Urban Airship has launched its Open Channels and Open Profiles messaging services, designed to deliver individualised messaging to any platform, device or marketing channel and to use real-time customer data from any system.

As the mobile platform shift accelerates from smartphones to homes, cars and virtual environments, traditional customer communication methods are becoming irrelevant, the company said. With today’s announcement, Urban Airship aims to make it easy for developers and marketers to coordinate lightweight, action-oriented notifications integrated into any experience along the customer journey.

The first deployment of Urban Airship’s open channels approach is third-party support for Apple News notifications. Apple News publishing partners can now use the visual message composer within Urban Airship Engage to create and deliver notifications to Apple News users that have opted in to their channel. As more than half of the top 30 global media owners already use Urban Airship for their own apps, the goal is to make it easier for publishers to grow channel engagement in Apple News using a familiar notification workflow.
Other new advancements include support for web notifications; delivery to users’ preferred and active channels; and machine learning to predict app users who are likely to churn.

Urban Airship’s Open Profiles extends the company’s open mobile data strategy and further breaks down customer data silos, by collecting and processing real-time customer behaviour, events and attributes from any system or channel. This data enriches user profiles for real-time automation and messaging orchestration, and is also available in Urban Airship Insight to analyse customer patterns across multi-device, multi-touchpoint journeys, or for real-time streaming through Urban Airship Connect to populate data warehouses and trigger user-level actions in other systems.

“Experts predict that the next 10 years will generate an order of magnitude more change than we have seen in the last 10 years,” sayd Urban Airship president and CEO, Brett Caine. “With this velocity of change, a closed marketing cloud simply cant keep up with the pace of business and customer demands. We’re opening up our platform to address the growing complexity and expanding opportunity for businesses to individually interact with customers wherever they are. Customers will demand it, and our Mobile Growth Platform will help businesses achieve it.”

Combined, Open Channels and Open Profiles will unleash the ability to both learn and act on what customers care about most, capturing customer interactions in notification experiences everywhere in real-time. Retailers could use it to capture point-of-sale data from physical stores to send receipts, warranty information and accessory upsells to users’ preferred channel.

Brands could also use it to infuse emails and messaging app interactions with rich notifications that proactively address users’ behaviours in other channels. Or to remind users on their preferred or active channel of items left in shopping carts and wish lists, or coupons that are about to expire.

All of these services and solutions are available in beta this quarter with general availability in Q1 2017. Businesses and technology partners interested in taking advantage of these new services can contact Urban Airship here.