Customers have never had more ways to interact with brands. Existing and emerging channels all play a role, but the biggest change is how customer expectations have grown alongside them.
People expect communications to feel relevant, arrive at the right moment and reflect where they are in their relationship with a business.
For many organisations, delivering that experience isn’t straightforward. Customer communications often sit across multiple systems and teams, making it difficult to build journeys that feel connected from start to finish.
Pulse was developed with that challenge in mind. The platform brings together the tools businesses need to create, orchestrate, deploy and measure customer communications in one place, while giving them the flexibility to shape the platform around their own objectives.
We sat down with Robyn Newberry, Brand and Marketing Director at MBA Group, to understand the strategic thinking behind the launch of Pulse and what makes the platform stand out to organisations looking to strengthen customer relationships.
Customer Communication is Now More Contextual
Businesses are communicating with customers more frequently than ever before, but frequency isn’t what makes communication effective. Relevance, timing and channel all influence whether a message is useful or simply adds to the noise.
What changes have you seen in the way businesses approach customer communication?
“We’re seeing a real shift towards not only personalised, but contextual communication. Brands now recognise they need to engage across multiple formats and channels to reach different generations effectively, and that the right channel often depends on the type of message itself. Some communications still carry more weight in physical form, while others are perfectly suited to a quick SMS. Our role is to help clients achieve this at scale, without draining resource from teams that are already time-poor and juggling competing priorities.”
Those expectations are also changing how businesses think about channels. Print still has an important place for certain communications, while email, SMS and RCS each serve different purposes across the customer journey. The opportunity is bringing those channels together, so they work as part of one connected experience.
Flexibility Matters
Customer communication rarely exists in one place. Most organisations have added technology over time as their needs have evolved, building up a mix of platforms that each play an important role, but don’t always work seamlessly together.
Introducing new technology into that environment should complement what’s already there, rather than forcing businesses to start again.
Why is flexibility becoming increasingly important in customer experience, and why was it such an important principle when building Pulse?
“Every customer communicates and behaves differently, so the technology powering that communication needs to reflect that same diversity. The days of one message for everyone are over. Brands need the ability to send communications intelligently, based on behaviour and context. That’s the only way to create communications that customers genuinely value, drive higher engagement, and build lasting loyalty over time.”
That thinking also influenced how Pulse was built. Instead of expecting businesses to replace existing technology, the platform was designed to fit alongside it, allowing organisations to adopt the capabilities they need without disrupting everything else.
Building Around Real Customer Challenges
Pulse is a platform that grew out of years of conversations with organisations trying to simplify increasingly complex communication strategies.
What was the vision behind creating Pulse, and what opportunity did you see in the market?
“Anyone who’s tried to improve their tech stack knows the frustration of platforms that offer no flexibility, where it’s all or nothing, with little regard for what you need. Others lack integrations altogether, leaving clients to do the heavy lifting themselves.
Pulse was built to remove that friction entirely. It’s fully modular, so clients can adopt exactly what they need, whether that’s one module, several, or the full platform, and it integrates with existing tech stacks, so we flex to fit our clients rather than the other way around.
Just as importantly, we didn’t see any platform in the market offering a truly omnichannel solution. Plenty offer strong digital capability, but print remains part of our heritage, and for many regulated industries, isn’t just a preference, it’s a compliance requirement, with a documented, physical record of correspondence. Bringing print together with SMS and email in one platform, enabling brands to build genuinely joined up customer communications, felt both exciting and long overdue.”
That vision was reinforced through conversations with clients across different sectors.
What conversations or challenges from businesses helped shape the development of Pulse?
“Time and again, we heard the same frustrations from clients. Marketing and CX teams were juggling multiple platforms just to deliver a single customer journey, one tool for email, another for SMS, a separate process entirely for print, with no shared data or view across any of them.
That fragmentation was costing them time, budget and, ultimately, consistency in the customer experience. We also heard how difficult it was to get buy in for new technology when the only option on the table was a total rip and replace of their existing stack. Those conversations shaped Pulse from the ground up.
It’s why we built a platform that’s modular by design, integrates with what clients already have, and opens up improved reach, giving brands access to meet consumers where they are and how they want to be communicated with.”
The common thread was clear. Businesses wanted greater control over their customer communications without introducing unnecessary complexity. They wanted technology that could support the way they already worked while giving them room to evolve over time.
Personalisation Has Become the Baseline
Customers are comparing every brand interaction with the best experiences they receive elsewhere.
That raises the bar for personalisation. What was once about inserting customer data into a template is now about understanding context and delivering communications that feel genuinely relevant.
Why is it important for businesses to have the ability to create personalised experiences that adapt to their own customers, journeys and objectives?
“It’s simply what customers expect now, not a nice to have, but a baseline requirement. We live in a world where attention spans are shorter than ever. If you’re not speaking to them specifically, you won’t earn a right to their attention, let alone their long-term loyalty. And that loyalty is directly tied to business growth and the longevity of a brand.”
Bringing Customer Communications Together
Pulse was designed to simplify complexity by giving businesses a single platform to manage customer communications across channels, while working alongside the systems they already rely on.
At its core, what does Pulse enable businesses to do differently?
“Pulse gives businesses one platform to create, manage and measure the entirety of their customer communications, bringing simplicity and control to something that’s traditionally been fragmented across channels and systems.”
That joined-up approach also changes how businesses think about customer communication. Rather than planning individual campaigns in isolation, teams can build journeys that evolve over time, responding to customer behaviour and creating a more consistent experience from one interaction to the next.
Where Pulse Goes From Here
Launching Pulse is only the beginning. The real opportunity comes from seeing how businesses use the platform to create, refine and improve the way they communicate with customers.
What do you hope customers will be able to achieve with Pulse that they couldn’t before?
“Ease. The ability to build, deploy and optimise a complete communications strategy within a single platform. Brands are under more pressure than ever to get this right, so anything Pulse can do to help them build genuinely smart, contextual communication strategies for every customer is enormously rewarding.”
Whether businesses are looking to simplify their technology stack, create more connected customer journeys or deliver communications that feel genuinely personal, our ambition for Pulse is simple: to give organisations the tools and flexibility to create customer experiences that are more relevant, connected and valuable over time.