CDP Institute

Online survey vendor SurveyMonkey has bought Usabilla, which captures feedback from Web site users. It’s a natural extension of SurveyMonkey’s business. Price was $80 million.

Decibel Insight offers its own take on Web user experience, monitoring behavior down to mouse movements and building several levels of summary metrics that culminate in a single Digital Experience Score, their “universal metric for measuring experiences online”. They’ve just launched a new version that analyzes individual sessions as part of a larger journey.

Inuvo does yet another type of Web analysis, deriving concepts and relationships from words and phrases within online content and then using content consumption to infer user intent. The end result is used for ad targeting. Inuvo just announced a deal to integrate its data with the AppNexus programmable ad platform, which will make the data available on more than 60 ad exchanges.

B2B data compiler DiscoverOrg has purchased NeverBounce, which provides email verification and list cleaning. DiscoverOrg and ZoomInfo, which DiscoverOrg purchased last month, are both already NeverBounce customers. So you can think of this as a bit of tidying up within the on-going consolidation of the B2B data industry.

Did I say consolidating?

Don’t get too cocky: most firms still struggle with data activation, according to this study by Forrester for Tealium. Indeed just 6% activate their customer data across core functions in a coordinated manner. I don’t understand what that means, either, but it doesn’t sound good. Worth a look.

Lots of CDP-ish news for you today, Dear Reader. We’ll start with CDP-in-good-standing SessionM, which has just partnered with clienteling platform Tulip to give retail staff live access to SessionM’s detailed customer profiles and recommendations. It’s a perfect example of Customer Data Platform handing its information to an external delivery system.

On the other hand, retail email specialist Bluecore has crossed that boundary by tying its delivery engine directly to an internal CDP. Bluecore’s new product creates a unified view with customer, product, and behavioral data. This would probably meet the technical definition of a CDP if the data is shared with external systems. But even then, we’d call Bluecore a “delivery system with a CDP inside” rather than a CDP. This blog post tries to explain the distinction.

aqfer has all the pieces of a CDP but refers to itself as a “CDP Toolkit”, perhaps to indicate it is providing components rather than packaged software. They’ve just launched a new marketplace that helps data owners buy and sell personal data. Launch partners include ShareThis and AirDXP, which help to identify otherwise-anonymize web traffic.

Walmart has been doing all sorts interesting things to counter the advances of Amazon. Here’s the latest: purchase of natural language processing specialist Aspectiva, which analyzes customer reviews and uses the result to fine-tune ecommerce search results. The result is higher conversion rates.

Berlin-based zenloop also uses machine learning to understand customer feedback, although its more along the lines of using Net Promoter Score feedback to identify actions that will reduce customer churn. They just raised $6 million, their first public funding.

Want still more feedback? InMoment creates a unified view with survey, panel, and review feedback from customers and employees. They just added Market Experience Cloud, which adds information such as campaign results, product performance, and competitive activities.