ASAPP, which uses artificial intelligence to advise customer service and sales agents on what to say next, has raised a $185 million Series B, bringing total funding to $260 million. The system uses a combination of speech recognition, natural language processing, and machine learning. It’s a reminder that lots of money is spent on customer experience outside of martech.

Shopify already offers one-stop tech shopping for small retailers. They just went a step further to add a mobile shopping app that covers everything from local business discovery to product recommendations to checkout to order tracking. Good timing.

Just over half of consumers (54%) like to receive personalized messages because they show the consumers are known to the brand, plus they can be time savers. The rest (46%) find it at best unimportant, at worst creepy. Relevance far outstrips personalization when it comes to driving email opens (54% vs. 19%). Takeaway: treat each customer the way they prefer.