Urban Airship Expands its Mobile Platform to Transform Customer Communications
Industry-first platform services bring personalized, interactive notifications to any digital experience and every marketing channel
PORTLAND, Ore. — November 2, 2016 — Already sending more than one billion app notifications and collecting 10 billion user attributes every day, mobile growth company Urban Airship today unveiled next-generation platform services—Open Channels and Open Profiles—to deliver individualized messaging to any platform, device or marketing channel and use real-time customer data from any system. As the mobile platform shift accelerates from smartphones to homes, cars and virtual environments, traditional customer communication methods are becoming irrelevant. With today’s announcement, Urban Airship extends its role as the global leader in mobile engagement, making it easy for developers and marketers to coordinate lightweight, action-oriented notifications integrated into any experience along the customer journey.
The first actualization of Urban Airship’s open channels approach is third-party support for Apple News notifications. Apple News publishing partners can now use the visual message composer within Urban Airship Engage to create and deliver notifications to Apple News users that have opted in to their channel. As more than half of the top 30 global media owners already use Urban Airship for their own apps, the goal is to make it easier for publishers to grow channel engagement in Apple News using a familiar notification workflow.
Other new advancements include support for web notifications, delivery to users’ preferred and active channels and machine learning to predict app users likely to churn. Collectively, these capabilities enable businesses to reach more customers in more places at their moment of need, sustaining interactions and creating valuable feedback loops that drive growth.
“In the scramble for customer attention and loyalty, only firms delivering the best customer experiences will win … that means supporting all experiences relevant and personal—tailored individually for each customer and in real-time. The payoff of using all the data to do so is significant: higher revenues” (Forrester Research, Inc., Digital Insights Will Power Great Digital Experiences, 11/25/15).
With Urban Airship’s Open Channels, businesses no longer need to integrate their software with numerous messaging channels or build orchestration logic from scratch in order to reach customers with rich notification-style messaging on any platform or channel—from chat messaging services and email, to smart home devices and in-car information systems.
Urban Airship’s Open Profiles extends the company’s open mobile data strategy and further breaks down customer data silos, by collecting and processing real-time customer behavior, events and attributes from any system or channel. This data enriches user profiles for real-time automation and messaging orchestration, and is also available in Urban Airship Insight to analyze customer patterns across multi-device, multi-touchpoint journeys, or for real-time streaming through Urban Airship Connect to populate data warehouses and trigger user-level actions in other systems.
“Experts predict that the next 10 years will generate an order of magnitude more change than we have seen in the last 10 years,” relayed Brett Caine, CEO and president of Urban Airship. “With this velocity of change, a closed marketing cloud simply can't keep up with the pace of business and customer demands. We’re opening up our platform to address the growing complexity and expanding opportunity for businesses to individually interact with customers wherever they are. Customers will demand it, and our Mobile Growth Platform will help businesses achieve it.”
Combined, Open Channels and Open Profiles will unleash the ability to both learn and act on what customers care about most, capturing customer interactions in notification experiences everywhere in real-time. A few use cases include:
- Using point of sale data from physical stores to send receipts, warranty information and accessory upsells to users’ preferred channel.
- Infusing emails and messaging app interactions with rich notifications that proactively address users’ behaviors in other channels.
- Reminding users on their preferred or active channel of items left in shopping carts and wish lists, or coupons that are about to expire.
- Sending an in-car notification to alert homeowners they left the front door open or unlocked.
- Sending grocery shopping reminders to a refrigerator screen or delivering a more urgent message to active channels if power to the refrigerator goes out.
The Sacramento Kings are at the forefront of using this technology to revolutionize the fan experience across major league sports. Their new, state-of-the-art arena, Golden 1 Center, is the most technologically advanced arena in the world—fans attending Kings games or taking in a concert can use the Kings app to find a parking spot, use the most advanced cell phone technology to send a Snapchat, or control the temperature of their section through the team's app, among other features.
“Golden 1 Center delivers hyper-personalized, real-time information and customer service experiences through our revolutionary app,” said Ryan Montoya, Chief Technology Officer, Sacramento Kings. “We have built the world’s most advanced arena, and a huge part of that, is the instantaneous use of data from multiple platforms that make guests’ experiences truly exceptional.”
Availability
All of these services and solutions are available in beta this quarter with general availability in Q1. Businesses and technology partners interested in taking advantage of these new services can contact Urban Airship here.
About Urban Airship
Urban Airship is trusted by thousands of businesses looking to grow with mobile. Every day, marketers and developers depend on Urban Airship to deliver one billion mobile moments that inspire interest and drive action. Urban Airship’s mobile growth platform is used by many of the world’s most admired companies, including Adidas, Alaska Airlines, The Home Depot, NBC Universal, Sky Media and Zillow.
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