Further shaking up the sales tech landscape, AdRoll Group has purchased Growlabs, gaining a database with 12 million companies and 320 million business identities plus a collection of lead generation and sales automation tools. Growlabs will join RollWorks, the B2B marketing line that AdRoll launched in February.
Data and process integration vendor SnapLogic had two announcements yesterday: AI-powered workflows to automate IT integration projects and self-service machine learning. SnapLogic argues that “machine learning is an integration problem” because of all the data preparation and movement involved. It’s an odd perspective but it does illustrate automation of yet another process that once required highly skilled humans.
Lest you conclude that consumers are entirely irrational, a SurveyMonkey survey found they have a remarkably pragmatic view of why they’d lose trust in a company – placing poor product experience (81%) and poor customer service (78%) far ahead of a security breach (49%) or offensive advertising (46%). Similarly, 76% of U.S. consumers rated resolving problems as the most important element of customer service compared with just 37% who listed “feeling the customer service agent cares about you.”
The integrated cloud communications market is relevant here because it increasingly overlaps with marketing systems. So you should probably care at least a little that cloud-based communications platform 8×8 has agreed to pay $250 million for Fuze, which offers roughly similar products.