Still not convinced all this matters? A study reported in this Marketing Land article found that Amazon Echo owners spend $400 more per year than run-of-the-mill Amazon Prime subscribers. (I couldn’t find the study itself.) And here’s a look from Wired at Amazon’s world domination lab, a.k.a. Alexa Voice Services. Get ready for voice-enabled lightbulbs.
Customer Data Platform vendor Segment has been integrated with Swrve, a digital customer interaction engine. Lots of jargon in that sentence. In plainer English: Segment will make data from all sources available to Swrve, which will use it in marketing campaigns (mostly mobile, which is Swrve’s strength). Does that help?
Finally, we have views on “big data” from senior data and analytics executives polled by NewVantage Partners. Their top objective for big data and AI investments was analytics – no surprise given the audience – although customer experience did rank second, ahead of lower costs, innovation, and speed to market. More important: by far the biggest challenges to being data-driven were people (49%) and process (32%). Just 19% cited technology. Most surveys give a similar answer but it’s still easy to forget.
Salesforce has announced a new solution, Unified Knowledge, that will pull data from third-party systems thus supplementing Salesforce Data Cloud with external information sources. Initially, this is mainly aimed at helping Service Cloud users in combination with Einstein for Service’s generative AI. It was developed through a strategic partnership with AI vendor Zoomin.