Yes, yes. I know. We live in a world where there are any number of APIs. And that makes it far easier to do things, communicate, and solve problems. But sometimes—honestly most times—it’s not exactly easy trying to figure out how to string all of those APIs together in a way that makes for something effective. That’s what I love about Portland startup Customer.io and their new Actions.
What’s Customer.io Actions? It’s an expansion beyond Customer.io’s typical email communications. To enable targeted communications to customers via any publicly available API. Twilio? Yep. Trello? Well yeah. Slack? Duh.
Long story short, you get to interact with your customer exactly how and where they want you to.
When we launched Customer.io, we weren’t thinking about “emails” alone. We were thinking about Customer “inputs” and “outputs” (Get it? Customer.io?). Inputs would come though website or app activity from a customer (behavior data). Outputs would be reactions to that behavior data. Customer.io is the place where a business orchestrates their interactions with a customer.
Over the four years we’ve had our email-only solution in the market, we realized that the list of things people want out of a tool like ours is infinite. But one resounding thing we’ve heard from businesses that have a website and an app is that they love the way Customer.io handles the logic for email — and wanted to be able to use it for other types of messages they were sending. One of our customers who did an evaluation of every mobile push product on the market said that nobody does it how we do it and his business was comparing all other solutions against the hypothetical that we would some day do push.
It was validation like that that made us want to invest in Actions.
And don’t even get me started on the whole perfect storm of marketing automation awesomeness that could take place, right here, in town with collaborations among Act-On, Customer.io, Janrain, Lytics, and the like.
For more information and the thoughts behind the new features, read Customer.io Actions – Why did we do it this way?
