At least some marketers have gotten the message that customers only like personalization when it helps them. This Acquia report found 62% of marketers are focusing on personalizing customer service while just 49% are focused on personalizing communications. In fact, personalization ranked towards the bottom of their tech priorities (43%), behind marketing automation (63%), CDPs (54%), and AI (44%).
Moving data to the cloud is supposed to simplify management, but Flexera found that 92% of companies use multiple clouds and 45% integrate data between clouds, which creates its own challenges. While cost savings are the top goal, respondents estimate that 30% of cloud spending is wasted. Just 16% of companies refuse to load any customer data into a cloud system.
Marketers in this CleverTap survey also seemed remarkably down-to-earth. They listed segment-level campaigns as their most important use for customer data (75%), while personalized customer messages ranked sixth at 46%. They also said lack of quality customer data is their top internal pain point (42%), far ahead of lacking real-time data (25%). Lots more here including key issues by industry, which are always intriguing.
It barely feels like news when industry giants add AI features, since that’s what they’re expected to do. But lots of people use their products, so their announcements are probably of higher interest than most. With that in mind, let’s note that Adobe has just announced general availability of agents for audience creation, journey orchestration, experimentation, journey insights, website optimization and agent support.