Have we mentioned recently that it’s helpful to unify customer data? The folks at Qualified just raised a $51 million Series B to do that, specifically in the form of identifying Web site visitors, finding internal and third party data about them, and then using it to help chat agents, sales reps, and others. Their system only works with the Salesforce Sales cloud.
If you’re looking for a broader measure of brand perceptions, BlueOcean analyzes data from hundreds of sources including social media, forums, review sites, and financial reports to understand consumer attitudes towards brands. They’ve just announced they’ll release an API later this year that will let third party applications access this data.
Signs and other “out of home” media are probably the oldest form of advertising, so there’s something faintly amusing about buying them with programmatic technology and using mobile devices to track the results. Or not. Either way, you might like to know that Verizon Media has just launched full-funnel self-service product suite so you can plan, buy, measure, and optimize your digital out of home ads in the most modern ways possible.
Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents. You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better. It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange. Price was not announced.