CDP Institute

Most shocking of all: the best customer experience comes from telcos and airlines. So says Brandwatch, which ranked TMobile, American Airlines, and Southwest Airlines in the three top slots of its CX report. Maybe they were grading on a curve?

CDP vendor RedPoint Global has launched a packaged solution for retailers, including predesigned data models and campaign flows. The new offering is cheaper and faster to deploy than RedPoint’s flagship Customer Engagement Hub. Unlike the Engagement Hub, the retail solution runs only on the Azure SQL database, only ingests data through batch files, and is limited to email, SMS, direct mail, and Web site channels. It is targeted at retailers with $250 million to $1 billion in revenue.

Nearly all retailers need a cross channel system because nearly all shoppers cross channels while buying. This study from retail management tech vendor iVend Retail found that 91% of shoppers research online before buying in a physical store and 84% browse a physical store before buying online. Just over 60% use their smartphones while they’re in the store itself. Other interesting info here too.

You know a tech trend is old news when it reaches the New York Times.

Data sharing vendor Bedrock Data has launched Fusion, which unifies customer data from source systems, stores the result in a SQL database, and shares it with other systems. Their previous product, Sync, moved data directly between applications. The persistent database puts Fusion squarely in CDP territory.

Identity data vendor Infutor maintains its own data sets but doesn’t build customer databases for clients. They’ve just added a real-time identity verification and enhancement solution called ID Max. Clients can provide a single identifiers and get back lots of details if the system finds a match. I’d be more excited about this hadn’t announced something similar a year ago.

When it comes to honking big piles of identity data, Acxiom LiveRamp is one of the biggest. They’ve just added IdentityLink for Television, which uses customer identities to connect advertising data with TV viewership data. Good for media planning, attribution, and cross channel campaigns.

Lots of AI-based analytics news today. We have Series A fundings from Luminoso ($12.6 million to do natural language analysis such as analyzing customer comments, understanding inquiries, and conversational search) and from Tellius ($7.5 million for a natural language query engine that finds interesting insights based on patterns within giant data sets.) Barking up the same tree, Clearstory Data has launched ‘Instant Data Discovery’ to find insights within blended data sets created by their automated data harmonization tools.

Why so much interest in AI-based analytics? Because it’s really hard to do the old-fashioned way. This survey from natural language tech vendor Narrative Science finds that 62.5% of business decision makers say their biggest pain point is reports that don’t explain what the data means, while 53.8% of report authors say their biggest pain is lack of time do to in-depth analysis.

AI vendors are careful to claim their tools will augment not replace human analysts, but who are they kidding?

You knew this was coming: location data is now so easily available that someone is giving it away. Location analytics vendor Placed is giving free access to visitor traffic data for 1,900 major businesses, including giant chains such as Walmart, McDonalds, and Starbucks. They hope to spur demand by educating the market.

Want to use that local traffic data to target local advertising on YouTube? It takes a separate campaign for each market – potentially hundreds of thousands. Yuck! But local marketing tech vendor Netsertive has solved the problem, automatically creating the campaigns and localizing the creative. Huzzah! But you’ll have to wait a bit longer: commercial release is a few months away.