Customer Service
How data orchestration conducts harmonic customer experiences
In the competitive landscape of today’s customers, particularly with more digital natives like millennials and Gen Z, organizations that don't embrace real-time capabilities and evolve their engagement strategies will face extinction.
August 19, 2025 by Robin Grochol — VP of Product Management - Data, Identity & Security, Twilio
More data, more problems. It's a modern business paradox that has long thwarted marketers and IT leaders. Despite generating historic amounts of data, many enterprises still struggle to turn it into meaningful, actionable insights.
Disconnected clouds, disparate databases, and legacy systems have made data ecosystems feel more like an episode of Hoarders than engines for holistic customer experiences. And it's only getting harder — Statista predicts global data creation will hit nearly 400 zettabytes by 2028.
The ability to move complex data from the right sources at the right time to the right location has become a superpower, not standard practice. While data orchestration directs the symphony, quality data collection provides the instruments. Even the best conductor can't create harmony with broken tools — organizations must invest in both.
Sayonara, siloed customer experiences
A new twist on the old tech proverb garbage in, garbage out is fragmented data, fragmented experiences — the more disorder within data landscapes, the more personalized customer experiences will remain frustratingly elusive. Intelligent, adaptive data orchestration brings cohesion to this chaos, bridging the canyon between raw data collected from sources like social feeds, communication channels, or customer relationship management systems and clean, unified golden records ready for downstream activation.
The business impact of getting this right is substantial — according to Twilio's State of Customer Engagement Report, 75% of businesses say personalization boosts customer spending, with a 32% average increase per purchase.
Historical data alone isn't enough — businesses that focus only on the past risk irrelevance. Poorly timed or generic campaigns can turn customers off. Today, success hinges on activating real-time intent signals — like cart abandonment or in-store visits — through tools like customer data platforms (CDPs). These platforms instantly update customer profiles, enabling marketers and execs to deliver precise, timely, personalized experiences.
Now, with AI and machine learning further enhancing data orchestration, organizations can simplify execution, build granular audiences, and predict behavior more easily than ever. I recently spoke with a global financial firm using unified data to streamline onboarding and create a single customer journey across products — something that once required siloed systems. Even Perplexity's CEO noted their move to build a browser is driven by the need for richer user profiles to fuel hyper-personalized ads — proof that real-time orchestration is becoming central to strategy.
The compatibility conundrum: Warehouses and CDPs
As marketers demand a more symbiotic relationship between CDPs and established data repositories like data warehouses, lakes, or lakehouses, the need for extensibility and interoperability between platforms has quickly become a business imperative. However, the struggle is (unfortunately) real — many CDPs in particular don't play nice in the sandbox, often cornering organizations into broader product purchases that can be incompatible with their existing tech stack.
To match the pace and precision required of today's customer interactions, CDPs should work seamlessly with these data repositories, enabling businesses to build around their unique needs and fuel a breadth of use cases that require both real-time signals – like cart abandonment campaigns — and contextual data — like loyalty points accrued – without costly workarounds that tax already-thin engineering bandwidth.
For example, A major pet care brand recently used a blend of real-time and historical data to improve how they communicate with customers—delivering more relevant reminders and updates tied to individual needs. By linking identifiers such as contact information, purchase history, and unique pet profiles, they delivered highly-targeted replenishment reminders, tailored offers, and timely inventory updates. This harmony between static and as-it-happens data not only improves operational efficiency but reinforces customer confidence and satisfaction by ensuring critical medication for furry family members is never an afterthought.
Data orchestration in concert
When it comes to data, most companies are wealthy. What separates the billionaires from mere millionaires is how successfully they can collect, unify, and activate on real-time signals, and in my experience, there are a pair of near-universal obstacles: technical and operational. Technically, when it comes to customer engagement, most organizations often stitch together a patchwork of systems and solutions that all rely on different data and customer profiles. This leads to considerable delays, duplication, or inconsistencies when it comes time to reconcile and activate it appropriately. Operationally, there's often friction between data and marketing teams over ownership, preferred tools, and delivery timelines of campaign-critical information.
Therefore, to evaluate data readiness organizations must first understand where the barriers and bottlenecks are – is it between your data and marketing teams or tools? Is it with your data warehouse or CDP or a lack of interoperability between them? The magic isn't just the ability to collect, unify, and parse data, but to leverage it at the right time in the right way to create amazing experiences. The future of customer engagement is a continuous conversation across channels, which will sit at the intersection of contextual data (from warehouses and CDPs), communications (from activation platforms), and AI — a trifecta that in consonance will drive more reliable, scalable, context-rich personalization.
Future of customer experience: Real-time, real impact
In the competitive landscape of today's customers, particularly with more digital natives like Millennials and Gen Z, organizations that don't embrace real-time capabilities and evolve their engagement strategies will face extinction.
While foundational practices like data collection will continue to be a critical first step on customer journeys, data orchestration will be the conductor that guides an array of tools and touch points into a symphony of deeply personalized experiences.
About Robin Grochol
Robin leads Product Management for Twilio's Data, Identity, and Security suite of products. Throughout her career, she has built products that harness the power of data to deliver personalized customer experiences at scale. Robin has over 20 years of experience in enterprise SaaS product management and professional services. Prior to Twilio, Robin spent 14 years at Salesforce where she held senior product leadership positions in Data Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Sales Cloud. She is a native San Franciscan and holds a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley.
