CDP Institute

One reason for less loyalty has been a decline in service levels, according to Simplr research. A mystery shopper study found that email and chat wait times have increased despite brands using more digital service channels. More subtly: nearly all complex bot experiences ranked as “very poor” unless a human was standing by to help.

This report from personalization vendor Formation.ai found an increase in loyalty compared with five years ago, but responses were collected before the pandemic began. The over-all finding that personalization generates loyalty is still probably valid, although customers like personalized rewards and discounts much more than personalized advertising. One weird twist: personalized Web experience, marketing email, and mobile notifications were rated both the most likely to increase brand loyalty and to decrease it.

Adobe has expanded the data governance capabilities in its Real-time CDP, enabling users to label data based on its privacy status and use the labels to define and enforce usage restrictions. The company positions the enhancements as a way to empower users outside of IT. Yep,we’re talking Citizen Data Governors, although Adobe hasn’t yet used the term.

Back on the more familiar turf of Citizen Developers, Parabola has raised an $8 million Series A for its no-code tool to automate data tasks. They’ve also added a Shopify integration, joining Mailchimp, HubSpot, Magento, and many others.

Gong’s Web site is like a direct view into the subconscious of those hyper-enthusiastic sales people who make the rest of us nuts but get the job done. The actual product is AI technology that captures video, phone, email, and face-to-face interactions and extracts insights about people, deals, and market events. It must work: they just raised a $200 million Series D, bringing total funding to $334 million. Did I mention their chatbot is a bulldog?

Many people hope first party will fill the gap left by vanishing third party data. Meredith is boarding that bus with a new Data Studio that will use their first party data – holding oodles of insights on 94% of U.S. women – for audience targeting, research, and matching against a company’s own first party data.

Want more news about data-based research? Here’s another twofer. Dynata, which builds research panels drawing on more than 62 million consumer and business profiles, just bought Sharpr, which helps companies share research results internally. And LoopMe, which runs digital ad campaigns and surveys consumers to see the impact on brand attitudes, announced they’re now offering near-real-time feedback on connected TV campaigns. They have data on 90 million U.S. households and 250 million devices.

I could fill three newsletters with what’s in the queue today. We’ll start with last week’s announcement that the latest version of Firefox will delete redirect tracking cookies after 24 hours. Redirect cookies are a clever way to skirt rules against third party trackers. And while we’re reporting old news, you may have missed this item in our new privacy newsletter, reporting that Google Analytics settings give marketers more control over data collection. Worth knowing.

Venture funding has remained fairly steady despite the pandemic, according to this report from KPMG Private Enterprise. I couldn’t quite reconcile the graphs, which seem to show a modest downturn, with the words, which say activity is well ahead of 2019. It’s more clear that capital is more available for late-stage companies than new ones.

What’s really clear is the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation programs. This Twilio study found 79% of companies had increased their digital transformation budget and 92% are likely to add new digital communication channels. The average acceleration was estimated at six years.

This Fujitsu study of retail IT managers also finds growth in digital transformation budgets.  Data is from February, so this might have changed.  Alas, marketing ranks far behind other departments in transformation progress. Insult to injury: respondents said transformation in the finance department had as much impact on revenue as changes in marketing.

We have lots of surveys today, Dear Reader. We’ll start with a pair from Jamie in our Department of the Obvious. Conviva reports that streaming media consumption increased when people were trapped at home. The American Customer Satisfaction Index confirms that and adds it made them cranky: satisfaction with search engines, internet news and social media all fell. No prize for guessing that social media rates the worst on privacy.