaigns that eventually lead to better customer conversion," Rodríguez said.

Arévalo added that Twilio offers a very well rounded team of developers and engineers who are constantly looking to implement the best solutions that are capable of rapidly addressing to the needs of their customers.

"The Twilio Customer Data Platform is a tool that allows you to get to know your customers very well. And when you know your customer well, you can communicate with them through any channel, including their preferred contact method. That is one of the great advantages of what Zebrands is doing: Understanding the needs of their clients and responding to them via a channel of their choosing."

We have worked with Zebrands to form a technology team that has led to the development of a platform fitted with the tools necessary for their contact center agents to efficiently carry out their responsibilities.

Constant communication and strategic planning are fundamental pillars of our relationship with the customer. Strengthening this partnership is key to anticipating market changes and guaranteeing innovative solutions.

By collaborating with the Zebrands product team, led by Fabián Muñoz, we have managed to prioritize and optimize the Flex platform. Today, agents and supervisors can both manage their activities with greater satisfaction and efficiency, furthering the objective of consolidating the best contact center on the market.

We are now at a key moment for Twilio and Zebrands' visions to complement each other and shape a product capable of revolutionizing customer service. The combination of our technology and strategy will enable us not only to stay ahead, but also to stand out in the industry.

Results

Zebrands is one of Twilio's Latin American customers who have made most use of the full range of Twilio platforms, according to Danilo Rivera, Engineering Solutions Manager for Twilio Latin America.

They began by integrating customer data into Segment, and then created a unified customer profile in Flex for contact center agents. This, combined with knowledge of AI and a series of digital channels, allows agents to truly know their customers, put them at the center and providing an experience that sets them apart from their competitors.

"What they did was use the different products to build a complete interface so the agent can get to know their customers in a personalized way," Rivera said.

Zebrands is using Segment and its machine-learning features to improve the quality of its advertising campaigns, reach similar audiences on Google and Facebook, and target specific profiles.

The future

Zebrands is currently undergoing international expansion following its recent launch in Brazil, and both Zebrands and Twilio want to continue working together.

Zebrands is working directly with the Twilio product team to establish an advanced "customer experience roadmap" in which they can both predict future needs, match them to Twilio solutions, and deliver an experience that customers will not be able to find with other brands.

Much of Twilio's current development is based on AI and digital channels, and the company is developing use cases for Zebrands to test and provide feedback on, which is helping Twilio define a product roadmap. One of these use cases is the "unified profile" in Flex.

"Zebrands has been one of the most important companies in terms of the feedback they have provided, helping us define new plans, launches, and new use cases. What they are building is very important to us. Our product team is working with them closely and I think other customers will benefit from all these use cases we are implementing with them," Rivera said.

Rivera added that Mexico is one of Twilio's markets that is most leveraging open APIs and testing new use cases, as well as experimenting with AI, which is motivating Twilio to innovate even further.

Zebrands is also innovating with its processes and the brands they sell. The company manufactures its own products, launches new product lines and is trying to expand into new markets, and their partnership with Twilio is helping them in that process.