Blip adopts Azure OpenAI Service, migrates to .NET 8 for superior customer experience

Technological advances are producing opportunities to engage with brands faster and more directly, and customers are becoming increasingly sophisticated. There’s a willingness to explore new offerings earlier, and as digital becomes the default for sales and services, the demand for a customized experience continues to rise. Although Blip was prepared for this shift, the company needed the right technology to achieve its forward-thinking goals. 

“Today’s customers are looking for personalized interactions. We help brands know their customers better and make every contact meaningful, which builds customer trust and brand loyalty in a competitive market,” says Roberto Oliveira, CEO at Blip.

With 25 years in the market, Blip is the conversational solution that connects consumers to brands in a hyper-segmented and hyper-personalized way across different channels. The company has expanded to serve brands in more than 32 countries. To maintain its competitive edge, Blip recognized the need to harness its data, accelerate the development and deployment of new features, ensure scalability, and uphold stringent security measures.

Breno Queiroz, Director of Engineering at Blip, says, “To gain a deeper understanding of customer preferences, behaviors, and needs, we had to access the right data and continue delivering exceptional digital experiences.”

AI-powered customer personalization built on .NET

Blip is an AI-first company and has a strong relationship with Microsoft due to the latter’s longstanding leadership in AI. So, to help drive strategy and deliver scalability, Blip chose solutions that included Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, .NET, and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). 

Microsoft has helped Blip achieve an increasingly efficient global scale. “We’re using Azure to scale and best serve our clients, from marketing to customer care, in industries from food to real estate,” says Oliveira.

With a microservices-based architecture hosted on Azure, which comprises its messaging, storage, processing, and AI capabilities, users can connect through multiple channels, including external messaging apps. Azure OpenAI helps to improve the customer experience by suggesting personalized responses based on each individual’s conversation history.

With Azure DevOps, Blip is automating workflows and increasing developer productivity. In addition, the Azure Security Center and other tools offer more secure coding practices and reinforce security best practices. This comprehensive approach to security helps protect Blip’s applications and data. 

“We’re using Azure DevOps to improve our development and deployment timelines in a highly secure environment to deliver consistent performance even during traffic peaks,” adds William Colen, Director of AI at Blip.

Expanding existing technology investments 

For development, Blip had begun its .NET journey with early versions of .NET Framework, laying a foundation for building reliable components in C#. But as containerization and cloud-native practices gained momentum, Blip saw an increasing need to deliver its services more efficiently, which led to its first major migration from .NET Framework to .NET Core, providing cross-platform compatibility and the flexibility required for Kubernetes.

Blip later started migrating to .NET 8 to realize the latest performance optimizations, such as enhanced CPU usage, improved garbage collector (GC) management, and memory allocation optimizations.

“We rely on .NET to achieve high performance and security. We’re developing cloud-native and AI-powered apps, ensuring our solutions are robust and scalable,” Queiroz explains.

Blip is embracing the comprehensive ecosystem offered by .NET, which aligns with the company’s growth goals and the demands of the evolving digital landscape. Blip is now developing a large part of its platform components in C#, providing a scalable and future-proof solution that not only improves system robustness but also opens new opportunities to innovate its products and services. 

Optimizing further to maximize efficiency

Blip can autoscale its resources to meet traffic increases, ensuring consistent performance even during peak times. This scalability is crucial for maintaining a seamless customer experience, regardless of the volume of traffic.

Colen says, “.NET provides support across the platform, and its use with Azure gives us the flexibility to allocate resources on demand.” 

.NET brought significant improvements to platform stability, scalability, and the user experience. In addition, the Azure platform made interactions more efficient for companies that communicate with thousands of customers daily. The combined implementation was a game changer for Blip.

Sérgio Passos, CTO at Blip, notes, “We leverage AI to personalize brand–customer conversations, ensuring more meaningful interactions. By gaining deeper insights into consumer behavior, we empower brands to craft targeted marketing campaigns and innovative strategies driven by data.”

In addition, the improvements that Blip saw directly translated to its customers too.

“The challenge lies in bringing together vast amounts of data from multiple sources, ensuring our platform can scale as brands do, providing an exceptional experience. As one example, we created a copilot for one of our finance customers, giving its customer service agents suggested answers during customer conversations. The agents using the tool completed twice as many loans as the control group,” says Colen.

Realizing impact as the AI journey continues

By adopting Azure, Blip has modernized its architecture to process more than 1 billion messages each month, totaling more than 80 billion to date. The solution Blip built goes far beyond a typical chatbot offering, providing valuable contact intelligence that enhances sales, customer care, and engagement. Blip is also continuing to innovate at an even faster pace to meet and get ahead of customer needs.

Passos explains, “We are seeing a dramatic change in customer behavior, and we understand the way people want to communicate with brands, moving from voice to mobile app to text. With our first copilot for service agents, we saw around a 20% to 30% acceptance rate for AI suggestions. Now, there’s an 80% acceptance rate.” 

Blip’s collaboration with Microsoft has been critical in turning the company’s ideas into reality. By embracing the power of Azure, Blip has enhanced its operational efficiency, delivering high-performance, secure, and scalable applications that meet the needs of its customers and future-proof its business.

“Azure has been instrumental to our success. From on-demand resources to advanced AI models, we’re transforming customer experiences, with true contact intelligence. By harnessing our data with advanced solutions, we’re shaping the future of brand communication,” concludes Oliveira.

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