Empowering teams, inspiring solutions: Inside Twilio Segment's build-a-thon

One of the most commonly uttered mantras at Twilio is, “we can’t wait to see what you build!”

And that extends to not only our customers, but our employees, too. Last month, we hosted an internal build-a-thon between with our Solutions Engineering, Solutions Consulting and Value Engineering teams. 

The rules were simple. The winning solution had to:

• Solve a real customer problem

• Leverage Twilio APIs (including Segment!)

• Interoperate with the data warehouse

The goal was to build something that solved a real-world problem, while showcasing the power of building within Twilio Segment’s interoperability and integration with Twilio’s products and data warehouses!

The execution

All competitors were divided into teams that were equally weighted between skill sets. They were encouraged to meet in advance before, share ideas, and map out a game plan for the live build.

A rubric was shared, and teams would get points based on:

• Solution Complexity: Number of Twilio APIs, Number of Segment features, Connectivity with third-party tools including data warehouse, Number of data sources

• Presentation: How well does the elevator pitch articulate the problem and the corresponding solution?

• Prototype: Is there an end-to-end demo, does it include a custom user interface?

And we saw some really innovative ideas! Some of them shared a way to:

• meet increasing consumer demand around personalized healthcare experiences 

• enable precise targeting and personalization around baby registry products purchased 

• how to capture cleaner data and improve engagement accuracy to verify the health of identifiers

The winner

Our winner was the Bernese Mountain Flying Squirrels, who set out to solve the problem of credit card churn, where card holders will close their credit cards if they are not fully utilizing the card’s benefits.  The team chose this problem for their project when their Value Engineer Matt Meyer walked through the detrimental effects it can have on a bank’s profitability, brand, and overall success.

The solution was built using Segment, Snowflake, Flex, Twilio Voice in tandem. In Segment, they collected all of the customer’s touchpoints, unified them into a golden profile, and used computed traits to create a likelihood to churn model based on customer calls at the end of the year that have a low utilization score with their benefits.

The bank could pull customer data from a warehouse, like Snowflake, into a Segment data graph to build audiences of customers sharing these traits, which are then passed down to third-party activation tools.

The customer data could also be activated in Twilio Flex, so the credit card company could directly interact with the customer and ideally prevent complete churn with a proactive conversation.

Conclusion

Our team had fun dreaming up real-world use cases for the Twilio products. We want to showcase the innovative ideas dreamed up by our team and the lessons learned, so expect a blog on each entry in the next coming weeks!