Overview
Businesses use tools like Customer.io to automate messages and engage their customers across different stages of a journey: onboarding nudges, churn recovery, upsell flows, and more. Termii Engage is that platform, built specifically for African businesses. But what makes it fundamentally different is how it thinks about who a customer is.
The Problem
Every major competitor in this space (Customer.io, Braze, Klaviyo) defines a customer by their email address. That is the primary key. Bunce, where I worked previously, took a small step forward by allowing either email or phone number. But in Nigeria and across much of Africa, this still falls short.
After rigorous research with banks and large microfinance banks, we uncovered a deeper truth: data is a fundamental problem. A highly informal economy, a largely unbanked population, and low digital literacy mean that many customers of financial institutions simply do not have email addresses on file. Some never will. Building a customer engagement platform on email as the foundation was building on sand.
The implication was serious: these businesses could not use any existing tool to properly identify, track, or engage their own customers at scale.
The Innovation
We rethought the foundation. Rather than imposing a primary key on businesses, we gave them the power to decide. Any attribute in their customer data (phone number, BVN, account number, customer ID) could be designated as the primary key, as long as it held a unique value per customer.
This was not a small UX tweak. It was a architectural decision that changed what was possible. A bank could now say "our primary identifier is account number." An MFB could say "use BVN." A retail business could say "use loyalty card ID." Each business defined their own truth about who their customers are, and Engage was built to respect that.
On top of this, we infused AI across the platform: AI-generated copy for message campaigns, automatic customer segmentation based on behavioural patterns, pattern discovery across customer data, and AI-suggested engagement strategies, so businesses are not just reacting to churn but anticipating it.
3
Markets: Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast
AI
Integrated Across Platform
Impact
Businesses can now engage their customers at every meaningful point in their journey: onboarding, activation, retention, and re-engagement, regardless of what data they have. Churn is reduced because interventions are timely and personalised. Revenue grows because businesses can identify high-value segments and act on them with precision.
CPaaS
0→1
AI Integration
Customer Segmentation
African Markets
Primary Key Innovation
Churn Reduction
Journey Automation