CDP Institute

10 Viacom CBS has joined forces with LiveRamp to allow advertisers to connect first-party data with the media company’s audiences and improve insights when executing and reporting on BVOD and digital campaigns.

Canadian-based NCRi, the Customer Experience Management (CXM) services Provider and Global Contact Center Operator, has acquired Ascentia Services, LLC, based in Dubai, UAE, and will be merging its contact center operations in Dubai, UAE; Delhi, India; Pune, India; and Manama, Bahrain, which will now operate under the brand name NCRi Ascentia.

SK Narvar promoted, FuelBuddy, the first company to start fuel delivery services in India and a market leader in technology and market share, announced that it has started to providing doorstep fuel delivery services in the United Arab Emirates and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

PushAlphabet Inc’s Google is ramping up cloud infrastructure in India with a second cluster of data centres in and around capital New Delhi to meet increasing customer demands in a key growth market, senior company executives said. The new infrastructure will help provide solutions for problems such as disaster recovery within India and ensure low latency for many state-run enterprises in and around New Delhi.

AIfluence is a two-year-old startup with an AI-driven influencer marketing approach to measuring the ROI of influencer marketing campaigns, a challenge faced by Brand teams globally. Today, the company is announcing that it has raised $1 million in seed investment led by Dubai-based EQ2 Ventures. Other investors include Antler East Africa, Oui Capital, ArabyAds and an unnamed European family office.

Mobile operator Orange Mali has announced the launch of a 5G pilot in Bamako, the country’s capital. Seven months after testing the technology in Senegal, Orange is now testing 5G in Mali and invites customers to be among the first to try out the new network.

India’s leading Live Commerce Mobile SaaS provider, SWIRL, is introducing enhanced Live & Interactive Video Shopping Experiences to the Indian market. It uses technology that is scalable, and adds a proprietary Interactive layer on top of video, using Text, Chat, WhatsApp, SMS, & Voice to make the entire experience close to real-life shopping.

CRMNEXT, the digital and customer experience platform for enterprise banks & financial service providers globally, announced $16M in Series B funding co-led by Avataar Ventures and Ascent Capital. Headquartered in India, CRMNEXT is currently servicing almost 100 large global enterprises in the banking and insurance space. Their customer base includes HDFC, SBI, Arab Bank, and Metlife.

Google announced the list of startups for the second cohort of ‘Google for Startups Accelerator Middle East and North Africa’, a three-month digital accelerator programme for Seed to Series A technology startups based in the region. The twelve technology startups come from six Arab countries across automotive, agriculture, fitness, fintech, real-estate, e-commerce and entertainment.

Bevy, the only enterprise community event engine, today announced the acquisition of Eventtus. The acquisition adds more than 20 engineers to the Bevy team, including Egyptian founders Mai Medhat and Nihal Fares. It also extends Bevy’s event technology stack with the addition of a mobile in-person conference app, and several other engagement tools for attendees.

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many organisations are making new customer experience (CX) investments, particularly in data management and customer data platforms, to generate greater value out of customer data, improve resiliency, and accelerate growth, IDC says.

The increasing spending for marketing and advertisement operations by organizations is one of the prime factors bolstering the customer data platform software market. However, data privacy laws are hampering the growth of the market.