In general, brands across industries turn to solutions partners when they need help selecting, evaluating, and pairing the best strategy and tech to support their customer engagement programs. What that entails in practice varies based on the type of consultancy or agency and the type of company they're helping, from startups to major corporations.

Our Braze Alloys Solutions Partners offer services in three key areas:

• Engineering support: Helping clients implement and integrate Braze and other platforms within their tech stacks

• Marketing support: Offering high-level strategy as well as day-to-day marketing campaign management

• Full-service support: Providing both technical engineering services and marketing campaign support

David Sealey, Director of Strategy and Growth at CACI, spoke with Braze to share CACI's customer engagement philosophy, detailing how the company helps clients design the ideal customer journey, as well as explaining the most common customer engagement and martech challenges CACI helps its clients address.

CACI's Customer Engagement Philosophy: Designing the Ideal Customer Journey

While many brands may be able to pinpoint opportunities to improve the customer journey, executing on that vision is often a challenge. That's where CACI helps—by pairing leading customer engagement strategies with leading customer engagement technologies. And they do so by putting their customers first.

"We assess martech providers based on the experience our clients want to deliver and the needs of their marketing users," said Sealey. "Based on our industry knowledge and experience we can quickly recommend best of breed martech solutions." He explained that “before recommending any martech stack, CACI always works with our clients to understand the experience that the brand wants to create and what existing technology is already in place. This enables our recommendations to be bespoke to each situation."

For example, for clients looking to improve personalization offerings, the company often recommends a combination of Braze, Tealium, and Snowflake paired with CACI’s expertise in customer data management and martech integrations.

Key Customer Engagement Challenges CACI Helps Brands Solve

CACI's core framework is built to help clients adopt and utilize tools designed to support best-in-class customer engagement. By addressing the following common challenges that many companies struggle with, brands can drive more revenue and growth.

1. Gaining an understanding of who customers are

"CACI’s clients want to understand who their customers are, what motivates them, and how they think," explained Sealey. "They want to then use data to create acquisition, conversion, and engagement strategies that work."

2. Creating a martech ecosystem centered on the needs of the customer

That means designing and implementing solutions that support the kinds of customer experiences customers expect and want, explained Sealey.

Because achieving a 360-degree customer view is essential for marketing personalization, CACI works with their clients to map out their data ecosystems to identify how their systems and data repositories work together to create customer experiences. "By creating a customer-centred architecture, we can identify how to maximise the value of data by improving its collection, storage and use," he added.

3. Overcoming technical barriers to drive greater engagement

"The marketing ecosystem should enable the business to accelerate customer acquisition and conversion," he told us. "It should also support the brand in engaging and retaining customers."

Sealey explained that clients often ask for help optimizing their martech stacks to achieve greater growth. CACI works with clients to achieve this objective by overcoming common issues such as:

• Slow or incomplete data flows

• Poor tech implementations

• Other gaps and latency issues that lead to poor marketing and poor experiences

By taking the time to fix these sorts of nagging issues, brands aren’t just cleaning up their customer engagement program, Sealey told us—they’re taking steps that can help bolster sales and profitability,.

4. Maximizing the ROI of the martech ecosystem

"This requires both the selection and implementation of good martech as well as the optimization of existing technology and integrations," said Sealey. In many cases, adopting new technology allows brands to take full advantage of flexible interfaces and pre-built connections that save time and money. "New technology may offer greater efficiencies for marketing teams, therefore freeing people up to work on more important projects," he added.

5. Implementing data-driven strategies

To take guesswork and personal biases out of marketing, CACI works to set clients' martech ecosystems up to collect data that's available for reporting, insights, and decision-making, so marketers can optimize customer experiences and deliver better outcomes for both customers and business objectives.

Meet Your Solutions Partner

In 2019, we expanded Braze Alloys to include solutions partners, making it possible for us to help pair clients in need of support with trusted, Braze-savvy advisors. Since then, we've also launched our Solutions Partners Certification Program, in which we assess and verify our solutions partners’ Braze expertise, offering up our Braze stamp of approval, so that the brands we work with can have the confidence that they’re teaming up with confirmed experts in the field who will help them upgrade their customer engagement practice.

Looking to build out or improve your stack to better support your customer engagement efforts? Visit our Braze Alloys Solutions Partners Hub to meet your solutions partner who can help.