Twilio Announces the Winners of Its First Annual Excellence in Engagement Awards

April 08, 2025 at 12:00 PM EDT

Top brands Best Buy, CLEAR, Rocket Mortgage, Vineyard Vines, and Zillow are honored for their innovative approach to customer engagement

Twilio (NYSE: TWLO), the customer engagement platform that drives real-time, personalized experiences for leading brands, today announced the winners of its Excellence in Engagement Awards. This award evaluates organizations across industries including retail, healthcare, financial services, and real estate, and honors businesses that are pushing the boundaries of customer engagement and personalization with contextual data. Improving customer experiences is a priority for many brands as they try to close the customer experience gap, as 84% of businesses reported they provide “good” or “excellent” customer engagement, yet only 54% of consumers agree.

Twilio honored businesses in five categories, with each winner demonstrating exceptional use of Twilio’s products to create meaningful, scalable customer experiences. This year’s honorees are Best Buy, CLEAR, Rocket Mortgage, Vineyard Vines, and Zillow.

“These brands share Twilio’s vision of a world where every digital interaction between brands and consumers is amazing,” said Chris Koehler, CMO of Twilio. “The winners represent the best in customer experience in their respective industries and it’s inspiring to see how they are using Twilio products to reimagine customer interactions and drive better outcomes – from making it easier to shop online for a new TV, to simplifying communications in the home buying process, and so much more. I look forward to seeing what’s next for these brands as they continue to innovate.”

Excellence in Engagement: Rocket Mortgage

Rocket Mortgage, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, leverages Twilio’s Programmable Voice, SMS and Twilio Segment’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) to help optimize client communication. The company has built a cross-channel system that includes two-way SMS messaging, a secure outbound voice system used by 3,000 agents to connect with their clients and is in the process of developing an inbound voice system. With Twilio Segment, Rocket Mortgage is creating 360-degree client profiles to continue growing personalized communication across its campaigns.

“We are focused on establishing industry-leading, intelligent and digital-driven experiences for our clients by streamlining communication workflows, enhancing efficiency and improving service delivery,” said Papanii Okai, Executive Vice President of Product Engineering at Rocket. “Twilio’s Communications APIs and Segment CDP helped boost client response rates and conversion through personalized, automated workflows informed by our data. We’re looking forward to building on this partnership, including implementing AI use cases, to continue to Help Everyone Home.”

Excellence in Communication: Best Buy

Best Buy adopted Twilio’s Flex and Programmable Voice platform to incorporate voice, chat and video for an enhanced customer and agent experience in its Virtual Store and Customer Care programs for customers shopping or looking for support through BestBuy.com or the Best Buy app.

Excellence in Trust: CLEAR

CLEAR, the secure identity platform, leverages Twilio’s Verify and Lookup APIs as an additional layer of their comprehensive identity solution. This integration allows users to quickly prove their identity using SMS one-time passcodes (OTPs), while Lookup Identity Match enables an additional verification at a lower cost than alternative solutions.

“Our mission is to create frictionless experiences while maintaining the highest standards of security and privacy,” said Nick Peddy, Chief Technology Officer at CLEAR. “Twilio’s security solutions help match identities quickly and cost-effectively, making identity verification seamless for users. Our Members can quickly verify who they are at any moment - whether it’s going through airport security, renting a car, or signing up for social media. CLEAR envisions a future where you can always be you, both physically and digitally, wherever you go.”

Excellence in Data and AI: Vineyard Vines

Vineyard Vines, the lifestyle apparel brand best known for its smiling pink whale logo, uses Twilio Segment for personalized customer journeys, paid media targeting, and email campaigns. The company integrated Twilio Segment with Databricks to launch highly personalized campaigns powered by their unique customer data in 60 days.

“We wanted to improve results across our marketing campaigns quickly,” said Anthony Ciancio, Vice President of Data & Analytics at Vineyard Vines. “Not only were we able to get Segment deployed immediately, we met our goals in under three months, seamlessly integrating with Databricks and Listrak for more effective campaign execution. Our brand celebrates the good life, with a goal of building a smooth experience across all our channels. Twilio Segment helped us make this possible by personalizing campaigns, improving our customer engagement, and maintaining one version of the truth of our customers.”

Excellence in Optimization: Zillow

Zillow, the most visited real estate website in the United States, uses Twilio’s solutions to power their “Connections” platform, which allows real estate agents to communicate with prospective buyers via voice, SMS, and TaskRouter, a skills-based routing system for contact centers. By integrating Twilio’s flexible communication tools, Zillow is able to effectively and reliably facilitate communication and connection between agents and buyers.

“Zillow is investing in products and services to improve the experience of buying, selling, renting and financing, to help make home a reality for more people,” said Toby Roberts, SVP of Engineering & Technology at Zillow. ”Our Connections product, built on Twilio products, allows real estate agents to communicate with prospective buyers, and facilitates reliable connection and clear communication. We’ve been a Twilio customer for more than 15 years, and value their partnership and shared commitment to excellence.”

The winners and finalists of the Excellence in Engagement Awards will be honored at Twilio’s annual customer and developer conference SIGNAL on May 14-15. To register, visit https://signal.twilio.com/2025/begin.

To learn more about our awards program and how our customers are shaping the future of customer engagement, visit https://www.twilio.com/en-us/lp/excellence-in-engagement-awards.

About Twilio Inc.

Today’s leading companies trust Twilio’s Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) to build direct, personalized relationships with their customers everywhere in the world. Twilio enables companies to use communications and data to add intelligence and security to every step of the customer journey, from sales to marketing to growth, customer service and many more engagement use cases in a flexible, programmatic way. Across 180 countries and territories, millions of developers and hundreds of thousands of businesses use Twilio to create magical experiences for their customers. For more information about Twilio (NYSE: TWLO) visit www.twilio.com.