New H1 2023 features: the key takeaways

The first half of 2023 is coming to an end and it’s time to share with you all the new Batch platform features since the start of the year.

On the menu: email automations, the new 360 profile view that collects and centralizes all of your customer data, iOS 16.4 Web Push notifications support, the new tech and product organisation, and many other innovations.

To discover each of these features in details, you can read the following dedicated articles:

• The profile new features;
• The engage new features;
• The messaging new features.

Batch’s tech and product teams: a new organisation in multidisciplinary squads

All these new features of 2023 have been reinforcing the Batch transformation as an omnichannel customer engagement solution.

With Batch’s new positioning as a 360 customer engagement platform, our tech and product teams divided these new features into three key areas:

• Profile: to centralise all your customer data that enables personalised communications on each CRM channel.
• Engage: to help you manage all your customer engagement scenarios on all channels efficiently.
• Messaging: to enable you to activate all your channels from the same interface under the best possible conditions.

Around these three floors, there are functional software components that you can see in more detail below.

The 3-in-1 view on our platform is the basis upon which all our tech and product teams work, and we use it to enrich our omnichannel solution constantly.

In this regard, we built the new Batch organisation to have these three pillars and the result was three product-oriented multidisciplinary squads: profile, engage, and messaging.

The new profile squad features

As a reminder, the profile squad mission to centralise all your customer data that enables personalised communications on each CRM channel.

In this regard, the Batch data model complete reinvention was an essential foundation project. For several months, our tech and product teams worked on our data model transformation, making sure the platform paradigm shift - from mobile-centric to omnichannel - eliminates all the data silos.

In this context, a major feature was born: the profile.

In the Batch platform, a profile is the compilation of user data and events from several sources (apps, websites, APIs) that is enriched and updated in real time.

As Batch customers, you have access to these profiles via the profile view on your dashboard. This real time 360°view of your users offers you a single source of truth to continuously optimise your CRM strategy execution.

The other key profile squad product innovations include:

• The email targeting, which enables you to refine your targeting on all the attributes sent to Batch;
• The automatic deletion of inactive profiles, that simplifies your privacy management and increases your metrics reliability.

Claire Zunda, Product Manager at Batch, shares an overview of all the latest profile squad features, in this article.

The new engage squad features

The engage squad mission is simple: enabling you to orchestrate all of your customer engagement scenarios on all your channels efficiently.

For this first semester, the engage squad major innovations are mainly focused on the emailing channel, with the email automations, the email campaigns and the recurring emails.

Within our omnichannel CRM solution, it was essential to equip the email channel with the striking power of trigger automations, while maintaining the Batch high standards in terms of UI.

For our customers, these email orchestration features ensure:

• A very wide range of use cases: transactional/service, trigger-based messages, targeted special offers, highlights (Sales, Black Friday Cyber Monday, Mother's Day, etc.), full-base exceptional communications (e.g. critical events), credit card expirations, expiring subscriptions, and so on;
• Ease of use for more productivity, just a click away, independently, without depending on your technical teams;
• Specific targeting email, by domain.

Our dashboard is also evolving. In the past, it was divided by application - with a list of applications (top left of the illustrations below). Now the dashboard groups these applications into coherent blocks called projects.

For example, we have taken the example of Prisma Media (above), which has this interface and distributes their projects by media brands (Cuisine Actuelle, Télé-loisirs, Voilà, etc.).

Mickaël Bentz, Lead Product Manager at Batch, explains in detail all the engage squad latest product innovations, in this article.

The new messaging squad features

The messaging squad purpose is to enable you to activate all your channels from the same interface under the best possible conditions.

By best conditions, we mean both your productivity and efficiency using the Batch platform, and the the best experience your users will have your brand and universe. .

For this first half of 2023, one of the squad messaging major product innovations is the email composer. This feature brings together all the essential conditions to ensure an optimal composition experience, combining creativity and productivity, so that you can :

• design templates from start to finish, using drag & drop, without the need to code a single line;
• create responsive emails, compatible with all email media;
• manage and create pre-saved blocks to save time when creating emails;
• properly preview and test its final content.

All these actions are now possible on the Batch interface, whether you design your emails within Batch or elsewhere.

With Batch's email composer, you can now add all the data platform personalisation variables to the email content: name, country, age, order number, etc.

On the personalisation side, you will be able to create conditional blocks from the Batch email composer and thus add easily personalisation variables: links, images, text, and so on. In fact, that’s what our clients already do on the push notification and In-app channels.

Our tech and product teams also have worked on other email channel’s essential components:

• The email router, essential to support your transactional / service use cases and the email sending experience. We have reviewed our integration with this router, optimised our sending chain, streamlined and automated our processes.
• The email reporting, to enable you to analyse and benchmark all your email campaigns’ statistics, with exportable formats so that you can work on them on your own tools.

Finally, we couldn’t forget to mention a major feature: since Apple's beta release, we’ve been able to provide web push notification support for a few months on Safari Mobile (iOS 16.4). Our customers are already benefiting from this innovation, in terms of additionnal reach and rate opening.

You can target this additional audience directly from the campaign builder, the brand-new centralised interface mentioned in the new engage features article.

Elisa Fan, Senior Product Manager at Batch, walks you through all the latest features of her messaging squad in this article.