​​Symend enriches customer communications, stands up new regions in two weeks on Azure​

Championing empathetic and productive customer engagement 

Companies often face competing pressures as they navigate the balance among releasing new products, keeping up with industry trends, and meeting financial goals, all while developing meaningful customer relationships—especially amid a growing flood of digital communications. Symend was founded in 2016 with a mission to apply human understanding to customer engagement and to make customer relationships positive, personalized, and profitable for businesses and customers alike. “The holy grail of customer engagement is getting the right message to the right person at the right time on the right channel. If we help companies treat customers like individuals and engage with them in a more human way, we can drive better outcomes,” says Peh Keong Teh, President at Symend. “With that basic thesis, we set out to revolutionize digital customer engagement, taking advantage of behavioral science and AI to create our Conscious Engagement solution.”

For most customers, Symend’s Conscious Engagement solution addresses customer churn by aiming to boost customer retention and loyalty through meaningful digital communications. Finance, telecommunications, and utilities companies also use it when a customer is past due on payments. “Delinquency can be one of the last steps before customers actually turn over,” says Teh. “Symend’s Conscious Engagement solution makes a significant impact on customer retention, and our clients retain our solution because it helps build better, longer-lasting customer relationships.” Symend found that using a human-centric, behavior-informed approach can drive both sides to act and remediate delinquency in a much more empathetic and productive way. The customer avoids going to collections, which can negatively affect their life, and the client benefits from increased lifetime value of its customer and improved results.

Focused on building its intellectual property and a resilient underlying technology stack, Symend wanted to use best-of-breed technology to deliver maximum client value. Building its solution with Microsoft Azure offered the necessary speed and agility to help Symend position itself for longevity within the market. Design, implementation, testing, and deployment took place over a 16-month period, culminating in the recent general release of its Conscious Engagement technology built on Azure with multitenant microservices architecture. “We can do a lot of work in a fairly limited time frame to grow rapidly with Azure,” says Teh. “We can spin Azure services up or down as needed and optimize our cost structure, translating those benefits to our clients.”

Symend now uses Azure as the foundation for its cloud technology stack. It uses Azure Red Hat OpenShift for its service cluster, Azure SQL for its transactional database, Azure Databricks and Snowflake on Azure for its analytic services, Azure Key Vault for security, and many other services to deploy, operate, monitor, and maintain its platform. “We know very clearly that our value proposition to clients is in the customer engagement space, so we try to use all the innovation that Azure delivers and build our solution on top to drive value for our clients, rather than reinvent the wheel every single time,” says Teh.

Using Azure to meet clients and their unique use cases where they are

As it grows, Symend recognizes it would be almost impossible for its small teams to quickly deploy a datacenter for each new market. “As a born-in-the-cloud service, we’re able to delegate a lot of those tasks to the cloud services we use so that we can focus on the value we offer,” says Teh. “Using the services available in Azure, we’re able to rapidly scale alongside our clients, standing up an instance in any region in which Azure has a presence in less than two weeks. From there, we can start serving our clients with data residency and privacy requirements that we couldn’t otherwise serve from outside the region without rearchitecting our entire stack.”

In its previous single-tenant environment, Symend would stand up new instances for every client it onboarded. Its goal for the upgraded multitenant environment was to reduce the effort of onboarding new clients by simply adding another tenant to the same deployment. For further efficiency, Symend built a microservice-architecture model to deliver faster functionality with Azure services. The platform was built so that Symend can easily layer new use cases onto the existing platform. “We started with the delinquency use cases and are able to easily add pre-delinquency use cases or retention programs initiated by the client onto the platform without needing to rewrite any of the software,” says Teh. “Everything is configuration-driven rather than hard-coded into the system.”

Unlike many other customer engagement strategies, Symend differentiates itself with a strategy informed by both customer interactions and non-interactions, such as when a customer might click through to a link in an email but not take further action. This requires massive analytics horsepower, which is why Symend uses Snowflake on Azure and Azure Databricks to process large streams of customer information, including interaction events, emails, text messages, landing pages, and other customer communications that each client provides. This data is then layered on top of strategic engagement models and playbooks, and clients can sign in to the Symend portal to analyze the outcome in near real time and start crafting behavior-informed digital messaging.

Symend has brought in additional Azure AI services as it has grown, including generative AI in Azure Machine Learning to build next-level models and accelerate reaction time. Clients can use generative AI in Azure to rapidly iterate on potential strategy adjustments to drive better outcomes based on what has worked in the past. “We want to curate and optimize customer engagement as customers become much more sophisticated and demanding, and we want to give them much more personalized engagement than the zombie campaigns and preset journeys they’re used to,” says Teh. “When we looked into doing a generative AI component on our product, we looked at a few providers but decided that Azure best fit our needs, so we connected and expanded our entire technology footprint within Azure.”

Putting behavioral engagement technology into action

For clients such as telecommunications companies that have offerings with a lot of commoditization, customer acquisition costs are significantly higher. Therefore, customer churn rate and retention are a significant focal point for these companies to help ensure they can keep the customers that they have worked diligently to acquire. TELUS, one of Canada’s largest telecommunications providers, adopted Symend’s Conscious Engagement approach, championing self-agency and empathy to achieve a fivefold click-through rate increase on client communications, along with a 45-percent reduction in calls to the company’s call center as it kept customers connected during COVID-19. The companies also worked together to develop a flexible payment plan aligned with TELUS’ customer-centric approach, helping ease client anxiety and boost long-term loyalty.

Similar success stories have helped expand Symend’s customer base, to include additional leading North American telcos and countless others across multiple industries. “We no longer see technology as a limiting factor to our growth,” says Teh. “Our platform architecture built on Azure services is designed to allow the business to grow unconstrained.”

With its number of customers increasing, so is the scale of its data, which introduces its own set of security considerations. In the customer engagement space, protecting personal data is extremely critical, and financial institutions and telcos have stringent requirements for their technology partners. “The fact that Azure is ISO/IEC certified gives us the peace of mind about security to grow and onboard clients to our platform,” says Teh. “Tools like Microsoft Defender for Cloud give us a single-pane-of-glass view into the technology stack that helps us check that our services are more secure within the Azure environment.”

Pushing the envelope with new services and experiences

Symend’s innovative approach to customer engagement proves that with purposeful, empathetic messaging, companies can inspire positive experiences and reduce losses. With its core infrastructure in place and safeguarded, Symend is now working on applying Azure AI services to new business cases and recently started testing Copilot for Microsoft 365 for its development teams. “A solid Azure infrastructure handles a lot of the heavy lift, which empowers us to invest and focus on building greater value and serving our clients,” says Teh. “I would say 60-percent of the problems that I used to be concerned about have gone away because Azure provides a platform for us to push the envelope on delivering value.”

Find out more about Symend on Facebook and LinkedIn.