A conversation with the Salam digital and media teams, exploring what a strong customer engagement fit looks like for you.
Where we left off
A short summary of what we covered with the digital and media teams, before we go a level deeper.
Salam is converging its mobile and home apps into a single experience, and is looking at the engagement platform to power it at scale.
Braze is one of three on the table. An open question remains: a separate CDP and CEP, or one platform that covers both.
It is still a crawl stage with an open canvas. The aim now is simply to understand the art of the possible together.
In that spirit, this walkthrough looks at both sides of the customer lifecycle, so you can see where Braze might fit across your teams.
Who we are
A customer engagement platform built for brands that want to reach people in the moment, across every channel, from one place.
Run their customer engagement on Braze, from telcos to retail, media and QSR.
Built from the ground up to act on live behaviour, not yesterday's batch exports.
A local team based in Dubai, in Saudi most weeks, supporting brands across the region.
Braze sits between your data and your customers. It pulls together what you already know about each person into one live profile, decides what should happen next, and delivers it across the channels people actually use. The result is engagement that feels timely and relevant, rather than generic and late.
What Braze does
Braze sits on top of what you already have. Three things work together: a single view of the customer, an engine that decides what happens next, and AI that makes it personal.
Behavioural, transactional and profile data stitched into one source of truth, including anonymous and guest users on the new app.
Canvas builds multi-step journeys that react to each user in the moment, across every channel.
BrazeAI predicts churn and intent, recommends content and timing, and personalises every send.
Where Braze fits in your stack
Your in-house data warehouse stays in place. Braze layers on top to unify and act on it.
An SDK on the converged app, plus API feeds from your warehouse and other systems.
Every signal resolves to a single customer profile, known and anonymous.
Real-time segments and journeys push messages across owned and paid channels.
Problems we help solve
Braze describes its work in terms of the customer lifecycle: helping brands acquire, onboard, engage and retain. The same four problems map cleanly onto a converged telco app.
"Paid media is expensive, and a lot of sign-ups never finish."
Braze converts more of the people you already reach by personalising the journey from the first touch, engaging anonymous and guest users, and syncing first-party audiences back to paid media so spend goes to higher-intent people.
Grubhub used Braze to lift sign-ups 188% with an 836% ROI on the campaign.
"People download the app but never reach the moment that makes them stay."
Guided onboarding flows and activation journeys get new customers to first value quickly, with multi-step paths that adapt to what each person does, rather than a single generic welcome.
Wealthsimple drove a 40% increase in quarterly net deposits with an incentive-led activation campaign.
"We batch-send the same message to everyone, long after the moment has passed."
Real-time segmentation and BrazeAI act on live behaviour, so the next message reflects what a customer just did. Cross-channel orchestration keeps it consistent across push, WhatsApp, SMS, email and in-app.
8fit used BrazeAI to target by purchase likelihood and grew conversions 3.75x.
"By the time we see someone has left, it is too late and too costly to win them back."
Tracking behaviour across the full lifecycle surfaces early signs of disengagement, so you can act before a customer leaves. Predictive churn scoring and automated win-back journeys protect the base you already paid to acquire.
Retaining existing customers is far more cost-effective than constantly replacing lost ones.
Lifecycle framing and customer results drawn from Braze's own solutions pages and case studies (Grubhub, Wealthsimple, 8fit) on braze.com.
Reach customers everywhere
Two jobs to be done. First, acquire new customers by converting unknown visitors into paying ones. Then, retain and grow them across every channel. Here is what each looks like in practice.
In-app messages and content cards that move people through the funnel, from an anonymous visitor, to a known lead, to a paying customer.
A visitor browses the app or site without logging in. Braze recognises the anonymous profile, sees what they looked at, and uses the moment to capture an identity, an email, a number, or a sign-up, so the relationship can continue.
Now Salam knows who they are but they have not bought yet, or they are on a free or prepaid footing. Braze uses what it knows about them to make the right paid offer at the right moment and remove friction from checkout.
Once someone is a paying customer, Braze orchestrates every channel from one place, and syncs audiences back to Starcom and ad platforms for win-back. Here is what each one looks like in practice.
Better targeting that turns interest into sign-ups, and brings back the people who almost converted.
Build first-party audiences from real behaviour and sync them to paid media for higher-quality acquisition.
Engage anonymous and not-logged-in users on the app, then convert them into known customers.
Win back users who dropped out of sign-up or checkout with timely, automated nudges.
Promote new mobile plans, fiber and value-added services at the right moment in the flow.
A visitor starts a mobile plan sign-up in the app but leaves before paying.
Braze waits an hour, then checks whether they came back on their own.
If not, a push reminds them their plan is waiting, with a one-tap return link.
Still no action after a day? An email offers help and answers common questions.
If they convert at any step, the journey stops automatically. More completed sign-ups, no wasted messages.
A prepaid customer tops up regularly and uses steady monthly data, a strong postpaid fit.
A push or in-app message shows how a postpaid plan would cost them less for the data they already use.
A WhatsApp flow lets them compare plans and switch in a few taps, no store visit.
On switching, a welcome journey sets up autopay and explains their new plan benefits.
Targets only prepaid users whose behaviour fits postpaid. Higher ARPU and a longer-term, lower-churn customer.
Retention driven by live behaviour, so you act before customers drift, not after they have gone.
BrazeAI flags churn behaviour early, so you can re-engage before a customer leaves.
Automate plan renewals, device upgrades and top-up reminders across channels.
Roaming offers, usage alerts and milestone messages based on real-time behaviour.
Tiered journeys that reward and re-engage your highest-value customers.
Usage drops and BrazeAI scores the customer as high churn risk.
A WhatsApp message checks in and surfaces a plan better suited to their usage.
If they engage, an in-app offer rewards them for staying, such as bonus data.
If they stay quiet, the segment syncs to paid media and to the retention team.
Each customer only gets the next step if the previous one did not land. Lower churn, spend focused where it counts.
A loyal postpaid customer is identified as a household with no Salam home fibre yet.
An in-app message offers a mobile-plus-fibre bundle at a loyalty price, with their address pre-checked for coverage.
A WhatsApp flow handles install timing and questions, and books a slot if they are interested.
After install, an onboarding journey activates the home app features and confirms the bundle saving.
Only offered where coverage and fit are confirmed. Two products per household, far stickier than mobile alone.
Who we work with
A large telco footprint globally, and growing roots across the region.
Beyond telco
Proof in telco
Not generic case studies. Two telcos solving the same problems Salam is weighing, with outcomes to match.
Braze since 2021
A sprawling martech stack of 21 separate tools created data lags and constant friction between teams, with no single view of the customer. Campaigns were slow to build and went out to broad mass audiences rather than the right people at the right moment, so spend was high and relevance was low. Sound familiar for a business pulling two apps and two customer bases into one.
A fast-moving market meant offers and pricing changed constantly, and manual A/B testing simply could not keep pace. Reaching every customer with the most relevant offer at that speed was humanly impossible to do by hand, and the traditional ML models they had tried were not moving the numbers. The team needed personalisation and decisioning that ran automatically, at scale, across millions of customers.
Source: Braze customer case studies for Virgin Media O2 and Liberty Latin America. Liberty also reports millions of dollars in customer lifetime value from this work.
Platform overview
A quick tour of how Braze fits together, from the single customer profile through to reporting on what worked.
One live view of each customer, stitched from every source and signal.
Group customers by real-time behaviour, attributes and predicted intent.
Build multi-step, multi-channel flows in Canvas that react as people act.
Deliver across push, in-app, WhatsApp, SMS, email and paid media.
See what drove conversions and retention, then feed it back into the next journey.
The business case
Braze does not control how many people land on your site or app. What it does control is how many of them become known, and how many of those go on to pay. Put your own numbers in below and see the upside.
People who reach you but have not shared any contact detail. Split by where they arrive.
People who have shared a mobile number or email, but have not paid yet.
Known users who converted into a paid line or plan.
First-year revenue from one new paying customer. We use first-year value, not lifetime, to keep this an acquisition number and avoid double-counting with the retention team.
Braze lifts the two conversion rates it can influence: anonymous→known and known→paid. Three scenarios, grounded in Braze benchmark data.
Uplift is applied to the conversion rates, across conservative, moderate and optimistic tiers, reflecting the lift Braze sees when anonymous users get a first-month in-browser or in-app prompt and known users are nudged across multiple channels. Figures are directional, for discussion.
Get a one-page PDF with this funnel, your inputs and all three scenarios. It opens a ready-to-send email with the PDF attached.
Churn reduction, ARPU growth and lifetime-value modelling for your existing base.
Where we go next
No pressure on timing. The goal is simply to give you what you need to judge whether Braze is the right fit.
Whenever it suits, we come to Riyadh to get the wider group together in one place.
A working session on your highest-value use cases with our solutions lead.
Templates and best-practice telco use cases to help shape your RFP, if and when you build one.