CDP Institute

Every channel wants to be a shopping channel these days. Interactive video platform WIREWAX has just launched a new app that lets Chromecast users pause streaming videos to see information and make purchases. Users can even “turn any paused frame into a playful shareable meme with creative graphic layers”. Some people must have a lot of time on their hands.

Building customer journey maps may not be your highest priority activity during a pandemic, but Ansira reports that 39% of companies have maps in place and another 29% are building them. The number of maps is fairly small, though: three-quarters have five or fewer. Biggest obstacles are lack of staff time (41%), data quality (37%) and data silos (32%).

Disconnected sources (53%) and incomplete data (40%) are also cited as the biggest data problems in this SnapLogic survey on data trust. More than half (54%) of companies with little or no trust in their data said they use it to guide strategic decisions anyway. Wrap your head around that.

Speaking of trust, European regulators don’t trust tech giants to treat their competitors fairly. Nor does anyone else, but the EU is doing something about it. Their latest step is a set of guidelines for documenting how search ranking algorithms work. The guidelines aren’t legally binding but they offer strong hints for how the EU wants the platforms to comply with the Platform-to-Business Regulation (P2B), which is.

It’s easy to think of Cisco as an infrastructure company but their products also include Webex and contact center systems, so they are definitely in the customer experience and collaboration industries too. Reinforcing the point: they just paid $730 million for IMImobile, which offers a cross-channel customer interaction management suite. In other words, they live closer to Salesforce, Pega, and Twilio than you might have realized.