• by Ray Schultz , August 23, 2021

Brands have a new resource for avoiding generic software and building a unique customer experience: Twilio’s Developer Toolkit. 

The Toolkit is designed to help developers customize their customer data stacks and differentiate their digital products and experiences when using when using the Twilio Segment consumer data platform (CDP).  

“Every company is investing and innovating in digital customer engagement in order to compete,” states Peter Reinhardt, CEO of Twilio Segment. "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."

Reinhardt adds: “You need the tools to build something unique that is true to your brand and customers.”

If Twilio Segment is correct, we have reached the end of off-the-shelf software. There were over 8,000 marketing tools available at the start of 2020, resulting in a “chaos of interconnected tools,” the company argues. 

In this environment, software developers are “a company’s most valuable asset,” Reinhardt notes. 

The Twilio Segment CDP allows developers to build unique products and experiences in-house using a “building blocks” approach, combining new and existing solutions while saving thousands of engineering hours, the company claims.

According to Twilio Segment, developers can benefit from these features: 

- Destination Actions provides brands with the ability to configure how data is sent to each application.

- Functions allows firms add custom data sources and application destinations in addition to the 400+ in the Twilio Segment catalog. 

- Multi-Instance Destinations connects a single data source to multiple instances of the same application, assuring teams across the business that they are using the same data. 

- Data collection from more data sources, including web libraries such as Analytics is 2.0, and mobile libraries like Swift and Kotlin.

Developers offer several observations. 

Daniel Newman, principal analyst at Futurum Research, says Twilio Segment CDP offers developers important tools "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,” adds Jane Kelly, head of growth at Retool, the development platform for building internal tools, adding that the Twilio Segment CDP gives developers the capability "to build on top of a strong data infrastructure."

Twilio acquired Segment for a reported $3.2 billion last year.