CDP Institute

Verint is a specialist in generating insights related to customer interactions. They’ve just released an “engagement data management” system, which they describe as “the industry’s first offering specifically designed to enhance the management and value of engagement data in its many forms”. It’s like a CDP, but less.

You may have thought BrightTALK was in the business of delivering Webinars, but it turns out they’re really collecting intent data. At least that’s the perspective of TechTarget, which just bought them to grow its stock of intent information. Price was $150 million.

The Federal Trade Commission and 48 attorneys general filed parallel anti-trust lawsuits against Facebook yesterday, alleging violations of federal and state anti-trust laws. The main charge is that buying WhatsApp and Instagram were aimed at removing market competitors to preserve Facebook’s ad monopoly. The long-expected suits may seek divestiture of the two acquisitions and other constraints.

Whether Facebook flicks off the anti-trust remains to be seen, but in the meantime it continues to expand its products. The latest addition is a shopping feature in WhatsApp, which will let users select items from a merchant’s catalog and send the order via WhatsApp message. Order processing and payments will be handled outside of WhatsApp.

Every channel wants to be a shopping channel these days. Interactive video platform WIREWAX has just launched a new app that lets Chromecast users pause streaming videos to see information and make purchases. Users can even “turn any paused frame into a playful shareable meme with creative graphic layers”. Some people must have a lot of time on their hands.

Building customer journey maps may not be your highest priority activity during a pandemic, but Ansira reports that 39% of companies have maps in place and another 29% are building them. The number of maps is fairly small, though: three-quarters have five or fewer. Biggest obstacles are lack of staff time (41%), data quality (37%) and data silos (32%).

Disconnected sources (53%) and incomplete data (40%) are also cited as the biggest data problems in this SnapLogic survey on data trust. More than half (54%) of companies with little or no trust in their data said they use it to guide strategic decisions anyway. Wrap your head around that.

Speaking of trust, European regulators don’t trust tech giants to treat their competitors fairly. Nor does anyone else, but the EU is doing something about it. Their latest step is a set of guidelines for documenting how search ranking algorithms work. The guidelines aren’t legally binding but they offer strong hints for how the EU wants the platforms to comply with the Platform-to-Business Regulation (P2B), which is.

It’s easy to think of Cisco as an infrastructure company but their products also include Webex and contact center systems, so they are definitely in the customer experience and collaboration industries too. Reinforcing the point: they just paid $730 million for IMImobile, which offers a cross-channel customer interaction management suite. In other words, they live closer to Salesforce, Pega, and Twilio than you might have realized.

“Email signature manager” sounds like one of those fake jobs listed on the The Onion. But it’s actually a big enough industry that one of the vendors, Exclaimer, has just raised $133 million from private equity investors, bringing total funding to $164 million. Their superpower is centrally controlling signatures for everyone in a big company.

“Virtual event manager” might also have sounded like a fake job a year ago but today it’s obviously real. Plenty of companies are working to develop on-line experiences that reproduce the good bits of live events, although it’s not always exactly clear what those were. If you’re keeping a list of the contenders, Wonder just announced an $11 million seed round for technology that makes it easier to strike up a conversation with online avatars.

Here’s a little stocking stuffer: Admetrics has just launched a freemium version of its Quantify automated campaign experimentation engine. Like its professional big brother, the system combines multivariate testing with Bayesian statistics and machine learning to deliver results more quickly and with less data than traditional A/B tests. And it can automatically introduce new variations as these become available, enabling continuous improvement.