Julian Dawkins of Infobip believes the brands winning at customer loyalty are the ones having the best conversations
Through his extensive and versatile career journey, Julian Dawkins, Principal for Product Marketing at Infobip, gained a strong foundation in understanding how people buy and what they need. Today, he lever-ages that experience to help businesses navigate the rapidly evolving world of customer communication and AI-driven engagement.
“My career began in sales and customer-facing roles, including account management. From there, I moved into product management within the manufacturing space, which gave me a solid grounding in product discipline, pricing and go-to-market methodologies. I subsequently moved into product marketing, pre-dominantly working with SaaS products in the B2B space. That experience made me well-versed in consumer behavior and the importance of adapting both products and messaging to different types of consumers, ensuring they clearly understand the value of what is being offered,” he begins.
His tremendous experience across sales, product and marketing empowers Julian to excel in his current role as Principal for Product Marketing at Infobip. “As a global cloud communications provider, Infobip sits at the intersection of businesses across many different sectors, connecting them with their end users, whether those are patients, local citizens or students. We provide the communications backbone that al-lows those businesses to connect with their customers wherever they are in the world, across the channels they use most, including WhatsApp, Rich Communication Services (RCS), voice, email and SMS.
“Being Principal for Product Marketing, my role is focused on educating the market around best practices, specifically how businesses can most effectively connect with their end users, regardless of where they re-side. My professional background is extremely useful in my current role, especially in determining Infobip’s strategic positioning, including where we should be playing, which conversations we should be part of and which customer profiles our products are best suited to serve. A significant part of that right now is shaping the story around AI, specifically how it can be applied in a positive and progressive way to help businesses connect even better with their end-users,” he continues.
Retail, Julian argues, is where the real test of effective communication tools plays out – a sector experiencing a fundamental shift in how it relates to consumers. “Customer loyalty has evolved well beyond one-off promotional campaigns, which changes everything about how retailers should be thinking about communication. Texting still has a role to play; it is immediate, accessible and grabs attention. But the real key to moving customers from a single transaction into an ongoing relationship is a genuine omnichannel strategy. We are seeing AI deployed across the entire customer journey now, from awareness through to purchase, customer support and retention, including retargeting to bring customers back. I think retailers would be wise to lean into this rather than relying solely on SMS, because conversational approaches span the entire customer journey rather than a single touchpoint.
“Employing an omnichannel strategy also works by making your brand more available to customers on their own terms. Not everyone responds to an SMS the way they respond to a WhatsApp message, and the barrier to entry has lowered considerably, as people do not mind having brands in their WhatsApp con-versations now. Therefore, brands need to place their digital storefront within the chat environment itself. It makes the brand more poignant, accessible and better placed to serve customers quickly and naturally,” Julian shares.
One of the key advantages of an omnichannel approach is fluidity, as an end user can begin a conversation via live chat on the web and seamlessly carry it over to WhatsApp, with no disruption and no need to start again.
Customer relationships
To make the most of mobile and omnichannel strategies for boosting both new and existing customer relationships, Julian outlines a set of best practices worth following. “Cover the basics first by making sure you have the customer’s name, understand their profile, know their recent purchases and pay attention to their current behavior, which often predicts future actions. From there, retailers can use AI to automate the lower-level tasks like sending back-in-stock notifications or order updates. Nonetheless, they should always have a human available as a fallback. There will always be moments when a customer wants to speak to a person, hear a voice and know there is someone behind the screen, because what they are dealing with is sensitive and requires a human response. Weaving that balance of automation and human touch into their conversational strategy will strengthen not just retailers’ omnichannel approach, but also their customer relationships. When people know they can rely on a brand to show up consistently and respond appropriately, it becomes their go-to.”
For businesses still weighing up whether conversational commerce is worth the investment, Julian points to the results Infobip has helped some of the world’s biggest brands achieve. “We were fortunate to work with Unilever in Brazil on one of their fabric softener lines, Comfort,” he highlights. “The brand wanted to move away from one-way transactional messaging and into genuine two-way conversations with their end users. Seeking to engage by providing tips and tricks, Unilever thought WhatsApp was the right channel to make that happen and facilitate exchange between the end user and the conversational agent. This way, users could interact with this agent on their own terms at any time of the day.
“Unilever amplified this by making it part of a national campaign where the WhatsApp number appeared on billboards across the country, allowing people to simply note it down or scan a QR code. Within the first 12 hours, around 6500 users had interacted with the conversational agent. Eventually, the campaign con-tributed to a 14-fold increase in revenue. This case study shows how a national campaign can go from being static to becoming a conversation, one that starts on a billboard and continues throughout a customer’s day.”
Beyond the commercial impact, Julian is deeply passionate about mentoring, something that has significantly influenced his career. “Mentoring is incredibly important to me and I carve a lot of time out for that. I am involved in two areas in particular. The first is with the university I graduated from, Kingston Universi-ty in London, where I speak with third-year students about how to transition into the workplace. It is something I feel strongly about, because having that kind of guidance when I was going through the trials and tribulations of university education would have made a real difference. The interactions with my mentees are mostly calls, having a coffee and just being present and listening. Sometimes people just need to talk it through, and the confidence that comes from feeling heard is more valuable than any specific ad-vice I could give.
“I also mentor with a charity called Young Leaders Academy, which works with young people between the ages of six and 16 in North West London. The program exposes them to speakers from their own communities who have gone on to build businesses, work internationally, write books and more. By facilitating conversations with young people about their dreams and aspirations, we want to show them what is possible and make sure they are not just reduced to another statistic. Helping prepare young people to give value to the real world is something I will always make time for,” Julian ends.
Julian’s career is proof that the best communicators are not just technically sharp, they stay connected to people and never stop investing in the next generation coming up behind them.