Kustomer spoke with CX professionals, who predictably believe that customer service will become more important in the next three years. They sided with IT in citing scattered data as their organizations’ biggest weakness, with insufficiently personalized experience ranked second. But when it came to actual priorities, reducing wait times was number one at 81%, while increased personalization finished fifth at 66%.
Data connectivity vendor Kong surveyed tech staff, not marketers. That group ranked poor integration, in the form of multiple technologies, as the top obstacle to innovation. In fact, even though 75% fear competitive failure if they don’t innovate, the group rated security, performance, and reliability as more important than innovating quickly. On the other hand, they’re all-in on microservices, with more than half running at least 50 and 86% seeing them as “the future”.
Dapio, the U.K.-based cashless payment solutions provider for businesses, today announced that it has raised $3.4 million to fuel the launch of its “Tap to Pay” solution for Android users in the U.K. and Europe. African payments giant Flutterwave co-led the growth round with Techstars.
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.