Speaking of old school: predictive ecommerce vendor Windsor Circle, which specializes in customer retention and upsell, announced it is now using split tests and reporting on revenue lift as an alternative to attribution for measuring the value of marketing efforts. They seem to feel this is new, although it was part of Marquis and other MCIFs in 1990s and a direct marketing best practice for decades before that.
Voice recognition isn’t new, but it’s much more important now that devices like Amazon Alexa and Apple Siri are capturing consumer intent. (See this blog post for a deeper analysis.) So it’s worth noting that Adobe Analytics can now extract information from speech captured on voice-enabled devices. This will make it easier for companies other than the device owners to use data from those interactions, assuming the outsiders are granted access to what’s said.
And again: purchase data aggregator IRI has launched the IRI Personalization Suite, which combines IRI’s own point of sale, panel, credit card, and location data with information from more than 250 million shopper loyalty cards. The data can be used for planning, advertising audience creation, media optimization, and results measurement. It’s a cloud-based game-changer!
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.