Segment Announces Functions, Allowing Companies to Build Custom Data Integrations in Minutes, Without Worrying About Infrastructure

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., Sept. 25, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Segment Synapse – Segment, the customer data infrastructure company, today announced Functions, a new capability that allows Segment customers to create new, custom data integrations in minutes. The announcement was made at Synapse, the company’s annual user conference. Functions eliminates the need to run any additional infrastructure for custom integrations. This allows businesses to use any marketing, business or analytics tool they need to grow their business and deliver innovative products and customer experiences based on high quality data.

In the digital age, putting customers first means collecting data from all the places where a company interacts with its customers and routing it to the tools and business units where it is needed.

Segment’s Customer Data Infrastructure (CDI) simplifies this process, enabling companies to collect, standardize and activate their first-party customer data without engineering complexities. Companies are able to use their data in over 300 best-in-class sources and destinations, including analytics, data warehouses, A/B testing, live chat, customer success tools and more.

Building on Segment with Custom Sources and Destinations

Segment Functions now provides customers with the possibility of building an infinite number of integrations. With just a few lines of code, a company can integrate its first-party customer data with any homegrown tool or external service needed to run a business, beyond the 300+ currently offered out-of-the-box sources and destinations in the Segment catalog. They can also customize existing integrations to fit their specific needs.

Functions gives unprecedented flexibility for businesses, allowing a company to turn any idea into immediate action within minutes.

For example, an e-commerce company may want to quickly understand the impact of shipping failures on customer lifetime value (CLV). This means the company must integrate its shipping data with its first-party customer data. Normally, if this integration did not exist in the Segment catalog, a team of engineers would need to build it manually, which can take anywhere from 6 to 15 weeks (in addition to constant maintenance).

With Functions, an engineer can now use Segment’s simple interface to integrate the shipping provider and its data with Segment, only needing to input just a few lines of code. This would immediately unlock new analytics and marketing campaign use cases: for instance, the company could quickly trigger a coupon campaign for customers who have recently experienced late shipments.

Flexibility for Fast-Growing Companies

In addition to providing businesses with the flexibility to customize their marketing and analytics stacks and unlock new customer insights, Functions gives customers the ability to:

• Unlock all of their data to make any idea a reality. With the ability to integrate with any source or destination, Functions enables increasingly sophisticated user experiences and marketing campaigns, allowing businesses to unlock new data types, new customer insights, new channels, and new methods of personalization.
   
• Reduce the time from ideas to action. On average, the typical custom data integration takes anywhere between 6 to 15 weeks for companies to set up. With the process now only taking minutes, customers with early access to Functions have already saved a combined 30,000 engineering hours bringing new types of data into Segment and sending that data to new types of destinations.
   
• Cut maintenance time by 40%. Developer-friendly tools and community templates make it easy to build and maintain custom integrations, so engineers can spend their time where it matters: delivering amazing product and customer experiences.

A Future-Proof Customer Data Infrastructure

Using Segment’s CDI means that anything engineers build using Functions will also get the benefits of the most trusted, scalable foundation for customer data, such as:

• The speed and ease of serverless computing: Engineers no longer have to worry about infrastructure when building integrations. The Segment developer experience is uniquely focused on customer data with a straightforward and streamlined approach, saving hundreds of engineering hours.
   
• Reliability and visibility of all first-party customer data: Businesses can ensure their first-party data is reliable and clean, no matter which tool it came from, all through a single, simple API.
   
• Consumer privacy is respected: With Segment Privacy Portal, businesses have visibility and control over the first-party data they are collecting, so they can more easily meet regulatory requirements, enforce data policies, and respect their customers’ privacy.
   
• High quality, accurate data: With Segment’s data governance tool, Protocols, bad data is removed at the source. Customer data can be standardized across the entire organization, so businesses can trust it to be consistent, accurate and reliable in real time.
   
• Raw data is actionable: With Segment’s audience management product, Personas, businesses can understand what really matters to their customers, so they can deliver more sophisticated experiences and build more effective marketing campaigns.

“In today’s marketplace, businesses who want to create compelling customer experiences now have thousands of amazing tools at their disposal. But reliably integrating many of them with the rest of the data stack has, until now, been a major technical challenge that can take weeks of engineering time,” said Calvin French-Owen, Segment co-founder and CTO. “Segment Functions solves this issue with complete flexibility, and lets companies go from having the spark of an idea to a fully built-out workflow in just a few minutes.”

“As our company grows, we need to empower our marketing and sales partners while staying focused on our mission of saving our users money on their everyday purchases. Segment saves us valuable time by removing the need to build and maintain complex data integrations,” said Shaun Dubuque, Vice President of Engineering at RetailMeNot. “With Functions, Segment has given us the flexibility to redesign our marketing stack with minimal impact to our engineering team, unlocking combinations between the tech we’ve developed in-house and new, best-in-class tools we want to add to our arsenal in the future.”

Availability

Functions is now available in private beta. Customers can request developer preview access here. For more information about Functions, see our blog post here.  

Additional Customer Quotes

John Marbach, Technical Marketing Operations Manager at DigitalOcean, said: “It’s important for us to get the most out of our external tools with minimal reliance on internal engineering teams to support them. We rely on Segment to quickly enable marketing and analytics tools so we can focus on how we want to take action on customer events. With Functions, we easily send Segment events anywhere we'd like by transforming standard event payloads to match highly-customized destination-specific settings while keeping our data within one tool, which makes development and testing faster, and maintenance easier.”

Peter Hill, Senior CRM Manager at Printed.com, said: “With customers engaging with Printed.com across web and support channels, we needed to unify this engagement to deliver relevant and effective campaigns. Functions adds even more value to our existing tools like Mandrill and Zendesk connected to Segment by allowing us to unify cross-channel communication data exactly how we want it."

About Segment
Segment provides the customer data infrastructure that businesses use to put their customers first. With Segment, companies can collect, unify, and connect their first-party data to over 300 marketing, analytics, and data warehousing tools. Today, thousands of companies across 71 countries use Segment, from fast-growing businesses such as Atlassian, Bonobos and Instacart to some of the world’s largest organizations like Levi’s, Intuit and Meredith. Segment enables these companies to achieve a common understanding of their users and make customer-centric decisions.

CONTACT INFORMATION:
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