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What Are the Best Practices for Account Hierarchies, External IDs, and Subscriber Relationships?

sarvan96

Hello Bonfire Folks 🔥,

We're implementing Braze for a telecom use case and are looking for best practices for modeling account hierarchies.

Our structure looks like:

We're interested in learning:

For telecom implementations, what do you typically use as the Braze external_id?
- Customer
- Primary Account
- Account
- Subscriber/MSISDN
How do you model parent-child account relationships in Braze?
- Custom Attributes
- Arrays
- Catalogs
- Connected Content
- Other approaches
If you need to target all subscribers under a Primary Account, what has worked best at scale?
Have you encountered any limitations around:
- Segmentation
- Canvas entry criteria
- Liquid personalization
- Catalog lookups
- User profile size
For customers with multiple accounts and services, do you maintain the hierarchy outside Braze (CDP/Snowflake/Databricks) and only send relationship keys into Braze?
Are there any telecom reference architectures, best practices, or lessons learned that you can share?

Primary Use Cases

Household / Family Plans
Enterprise & Corporate Accounts
Cross-sell and Upsell
Service-Level Communications
Account-Level Communications
Consolidated Customer View

Any real-world examples, recommendations, or pitfalls to avoid would be greatly appreciated.

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Comments

rahulbishnoi

For telecom implementations, what do you typically use as the Braze external_id? -

Subscriber/MSISDN - Think of external ID as a single source of truth for your user while the data is exchanging hands between Braze, Mixpanel, and your DWH.

How do you model parent-child account relationships in Braze?

Custom Attributes
Arrays
Catalogs
Connected Content

Other approaches
Ans - Custom Attributes

rahulbishnoi

If you need to target all subscribers under a Primary Account, what has worked best at scale?

Question is unclear can you elaborate?

sarvan96

For organizations managing large numbers of subscribers under a Primary Account, what targeting methods have delivered the best results while maintaining scalability and performance?

rahulbishnoi

Now that I have more time, let me go through all of these properly. My earlier answers were correct in spirit but not optimised for telecom scale, so I've revised two of them.

1. What to use as external_id

Subscriber level, but not the raw MSISDN. Use an immutable internal subscriber or line ID and keep the MSISDN as a custom attribute.

2. Modelling parent-child relationships

You don't model the relationship in Braze Braze custom attributes are all flatten info. There's no relational layer, so the hierarchy gets collapsed onto another line record..

In practice that's custom attributes doing two different jobs:

Flat attributes for targeting — primary_account_id, line_role (primary/secondary), plan_tier, lines_on_account. These are what you segment on.
Arrays of objects for personalisation — on the primary line's profile, one object per line with msisdn, plan, usage, upgrade eligibility. This is what you loop through in Liquid for consolidated or household messages.

Not catalogs — those are keyed lookups for reference data (device catalog, plan catalog), not a join engine. Not Connected Content for structural data either; keep that for genuinely live values like a current balance, API key etc.

The hierarchy itself stays in the warehouse.

3. Targeting all subscribers under a Primary Account

Three methods, in the order I reach for them:

Segment filter on primary_account_id — simple equality check, fast at any volume. Use for marketing and lifecycle.
API-triggered campaign or Canvas — your system passes the subscriber IDs in the request, up to 50 per call. Use for account events: bill ready, outage, plan change.
Event-triggered Canvas — fire an event on the relevant lines with account details in the event properties. Real-time, nothing written to the profile.

Avoid a segment per account, and avoid Connected Audience filters in API calls, those are rate limited to 250 requests per minute, which is nothing at telecom volume.

4. Limitations worth knowing before you build

You should refer to docs for limitations, as there are segment size limitations, profile size limitations, and others as well.

5. Do we keep the hierarchy outside Braze?

Yes, at telecom scale, hierarchy should always be kept outside. The warehouse serves as the system of record while Braze acts as the activation layer. We expose a flat subscriber-level view and push down keys and rollups via CDI.

Lessons-
- Split service-level and marketing consent into separate subscription groups, per channel. Outage and billing alerts must never sit behind marketing consent and always use a dev & prod workspace.