Company Spotlight: Vibes

Alex Campbell, co-founder and chief innovation officer, Vibes

“Vibes empowers brands to realise the value of building and nurturing personal consumer relationships, while optimising their digital marketing through our intelligent mobile engagement.”

What does your company do?

Vibes enables brands to build relationships with their consumers, in the same way consumers build relationships with each other — through personal, mobile conversations.

Using the Vibes platform, brands deliver targeted interactive experiences that engage consumers through SMS, MMS, mobile wallet, and push notifications to generate brand awareness, drive online and instore shopping, service consumers, and increase loyalty.

What is your USP and how do you work?

Vibes is the only software platform that combines all mobile channels, intelligent automation, and performance insights in order to deliver truly personalised consumer experiences.

Vibes works by first allowing brands to build and retain a mobile audience. They can then activate that audience with timely, personalised experiences, offers, and messages across all mobile channels. Finally, they can then optimise the lifetime value of their mobile audience by using performance analytics and highly targeted messages to keep consumers engaged with their brand.

Which retailers do you work with?

Vibes works with a wide array of omnichannel retailers including department stores and specialty retailers in apparel, jewellery, sporting goods and home furnishings. We also work with grocery and convenience stores, as well as full-service, fast-casual, and quick-service restaurants. Specific brands we work with include Ralph Lauren, Dollar General, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Redbox, Chipotle, Sephora, and LEGO.

What have been the main points in your expansion?

Over the last few years Vibes has expanded both geographically and functionally. We have expanded outside of North America, and now have programs running in all major global markets including Europe and APAC.

Functionally, we have expanded our platform to include native offerings for mobile wallet, MMS, and Facebook Messenger. We have also expanded our use of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing in our analytics suite and triggered messaging.

What challenges are you addressing for multichannel retailers who aim to meet peak season demands?

Vibes is one of the few platforms capable of delivering unrivaled messaging speeds at enterprise scale. As one of only four “Tier 1” aggregators, meaning we have direct connections with all major carriers, we have the capacity to deliver up to one million messages in five minutes. Additionally, Vibes intelligent automation makes all of the mobile channels dynamic, allowing retailers to stay agile during peak seasons.

How are you using emerging technology to support retail growth?

Personalisation is at the very core of the Vibes mission, and we’re hyper-focused on technology that will enable brands to create personal interactions at scale. Most retailers are sitting on vast amounts of data but find it difficult to leverage that data in a way that drives meaningful customer action. We use various forms of AI and machine learning to help retailers understand their customers better and engage with them in a way that drives action.

Furthermore, we believe there is still so much untapped potential in using mobile wallet as a way of connecting customer actions. Pulling a customer’s loyalty account into a mobile wallet pass that they can scan instore, and allowing them to save digital coupons/offers to this pass that changes dynamically as their account changes – is a fantastic way of connecting what were previously disconnected customer actions.

What do you see as challenges for retailers and suppliers in the near future?

While we may be a bit biased, we believe that the surges in mobile-centric shopping and Buy Online Pickup In Store (BOPIS) we’re seeing brought about by this year’s pandemic are an indicator of where the retail industry is ultimately headed, and many retailers may not be prepared for this.

The Vibes platform enables retailers to optimise their customer engagement for mobile devices. By leveraging engagement touchpoints across SMS, app, and mobile wallet retailers now have the tools they need to connect online and offline touchpoints and develop a ‘single view’ of their customers.

To that end, the Vibes team just recently put together this guide to inspire retailers with ways to make their ecommerce programs more mobile-centric.

What targets are you aiming to achieve in the next five years?

Our goal is to serve as an enterprise-grade, highly extendable, unified mobile engagement platform that delivers significant growth in both revenue and loyalty for our customers. We want to help brands create unique experiences that drive action across all points of the consumer journey.