For companies with big ideas about customer engagement in need of extra resources to make those dreams a reality, there's an answer. And that answer is teaming up with a solutions partner like Phiture, a Braze Alloys solutions partner and mobile growth consultancy that works with the teams behind leading apps.

Companies of all sizes, from startups to enterprises, collaborate with solutions partners on a range of needs, including selecting and optimizing tech stacks made up of cloud platform technologies—like Braze and our technology partners—to support their customer engagement programs. Braze Alloys solutions partners program members offer support services across engineering, marketing, and full-service (both technical engineering services and marketing campaign support) offerings.

For more about what it's like working with a solutions partner, Andy Carvell, Cofounder and Partner at Phiture, spoke with Braze to share his company's customer engagement philosophy, the top customer engagement challenges his clients are facing, and how he helps them tackle these issues effectively.

Phiture's Customer Engagement Philosophy

Deeply embedded in the growth community, Phiture has created several mobile-growth and app-focused frameworks, operates industry blogs (including the Mobile Growth Stack and ASO Stack blogs), has its team members regularly speak at conferences, hosts its own conference, runs an industry Slack channel, and is an active member of communities like Braze Bonfire—all with the goal of developing and sharing leading industry expertise.

"There are so many technical solutions out there, as well as great teams driving innovative use cases with them and also everyone is learning in this fast-moving space all the time," said Carvell. "From the early days, we’ve been keen to contribute by sharing what we know and how we approach key growth topics."

Beyond being active thought leaders, Phiture's core philosophy comes down to solving client needs with solutions and strategies tailor-fit to each company.

"We definitely have some go-to platforms that we know can do a good job in a wide variety of situations, and Braze is definitely one of these, but we also acknowledge that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, so we help our clients to navigate the tech space and understand the capabilities they need to drive the use cases that are important to them," he added.

Key Customer Engagement Challenges Phiture Helps Brands Solve

With customer engagement, some of the greatest challenges lie within the systems, processes, and team workflows operating behind the scenes. And that's where Phiture comes in—to help calibrate and optimize the whole machinery.

1. Overcoming team silos, stakeholder alignment problems, and issues with legacy tech systems.

Phiture Cofounders Carvell and Moritz Daan previously served on the growth team at SoundCloud and Phiture has partnered with digital-first companies like Headspace and Skyscanner. Those experiences have led Phiture to branch out to helping enterprise customers work through team silos, getting stakeholders aligned on priorities, and dealing with challenges associated with legacy systems.

Phiture's onboarding process includes a pre-kickoff questionnaire that's used to align stakeholders on the client's approach, business goals, tools, and processes.

"We capture all of this information and then run through it with all of the key stakeholders in the kickoff with every new client," explained Carvell. "We also conduct separate deep-dive calls with the relevant teams and stakeholders for CRM, analytics, and sometimes design and product, too."

2. Helping clients adopt a data-driven, growth mindset.

Phiture works to educate clients on topics like the importance of experimentation, embracing growth strategies, aligning tactics to top customer engagement KPIs, and how to build a tech ecosystem to best support key customer outcomes.

3. Auditing martech stacks, troubleshooting customer experience issues.

Phiture helps clients address big picture issues within the martech stack, like data latency and channel silos, as well as the nitty-gritty details.

"We also do a bunch of low-level practical stuff that’s not very sexy but hugely important: Checking deeplinks, identifying gaps and inconsistencies in event and attribute tracking, and documenting analytics taxonomies that nobody in the organization has a full understanding or overview of," explained Carvell. "Our team has a ton of experience and a great process in doing this for teams that struggle to document their own systems properly, or just don’t know where to start with auditing their current setup."

4. Helping clients evolve their martech stacks and enabling change management.

Whether brands want to add a new channel—such as in-app messaging—not available with their current martech stacks, improve their segmentation capabilities, or increase personalization, Phiture works with teams to get the right infrastructure and tools in place.

Customer engagement teams looking to make these kinds of upgrades may face some resistance internally particularly related to sunk costs associated with legacy tools and in-house solutions, and Phiture helps with these challenges as well. "We try to cut through that by focusing on the capabilities that would be possible with an upgraded tech stack," Carvell added.

In addition the company provides workshops on mobile growth best practices, in-depth training on mobile growth, and demonstrations of how to use new solutions.

5. Aligning customers' tech with their customer engagement goals.

"Braze and other enabling tech provides the cornerstone for our clients’ teams to do great work," said Carvell. "There’s nothing more fulfilling than seeing a client leveraging the awesome capabilities of a solution like Braze and driving amazing results with it," he added.

Find a Solutions Partner to Support Your Customer Engagement and Optimize Your Martech Stack

We created the Braze Alloys Solutions Partners Program two years ago to help connect our cusomters in need of support with our trusted solutions partners. To further our seal of endorsement for these leading consultancies and agencies, we have since launched a Solutions Partners Certification Program to assess and verify our solutions partners’ Braze expertise. That way the brands we collaborate with can know they’re partnering up with credentialed customer engagement experts.

If you want to upgrade and optimize to further your customer engagement efforts, check out our Braze Alloys Solutions Partners Hub to meet solutions partners who are ready to help.