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

Challenge

In order to maintain its growth momentum, Zebrands, a Mexican retailer offering a range of products designed to improve the quality of life—such as mattresses and suitcases—wanted to centralize its customer data. They wanted to run personalized marketing campaigns and provide a better experience in its contact center.

Solution

The company used Twilio's Segment platform to capture data and unify profiles. Next, it decided to integrate messaging, such as SMS, WhatsApp and voice, before adding Sendgrid for email marketing campaigns and, finally, the Flex contact center solution.

Introduction

Zebrands is a Mexican company that offers comfort products designed to improve people’s quality of life. Its products include: beds, mattresses and pillows, room organizers, household appliances, home gym accessories and travel bags. With rapid growth, the company has reached over 1,000 employees and 160 stores in Mexico, and now has plans for regional expansion starting with Brazil, hoping to reach over 1,000 stores in the medium term.

Zebrands prides itself on innovation and the adoption of the latest technologies, used to cover the entire value chain, from product manufacturing to delivery to the end customer.

Why Twilio?

To keep pace with growth, the company also wanted to leverage technology to further boost its marketing initiatives. The goal was to centralize all customer data so as to better understand customers and target specific marketing campaigns. That's when Zebrands implemented Segment, Twilio’s customer data platform.

“We knew our customers, but it was difficult to use that knowledge to improve their experience,” says Nicolás Rodríguez, senior software engineer and head of technology for the payments team at Zebrands. “With Twilio Segment technology, we began collecting this information and providing a personalized solution for our customers.”

The company also used various communication tools to exchange messages with customers. This led Zebrands to implement Twilio’s Flex contact center platform, with voice and text integration (WhatsApp and SMS), and Sendgrid for email marketing campaigns. As a result, all communication channels directly aimed at customers were integrated into a single platform, enabling contact center agents to provide faster and more efficient responses to customers.

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

According to Carolina Arévalo, Twilio’s account executive in Latin America, Twilio Flex also incorporates the latest advances in artificial intelligence for both messaging and voice, representing a major advantage for contact center agents.

“This is a huge benefit for contact centers, which can respond more quickly and provide an excellent customer experience,” she explains.

Rollout

The rollout of Twilio’s various platforms happened gradually, starting with Segment, followed by unified communications and voice, and finally integration with Flex. The tool underwent a customization process to suit the specific needs of contact center agents.

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

The integration of Segment was an issue at first because it gathered a lot of information from different locations. However, this allowed us to start using the tool to create more targeted marketing campaigns that now generate better customer conversions,” explains Rodríguez.

Arévalo adds that Twilio has a very comprehensive team of developers and engineers who are always looking to implement the best solutions to respond quickly to their customers’ needs.

"With Twilio’s customer data platform, you know everything about your customer. And when you know your customer well, you can communicate with them through any channel, especially their preferred channel. That’s one of the great advantages of what Zebrands is doing: understanding its customers’ needs and responding to them on the channel they choose.”

In collaboration with Zebrands, we formed a technology team that enabled us to develop a platform with essential tools for their contact center agents to perform their duties efficiently.

Constant communication and strategic planning are fundamental pillars of our relationship with the customer. Strengthening this partnership is essential to anticipate market developments and ensure innovative solutions.

Thanks to our collaboration with the Zebrands’ product team, led by Fabián Muñoz, we were able to prioritize and optimize the Flex platform. Agents and supervisors can now manage their activities with greater satisfaction and efficiency, with the goal of consolidating the best contact center on the market.

Now is an important time for Twilio and Zebrands to complement each other's vision and create a product that will revolutionize customer service. The combination of our technology and strategy will allow us not only to get ahead, but also to make a difference in the sector.

Results

Zebrands is one of Twilio’s customers in Latin America that takes full advantage of its complete line of platforms, according to Danilo Rivera, Twilio's Engineering Solutions Manager for Latin America.

It began integrating customer data into Segment and soon started offering a unified customer profile in Flex for contact center agents. All of this, combined with AI knowledge and various digital channels, allows agents to truly get to know their customers and make them the focus of everything they do, in order to offer an experience that sets them apart from their competitors.

“Different products were used to create a complete interface so that the agent could get to know the customer in a personalized way,” says Rivera.

Zebrands uses Segment and its machine learning capabilities to improve the quality of its advertising campaigns and reach similar audiences on Google and Facebook to target specific profiles.

The future

Zebrands is expanding internationally following its recent launch in Brazil, and both Zebrands and Twilio want to continue this partnership.

Zebrands is working directly with Twilio’s product team to establish an advanced “customer experience roadmap,” where both companies can anticipate future needs and combine Twilio solutions to deliver an experience that customers won’t find with other brands.

Much of Twilio's current development is based on AI and digital channels. The company is developing use cases that are tested and reviewed by Zebrands, which helps Twilio define a product roadmap. One such use case is the “unified profile” in Flex.

“Zebrands was one of the key companies in providing us with feedback, helping us define new plans, launches, and new use cases. The work they are doing is very important to us. Our product team works closely with the company, so I believe that these use cases being rolled out will be useful for other customers as well," explains Rivera.

Rivera adds that Mexico is one of Twilio’s general markets that most takes advantage of open APIs and tests new use cases, in addition to testing AI, something that is motivating Twilio to continue innovating.

Zebrands also brings innovation with its processes and the brands it sells. The company manufactures its own products, launches new product lines and tries to open up new markets. And the partnership with Twilio is helping in this process.