CDP Institute

Conventional wisdom has it that the pandemic-driven shift to online channels caused a boom in customer experience tech.  So I don’t know what to make of this Jitterbit report that EMEA companies spent 15% less on customer experience integrations in 2021.  Jitterbit believes companies shifted resources to meet urgent needs for ecommerce (up 99%) and employee tech (72%).  Okay, but did CX spend really drop?

Crowdsourced business data has a mixed reputation, but apparently Lusha is making it work: the company just raised a $205 million Series B, following a $40 million Series A in February.  The system recommends relevant contacts from its base of 100 million business contacts and has direct integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, Gmail, Outlook, Zapier, and other common tools.

Lily AI calls itself the “industry’s first customer intent platform for ecommerce”, which is the sort of claim that raises the question of what – if anything – is really new.  The answer seems to be it analyzes product images to extract ten times more attributes than other systems get from text descriptions, correlates those attributes with customer behavior to infer intent, and uses the product to deliver highly targeted search results and recommendations.  The company just officially launched but already has testimonials from major retailers.