I have a pile of personalization surveys for you today, Dear Reader. But the most intriguing study in the queue is this one from CX tech vendor TELUS International, which finds that companies are using fewer CX systems. Specifically, 50% of companies are now trying to reduce the number of CX vendors, compared with 44% two years ago and 27% five years ago. Suites still win, it seems.
Grab Singapore, a leading superapp in Southeast Asia, announced that it has bought and relaunched Singapore’s food site HungryGoWhere and its accompanying social media channels. The revamped HungryGoWhere brand aims to address the growing interest of diners to reconnect with its local food scene in much deeper ways.
There’s less surprise in the personalization surveys, which consistently show that consumers want personalized treatment but still care about privacy. Twililo’s State of Personalization 2022 reports increases 62% of consumers will be less loyal to brands that fail to deliver a personalized experience, up from 45% in 2021. But 65% worry data is being collected without their permission and just 40% trust brands to use it responsibly. On the bright side, 63% are okay with personalization so long as it’s based on data a brand has collected rather than purchased.
Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents. You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better. It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange. Price was not announced.