CDP Institute

Microsoft has announced its Customer Experience Platform, which includes a collection of existing Microsoft products including their CDP, the catchily-named Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.   Other components offer data governance, machine learning, website analytics, journey orchestration, ad campaigns, ecommerce, sales and service.  It’s not clear what’s actually new here, although there may be more prebuilt integrations than before.

Medallia is a customer experience platform in the narrower sense of capturing customer feedback via surveys. They now include a wide range of data capture, unification, analysis, and interaction capabilities, which they just packaged as Medallia Digital Suite. If a combining customer feedback and behavioral data sounds familiar, you may be remembering that Zendesk bought SurveyMonkey parent Momentive just last week to do just that.

Hi, it’s Jamie, Senior Intern at the CDP Institute Department of the Obvious. The Boss said his arm was too sore to write today, which seems weird but lets me share this Airtable study which found that most marketers are overworked, half spend at least 30% of their time on manual tasks, and 60% of teams use more than twenty tools on a regular basis. Incidentally, Kintone disagrees: they say the average office worker actually uses 35 apps and switches among them at least 1,100 times each day.

It’s tough to top this Tricentis report that software testing slows down delivery but improves quality. But never underestimate the pros at Forrester Consulting: when Emplify hired them to research social commerce, they discovered its main goal is to generate revenue. Not only that, but social commerce is growing quickly. My hat is off.

Let’s finish with this Cyara survey, which found that most digital transformation initiatives run behind schedule, many have no clear owner and most senior managers overstate success.  To quote directly, “90% of business owners and 75% of managing directors vs. 38% of department heads and 35% at the manager level [are] describing their digital transformation initiatives as ‘very successful.’”  Want more?  They say it’s a bad idea to run the project without involving the IT department.

I had to arm wrestle our privacy newsletter editor for this Acquia survey, but fortunately I outweigh her and she’s ticklish.  It was worth trouble because there’s lots of interesting info here.  Highlights: 87% of marketers think their organization is fully prepared for the end of third-party cookies; 55% had adopted a digital experience platform and 50% have added a CDP;  82% think their customers have more trust in  their company’s use of personal data than last year; but 40% of global consumers seem to disagree.

CDP Simon Data is moving from profile building into data activation with a new cross-channel journey builder and email platform, and expanded predictive modeling.  The company also announced new APIs for audience selection and real-time content access.  They’re all closely integrated with customer profiles in Simon’s CDP.

Mobile app messaging platform Airship has announced new tools to help marketers improve customer experiences without help from those prickly developers. Capabilities to be delivered “over the coming months” include interactive walkthroughs, in-app surveys, and a preference center. And while we’re talking about app marketing, I’ll slip in that ironSource last week bought app marketing software company Bidalgo.

Snowflake keeps adding options that inch its Data Marketplace closer to CDP functionality. The latest piece to fall into place is identity management, care of Neustar’s United Identity service. Features include identity resolution, enrichment, segmentation, and media syndication. You may recall that Neustar recently agreed to be bought by TransUnion.

I hope someone at Merkle’s Merkury group is paid for the number of alliances they sign, because that person is getting one fat bonus this year.  Merkury’s latest partner is Yahoo (until recently Verizon Media), which will their link their ConnectID with Merkury IDs.  Merkle clients will be able to build custom audiences using individual-level Merkury IDs and then activate them through Yahoo’s demand side platform.

You knew that “citizen CDP builder” was going to happen.  Sure enough, Y42 says “anyone feeling comfortable with Excel” can ingest, unify, and analyze enterprise data without writing a line of code.  Color me skeptical but they just raised a $31 million Series A to make it happen.

Customer service system vendor Zendesk has agreed to buy Momentive Global, the owner of SurveyMonkey. The all-stock deal is valued at close to $4 billion, or roughly ten times Momentive revenue. Zendesk describes the merger as creating a “customer intelligence company” because it “connects what customers say and do, with how they think and feel.” Interesting way to look at it.