Speaking of ad blockers, creative portfolio Website Visual Objects found they’re twice as common on desktop than mobile devices and that video ads are the most annoying of all. The study quotes Statista research showing nearly one-third of computers use some form of blocker and the usage continues to grow.
Digital behavior analysis vendor Contentsquare has raised a $60 million Series C, bringing its total funding to $120 mllion. Contentsquare captures Web and mobile app behaviors, provides journey analytics, heatmaps, and other reporting, and uses artificial intelligence to alert marketers to interesting situations. Founded in 2012, the Paris-based firm now has more than 300 employees worldwide.
Jamie is still on loan to our Department of Counter-Intuitive Results. He offers news that Verizon, a telecom provider not usually associated with great customer experience, is selling a suite of customer service tools. These connect self-service and call center systems with a unified customer view and apply AI to select customer treatments. The ads just write themselves: Now you can offer your own customers that great Verizon experience!
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.