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And then there were three. Twilio argued customer engagement is stalled because AI hasn’t closed the trust gap. Sinch said the problem is that disconnected systems sabotage your customer conversations. Now Braze adds a third perspective—we rarely understand the human at the end of the phone.
Also the publisher of the Humanity in Action report, Braze calls for understanding the user’s digital body language and understanding the human behind the visitor. We must read the signals, use the data, and shape the experience to convert aloof anonymity into deep trust. It’s a call for empathy at scale.
The Marketer’s Quiet Stress
Eighty-five percent of marketing execs say they’re concerned their messages aren’t hitting home. Over half say they’re very concerned. This buttresses Twilio’s demand for meaningful AI and Sinch’s integration thesis. There’s execution anxiety around merging content, channels, and timing in a way that actually works.
Twilio reported even worse results.
If Braze surfaces the internal anxiety, Twilio confirms the external gap. One is fear. The other is fallout. Together, they reinforce the same signal: The brands are off, and customers feel it.
Braze shifts the conversation by asking three self-assessment questions:
- Can you merge content with technology to connect?
- Can you shift from volume to relevance?
- Are you building emotional connections?
Trust, Again
Like Twilio and Sinch, Braze makes trust a core theme but ties it more directly to data transparency. Personalization relies on private data, and 99% of marketers are afraid of getting it wrong. That fear holds them back from implementing what they know customers actually want.
The caution is justified. It’s easy to skid from “You get me!” into “Are you stalking me?” Braze recommends using in-product messaging to surface data usage and get consent in real time. That kind of clarity lets marketers move forward instead of freezing up.
Sidebar: The Fight for Your Data
Over the last few years, third-party cookies—the hidden trackers that followed you across websites—have been steadily blocked by browser updates, government regulations, and rising consumer awareness. Apple’s Safari and Firefox led the charge; Google is now phasing them out in Chrome.
Given the world has declared war on third-party cookies, the marketer’s challenge in personalization is to either get customers to give you data in return for something (first-party data) or use what they’ve already given you just by using your platform (zero-party data). Giving someone a coupon in return for their email? That’s first party. Noticing which product pages they ignore or return to? That’s zero party.
This is an awareness shift. The customers know their data is gold and are not OK with permissionless mining. You have to earn it and be upfront about what you’re going to do with it.
RCS Is Getting Real
All three reports point to the same thing: RCS is showing up in real campaigns, in significant industries, and in actual budgets.
Think of it this way: If SMS was a short, functional, plain postcard, RCS is the branded flyer you stop and read. It’s got visuals, buttons, maybe even a QR code. And you know who it’s from the second it lands. You’re stepping into a conversation that feels legitimate, useful, and alive. These reports confirm it’s already happening.
Twilio says 75% of business leaders plan to invest in RCS this year, and that jumps to 85% in Latin America. Sinch found similar signals. Nearly 60% of leaders see RCS as game-changing, with the highest optimism coming from tech, healthcare, and financial services.
Braze says interest is rising, especially after Apple’s RCS announcement, though SMS is still more widely used for now.
The use cases are wide and important:
- For abandoned cart reminders, 54% of consumers preferred RCS messages with branding and call-to-action buttons.
- For healthcare appointments, 41% picked the version that let them confirm or reschedule directly.
- For account verification, 59% said RCS felt like the better format.
- Retail is catching up too. In Sinch’s data, 76% of consumers said they’d be open to doing returns or exchanges through RCS, and that number hits 90% for Gen Z and millennials.
RCS may not be everywhere yet, but it’s no longer waiting for one killer use case. In fact, it has several.
The Crawl, Walk, Run of Customer Engagement
Braze breaks brand maturity into three levels: Activate, Accelerate, and Ace. Think of it as the crawl, walk, run of customer engagement.
- Activate (or crawl): You’re running basic campaigns, maybe across one or two channels. Teams aren’t really talking to each other, experiments are one-off, and personalization is name-in-the-subject-line level. It’s a start, but barely.
- Accelerate (or walk): Collaboration starts happening across teams, experiments run continuously, and metrics start getting deeper. You move from open rates to lifetime value. Data is better connected, orchestration moves beyond single-channel, and personalization starts to factor in behavior and context. You are still campaign driven, but with some muscle.
- Ace (or run): These are the brands with teams, tools, and decisions running on real-time data. They personalize in the moment, segment on the fly, and adapt campaigns in real time. In these organizations, AI predicts churn, auto-generates images and aligns marketing with product and strategy. Not perfect, but intentional, fast, and customer first.
If Activate is “send something,” then Accelerate is “send smarter” and Ace is “respond quickly and attentively.”
According to all three reports, most companies think they’re running, but in reality many are crawling in fancy shoes. Braze’s framework helps call that out. You can’t fix what you won’t name.
Finally
The more complex the problem, the stronger the pull to anchor on one solution and succumb to the tyranny of “just one thing.” Customer engagement is never just one thing. It’s not just about messaging. Not just personalization. Not just platforms or timing or AI. It’s all of it working together.
It is a layered problem.
Sinch reminds us that if your systems don’t talk to each other, your engagement feels awkward. Twilio points out that without the right data model, even well-timed messages fall flat. Braze shows that even with the right stack and signals, it doesn’t matter if the human at the end doesn’t feel understood.
You win by understanding the layers and knowing which one you’re standing on.
You win when you realize that the one thing about the one thing is never just the one thing.