CDP Institute

Of course you know that GDPR goes into effect today. You probably weren’t wondering about CDP Institute’s own compliance efforts but rest assured we’ve done our best. You’ll notice new consent language on our downloads and we’ve updated our terms of use and privacy policy. What’s that you say – we’re supposed to notify subscribers of those changes? We just did.

Let’s take a break from obsessing about GDPR and obsess about blockchain. TechCrunch says venture capitalists have invested more than $1.3 billion so far this year, more than the previous eighteen months combined. Not really surprising.

There are so many new blockchain products that we can only mention the most intriguing. Poseidon Foundation uses blockchain to buy carbon credits as part of retail transactions. Their pilot project contributes to forest conservation in Peru every time someone buys Ben & Jerry’s ice cream at a store in London. The low transaction costs of blockchain make it practical.

You knew this was coming: a blockchain-based GDPR solution. Sure enough, it’s called GDPR Edge and was built by tech services company IntraEdge using Intel’s SGX secure processing technology. It runs on Microsoft Azure and is being sold by professional services firm BDO USA.

We’ll start with news that Google will integrate with the consent framework proposed by Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe and IAB Tech Lab. Or not – suspicions among publishers run high, according to Digiday. As you may recall, the IAB wants Web sites to pop up a list of partners that visitors consent to receiving their data. Publishers didn’t find this very appealing in the first place but it would probably work well for well known and relatively trusted brand like Google.

Confusion about GDPR opens some interesting opportunities. Here’s an announcement from something calling itself the European Center for GDPR Certification, which has launched a “Consumer Privacy Trust Seal”. They are definitely not a government agency and state clearly that “our function is not to certify businesses”. They do offer Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum versions of the seal, which makes very little sense if you think about it.

Visual analytics vendor Arcadia Data is also jumping on the GDPR bandwagon. You might find the connection tenuous but they do have data security and governance features that could help with GDPR compliance. David Meerman Scott calls this “newsjacking”. Many firms are doing it.

Adobe has acquired ecommerce platform Magento for $1.68 billion cash. Adobe competitors Oracle, Salesforce, and IBM already have ecommerce products. Magento is stronger in the mid-market than Adobe Experience Cloud, so this may give them an opportunity to expand in that direction.

Part of Adobe’s plan for Magento is to embed its Sensei AI technology. Oracle and Microsoft made their own AI-related acquisitions recently. Oracle bought Datascience.com, a self-service workbench for data science projects. Microsoft bought Semantic Machines, experts in conversational AI.

And one more acquisition: retail data giant dunnhumby bought Aptaris, an enterprise promotion management platform. It illustrates the trend towards integration of customer data management with data activation. You like trends, right?

Doubtful that emotional connection is what consumers crave most? You should be: CCW Digital found that having to repeat information when transferring between channels is the biggest complaint that agents hear, followed by inaccurate information, product issues, and long wait times. Agents’ own top complaint was unintegrated systems. But there’s hope: helping systems talk to each other was number one on managers’ project list.

NTT Data asked consumers directly about their top service frustrations and got quite different results from CCW: multiple transfers (12%) ranked far behind long wait times (43%), inability to reach a real person (20%) and uninformed agents (15%). Go figure. If you’re thinking automation will reduce wait times, consider this: 94% of consumers prefer a live agent, mostly because virtual agents often fail to resolve their problems. NTT does see change on the way as virtual agents get better.