Customer Data Platforms are the highest technology investment priority for traditional retail marketers, listed in the top 3 by 78% in this CommerceNext survey for Yotpo. Digital-first retailers, who struggle less with tech in general, rated attribution, messaging, and new ecommerce models ahead of CDP. The survey also covers business goals, privacy compliance, and other non-CDP topics if you have other interests.
Sastrify covers a mere 20,000+ solutions in its SaaS procurement platform. They offer a range of services to help small and mid-size companies catalog, track, select, buy, and monitor SaaS systems. Their news today is a $7 million seed round.
Customer support is emerging as a primary use case for artificial intelligence, sometimes to replace human agents but more often to help them. Zendesk just bought AI startup Cleverly for that application. We also just saw Level AI launch its own AI-based conversational support app with $15 million in funding. Next door in the customer success department, involve.ai just raised a $16 million Series A for AI to predict customer churn.
Just over half of consumers (54%) like to receive personalized messages because they show the consumers are known to the brand, plus they can be time savers. The rest (46%) find it at best unimportant, at worst creepy. Relevance far outstrips personalization when it comes to driving email opens (54% vs. 19%). Takeaway: treat each customer the way they prefer.