Meet your customers in more moments that matter 

Your customers are moving through the world in real time. They're walking into stores, living on their phone screens, messaging across borders, and returning to your app when they're ready. Meeting customers not just where, but when it counts has never mattered more. This release helps ensure that every moment that matters to your customers is covered.

Customer.io is already the best place to manage the conversations you have with your customers. What we're launching today takes it further: expanded triggers, new surfaces, and more channels—so you can show up the moment it counts.

Here’s what’s new and what each feature unlocks for you.

Most customer engagement platforms treat location as an afterthought. If you wanted to send a message based on where a customer was physically, when they walked into a store, arrived at a venue, or pulled into a parking lot, you needed a separate location vendor and another integration to stitch together and maintain.

With this release, geofencing is native to Customer.io. You draw a virtual boundary around any real-world place (a store, a gym, an airport, a parking lot) and the moment a customer enters or exits, it can trigger a journey across any channel: push, email, SMS, in-app, and more.

This matters beyond the obvious use case of sending a promo when someone walks in. A parking app can remind a user to close their session when they drive away. A hospitality brand can trigger a check-in message the moment a guest arrives. A fitness brand can send a post-workout nudge after someone leaves the gym. Physical presence has always been one of the most meaningful signals in a customer's journey. It's now a first-class trigger inside Customer.io.

Push notifications are great at getting attention once, but some of the most valuable mobile experiences are ongoing rather than one-time notices. Think of delivery tracking, ride progress, a parking timer counting down, or a sports score updating in real time. These require something different: a persistent, updating presence on the lock screen that doesn't require the user to open the app.

That's Live Activities on iOS and the equivalent, Live Updates on Android. They've become a baseline expectation for mobile-first teams, and now, Customer.io supports them.

Customer.io now provides the full foundation teams need to deliver these experiences: SDK support, push infrastructure, and API lifecycle management. Developers get a clear integration path and reference documentation to ship quickly. And unlike standard push notifications, Live Activities (and Live Updates) don't require the same opt-in prompt. You can now place a persistent experience on the lock screen (and beyond).

If your product has any ongoing, time-sensitive states that customers would benefit from seeing at a glance, this is for you.

SMS has traditionally had a reach problem. A single provider that works well in one region can fall short in another, due to different carrier coverage, compliance requirements, and pricing dynamics. For global teams, the standard answer has often been to maintain separate systems based on where SMS messages are sent.

Now, you can send SMS on your terms, with the provider that best fits your needs. Customer.io has expanded your SMS vendor options. You can now connect the SMS provider that works best for your region—such as Infobip, Sinch, Vonage—directly to your Customer.io workspace.

You bring the vendor relationship. We handle everything else.

Email, push notifications, SMS, and in-app messages each do their job in the moment, meeting people right where they are. A notification inbox is a great addition to that mix. It gives the messages you already send a persistent home inside your app, one place users can return to and engage with on their own time.

It’s a new place customers can return to when they're ready. Instead of a fleeting moment, your message can gain a permanent address. Additionally, you can also send push notifications to your notification inbox, too, and prolong their shelf-life.

Send inbox messages through Automations, one-time sends, and API-triggered sends, giving you the same flexibility as every other channel. And we wanted to give you flexibility too: choose to build your own inbox UI or utilize our pre-built inbox UI.

Omnichannel subscription center

As Customer.io has expanded channels across SMS, push, WhatsApp, and LINE, the previous topic-only subscription model hit its limit. Users could control what they heard about, but not how or where. The updated subscription center adds channel preferences alongside topic preferences, so end users can choose exactly which channels and topics they want to hear from you on—all in one interface, with translation support so it displays in the recipient's language.

WhatsApp message management improvements

Sending a WhatsApp message has always involved quite a bit of back-and-forth. You needed to create a message template in Meta Business Manager, submit for approval, wait, sync it back to Customer.io, then send. With this release, that entire workflow moves inside Customer.io. Create, edit, and submit WhatsApp message templates for Meta approval directly in the platform, with approval status surfaced in-product. Header, body, and footer components are all supported with full Liquid personalization. Only available via Native WhatsApp.

Tooltips

Say hello to a brand new in-app message type. With tooltips, you can anchor contextual messages to a specific element on a web page—a button, a menu item, a feature you want to highlight. Use them for onboarding, feature education, or any moment where the right message is the one that shows up exactly where the customer is looking. Tooltips run on the same engine as every other Customer.io in-app message, so there's no separate tool to configure.

Smarter journeys with LLM actions

LLM actions are now easier to start with, easier to optimize, and more powerful in production. New prompt templates give teams proven starting points for common use cases like content generation, lead scoring, and persona classification. Built-in prompt optimization improves output quality before campaigns go live. And knowledge sources let teams ground AI responses in their own content—product catalogs, brand guidelines, FAQs—so responses stay on-brand and accurate.

Message frequency caps

More channels mean more potential for over-messaging. Message frequency caps let teams set limits on how often a person receives messages by channel and timeframe—at the workspace, campaign, or message level. A straightforward control that helps protect deliverability, manage cost, and keep your audience from tuning out. Learn more here.

Platform usability improvements

We’ve rolled out three major updates that will speed up your everyday work. Your workspace now matches your workflow.

• Updated taxonomy: We've standardized terminology across the platform—Campaigns → Automations, Newsletters → One-time send, and several other names have been updated to better match industry conventions and for clarity. Learn more here.
• Dark mode: You can now toggle between light, dark, or system-matched in your settings. Go to ⚙️ → Theme → toggle between System, Light, or Dark modes. Set it up.
• Customizable navigation bar: Your nav bar is now customizable! Show only what you use, hide what you don't. Go to More in the navigation bar → Customize sidebar → choose what you want to “show” or “hide.” Learn more here.

Multiple apps per workspace

If your company runs more than one mobile app—a driver app and a rider app, a family of white-label brands, a free and premium version—you've had to manage each in its own workspace, copying templates and rebuilding the same campaigns over and over. Now you can manage push across multiple apps from a single workspace. One place to build, one place to send, no more duplicating work app by app.

Each of these features is useful on its own. Together, they give you everything you need to show up in more ways that matter to your customers. Customer.io meets your customers when it counts.

If you're a Customer.io user, these features are live (access varies by plan) in your workspace now. Start with whichever feature is closest to a gap you've been working around, and try it on a real use case.

Join us on August 6th for a live walkthrough of everything that just shipped, with real use cases and examples.

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