Check-in. Connect. Share. That's the tagline of Plain Sight, a new networking community that launched five months prior to the global COVID-19 pandemic with a mission of helping its users facilitate in-person networking. Now that it's harder to get together in physical spaces, the platform has shifted its focus to helping people make connections in virtual spaces.

Of course, it's hard to help users connect with the right people without access to reliable customer data. And it's even harder to deliver these kinds of tailored recommendations without the tools in place to truly understand (and act upon) customer preferences and get personalization right.

Getting to Know—and Serve—the Customer Better with Braze

Plain Sight was able to get started with Braze through Tech for Black Founders, an initiative launched to help even the playing field for Black founders by making key growth stack marketing technology platforms—such as Braze and our technology partners—available for free.

Prior to teaming up with Braze, Plain Sight sent all of its messaging through a platform that wasn't intuitive and didn't allow the social app to get to know its customers. After getting fully onboarded and launched with Braze in just three months, Plain Sight is now able to take its customer engagement to the next level by:

• Learning about its customers' messaging preferences, including the kinds of content they want (and, just as importantly, the kinds they don't like) and using these learnings to iterate and drive product development decision-making

• Engaging with customers more often in deeper, more meaningful ways

• Delivering cross-channel customer engagement, leveraging email and push notifications

• Offering better customer experiences, such as being able to show users a history of their individual account notifications—updated instantly as new push notifications or emails are received—at the personal level using Braze's webhook support

• Guiding smooth transitions between receiving a message and opening the app by leveraging the Braze platform's rate-limiting capabilities

• Ensuring security best practices through the Braze API, Braze IP allowlisting and SSL support, and combining two dynamic Braze features, Content Blocks and Liquid templating, to revoke access to webhooks immediately in the event that a credential becomes compromised

• Offering best-in-class engagement across iOS and Android using the Braze SDKs for both platforms

“Braze has been great so far and everyone at Braze that we work with has been extremely helpful at every step. There's almost an overwhelming amount you can do with such a powerful tool, but Learning at Braze (LAB)—and conversations with the Braze team—has helped guide our focus to what's going to matter most for us," says Alexis Matteson, Chief Product Officer at Plain Sight, whose focus is on supporting the community and ensuring the product caters directly to its users.

What's Next?

Plain Sight has its eyes on one key customer engagement KPI: Retention. Their objective when it comes to adopting these new approaches is to be able to deliver one-to-one tailored messaging and reduce churn.

"We hope to give our users the sense that we understand their unique goals in using our platform," adds Matteson. "With that, we can nudge them to take actions that are aligned with their own individual interests.”

Find out for yourself how to deliver personalized experiences to build your brand's community with our guide, The Power Behind the Message: The Nuts and Bolts of Effective Personalization. Plus, check out how other innovative companies are delivering seamless customer experiences with Braze by reading more of our customer case studies.