Let’s look at some companies outside the U.S. today.  We’ll start with Boxever, a Dublin-based Customer Data Platform and orchestration system that has specialized in the travel industry. The company has just repackaged its unification components as Boxever OneView and its orchestration tools as Boxever Engage. It’s part of a move to add retail and financial services clients. Packaging aside, the system capabilities are still pretty much as described in this recent review.on Customer Experience Matrix.

Here’s a reminder why customer experience is important: a recent Janrain survey that found that “good customer experience” is the single most important factor in convincing consumers to share personal data. Experience was important to 86% of consumers, ahead even of control over communications (78%), compelling loyalty programs (74%) and promising not to share data with third parties (71%). But it’s not all about feeling warm and fluffy: 62% said they’d register to receive a product discount.

Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents.  You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better.  It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange.  Price was not announced.