Marketing, customer service, and sales leaders may all think it’s obvious that their own department is in charge of customer experience.  But they’d probably be surprised by this Bloomfire study which found other departments disagree: for example, 62% of marketers said marketing is in charge of CX but just 30% of people in other departments said the same.  Nearly half (45%) said half of their CX decisions are data driven, which may be obvious but is still rather sad.

Data pipeline companies also aren’t complete CDP systems but perform the key task of ingesting data from many sources. Airbyte, an open source platform that offers prebuilt data connectors, just raised a $26 million Series A for that sort of thing. And Jitterbit, a more established data connection company, just bought eBridge Connections, which specializes in e-commerce and B2B integrations.

Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.