The human touch: How Braze Agent Console helps marketers get more personal

There's no denying the complexity of the interactions of brands and consumers today. The number of different ways that individuals can research, shop, and ultimately purchase goods and services is at an all-time high—and that's creating challenges as marketers seek ways to provide consistent personalization across all those channels and touchpoints. At the same time, customer engagement teams are increasingly grappling with complex data structures, martech stacks, and campaign infrastructure, adding to their behind-the-scenes resource burden.

AI agents can help. These intelligent software systems are capable of making decisions and taking action autonomously in pursuit of a chosen goal. In a marketing context, they can evaluate data, uncover insight and make decisions on the most relevant, real-time experiences for each customer at scale. So while consumers can turn to agents to make their lives easier, customer engagement teams are increasingly turning to agents to make life easier as well.

BrazeAI Agent Consoleᵀᴹ is already making it possible for marketers to strengthen relationships between brands and consumers. Agent Console helps brands to stay on the cutting edge of personalization, leverage data for a human touch, and reduce friction for consumers.

The agentic revolution

It's hard to overstate how swift and transformative AI innovation has been over the past few years. Twenty years ago, telling someone that you were using artificial intelligence to find the best savings account for your financial needs would have gotten you laughed at; now, it's the preferred tool for millions of people around the world. (And that goes double for people who have refrigerators that can reorder groceries when they run low on staple items!)

AI agents and intermediaries are taking many forms for consumers, opening up new opportunities for seamless, streamlined experiences. A similar dynamic is playing out for marketers, too, as agents make it possible to uplevel customer experience marketing sophistication while also reducing the burden on customer engagement teams and marketing stakeholders. The ultimate dream is to be more human in your communications and more personalized across all your touchpoints with customers. Agent Console makes this possible, all while making your working life easier.

Improving personalized item recommendations

No consumer wants to see an email or text message with item recommendations that aren’t suited to their needs. If you’re exclusively a long-distance runner, and you get a text message recommending new swim trunks, it’s an indication that a brand doesn’t care to know you as a person. Worse, it signals to consumers that the brand in question isn’t willing to do the work, something that disincentivizes engagement and can lead to less invested users.

Agent Console can help to provide a human touch to your AI-driven messaging by bringing additional nuances into item recommendations. Current item recommendations give marketers the top products a customer is likely to convert on given their engagement and first-party data. Agent Console allows you to go one step deeper, applying custom filtering that can understand demographic information or better understand products within certain category affiliations. It’s a way to help further home in on what customers might be interested in.

Creating copy for every customer, on the fly

The right item recommendation goes a long way in treating consumers with the humanity they deserve. But even personalized products may miss the mark if the message that includes them feels generic. Thankfully, Agent Console helps marketers craft personalized copy that responds to each consumer’s unique tastes. Let’s say you know a customer’s favorite shopping category is running shoes, and they always buy medium-cushion running shoes. Agent Console can support creation of an agent capable of writing copy specific to that combination for that exact customer as they pass through a Canvas-powered user journey.

You can also use Agent Console to personalize cross-sell and upsell opportunities. An agent could analyze a purchase and the cross-sell opportunities that match the purchase. It could then write a short piece of copy for each upsell opportunity, so that the message being received is specific (and relevant) to the situation.

Orchestrating more dynamic journeys

SMS marketing has traditionally been a one-sided affair. Even if customers can reply to their favorite brands, marketers are often limited to simple rules when it comes to automated responses, with AI bots unable to respond when queries shift or change.

Agent Console makes it possible to create more personalized text messages with agents that can troubleshoot within SMS and help consumers get what they’re shopping for. The healthcare-focused consumer goods brand Aeroflow Health leveraged Agent Console to remove friction in their SMS “re-ordering” journey and ease the ordering process for new mothers looking for breastpumps that are covered by insurance.

Traditionally, Aeroflow sent a rules-based text asking if mothers wanted to reorder breastpumps of the same size. If they said “yes,” the order was automatically filled. If the answer was no, the journey got more complicated and often required customers to log on to another platform for them to finish the purchase.

Aeroflow leveraged Agent Console to make the journey more human. Their agent is designed to respond to feedback in natural language, consult the product catalog, then confirm and place the order, when appropriate. All within the company’s larger SMS journey.

Final thoughts

While marketers and consumers don't always see eye to eye, both groups stand to benefit when their interactions feel more human. Achieving that has been a major challenge for brands over the years, with traditional business rules and the proliferation of touchpoints complicating efforts to approach every customer as a unique individual. But Agent Console gives marketers tools that enable them to add more humanity to their campaigns, while still saving significant time and effort. By leaning into the power and flexibility that agents provide, brands can boost efficiency while also building stronger, more sustainable relationships with their customers.

To learn more about Agent Console, check out our documentation.