CDP Institute

Customer success vendor Gainsight has launched a Customer Data Platform of its own, part of a new Customer Cloud for subscription businesses. The new CDP pulls in data from many sources, lets users define what’s stored, and shares data with a variety of external systems. We haven’t seen the details but it sounds like a real CDP.

Selligent, a B2C marketing execution platform, doesn’t claim to have a CDP but does offer what they carefully call “CDP capabilities”. They seem to mean that they build multi-source customer profiles but use them within the Selligent platform. They’ve just added a customer information management tool that helps brands comply with privacy regulations. GDPR features are in place and CCPA is on the way.

What’s changed since the General Data Protection Regulation took effect one year ago tomorrow?  TrustArc and Ipsos found that 36% of UK consumers have greater trust in how their data is handled, which the press as spun variously as a success (“more than one third”) or failure (“only 36%”). I’d say any improvement in trust is a success these days. A global survey from Snow Software had similar results: 39% of data professionals feel more protected although 20% feel worse.

Business attitudes are the other side of the coin.

What about actual behaviors? Two-thirds of the Snow respondents said their companies had processed more than 100 data rights requests. TrustArc found 47% of UK consumers had exercised some GDPR privacy right and 10% had made a data deletion request. Airship reported that mobile app audiences have grown and notification opt-in rates remain steady around 67% but location data opt-in rates fell from 9.3% to 7.7%.

One of the less-recognized subspecies of Customer Data Platforms are customer success systems, which need unified customer data for their own purposes. The Natero customer success system builds a complete view, although I don’t know whether they meet the RealCDP requirement of making it accessible to other systems. I do know they were just purchased by Freshworks, a unified marketing, sales, and support system that specifically wanted Natero’s data assembly super powers.

People.ai reads email, calendars, conference, collaboration and telephone data, uses AI to identify who’s involved and extract meaning, posts the data in CRM and other systems so people don’t have to, and makes recommendations for what to do next. They just raised a $60 million Series C, possibly to fund all the words it takes to describe what they do.

Punchh offers a slew of CRM, marketing automation, and analytics solutions for restaurants and retailers. They just released an AI-based tool that extracts sentiment from online reviews (pretty common) and reacts immediately with recommended responses for phone and chat agents (pretty special).

You weren’t terribly interested in yesterday’s items about IT tools to build unified databases, Dear Reader. But I’ll double down with news that Google Cloud and Informatica have announced a strategic partnership along the same lines. At least they are familiar company names. Informatica also announced a partnership with analytics data platform Databricks.  You’ll recall Informatica bought the Allsight CDP in March.

TiVo, Kantar, and Drawbridge, and Kantar are also names you know. They’re working together to expand the information available to marketers about TiVo viewers. Most notably, the Drawbridge relationship will let advertisers target viewers outside of TiVo. Individuals will remain unidentified but the veil of anonymity just got thinner.

Xandr is the advanced advertising arm of AT&T, another familiar name. They’re also making it easier to target individuals across traditional and connected TV, mobile, and online devices. The tool is Community, an video advertising marketplace with inventory from more than 15 premium content publishers.

MarkLogic also helps technicians build databases, offering a data hub for integration and a NoSQL database for storage. They’ve now added “embedded machine learning” to optimize personalization, customer service, and other things. No claims here to be a CDP.