CDP Institute

Nuance is best known for the speech recognition technology which powers automated telephone customer service systems.

TouchCR is a just-launched Salesforce AppExchange app that can gather data from all Salesforce.com products to build a unified customer profile, append external data, and then produce reports and segmentations including enhanced RFM (Recency, Frequency, and Monetary Value) scores. The segments and scores can be fed to external systems to use in campaigns.  According to TouchCR, it’s the first system to unify data from all the Salesforce clouds. It doesn’t appear to integrate non-Salesforce data.

Venture funding for marketing technology nearly doubled from $7.96 billion in 2015 to $14.05 billion in 2016, according to the Investscape 2016 from MarTech Advisor. The largest deal was $2.5 billion invested by Koch Brothers in Infor; that deal single-handedly made the platform/suite category that largest fund recipient for the year. Other top-funded categories were internet services, mobile apps, and customer experience. Lots of company-by-company details here if you’re interested.

Let’s look at some companies outside the U.S. today.  We’ll start with Boxever, a Dublin-based Customer Data Platform and orchestration system that has specialized in the travel industry. The company has just repackaged its unification components as Boxever OneView and its orchestration tools as Boxever Engage. It’s part of a move to add retail and financial services clients. Packaging aside, the system capabilities are still pretty much as described in this recent review.on Customer Experience Matrix.

IOVOX is a London-based firm that captures telephone call data so companies can better analyze where calls are coming from and how they relate to marketing programs and sales results. Boring but important. The company just raised $10 million to finance entry into the U.S. market.

Closer to home, Toronto-based AdParlor develops social and video advertising technologies.

IT trade group CompTIA asked U.S. IT workers about technology acquisition and management at their organizations.

NewVantage Partners advises senior business and technology executives, mostly in financial services. They polled their constituents, mostly data and analytics leaders, about big data initiatives. Nearly all (95%) had at least started a project and 81% felt they had yielded some business benefit. But, marketers may feel marginalized: the most common gains were in lower costs (49%) and innovation (44%), with new revenue ranked fourth (33%). Another interesting look at the world through non-marketer eyes.

Finally we have a study about marketers.

Customer experience involves more than just marketing.

Another customer experience that marketers don’t control directly is what happens in their channel organizations, whether branches, agents, or independent dealers and distributors.

Here’s a reminder why customer experience is important: a recent Janrain survey that found that “good customer experience” is the single most important factor in convincing consumers to share personal data. Experience was important to 86% of consumers, ahead even of control over communications (78%), compelling loyalty programs (74%) and promising not to share data with third parties (71%). But it’s not all about feeling warm and fluffy: 62% said they’d register to receive a product discount.