CMO's top 8 martech stories for the week - 2 May 2019

ForgeRock achieves FAPI

ForgeRock, a platform provider of digital identity management solutions, announced it is the first Identity and Access Management vendor to achieve conformance with the OpenID Foundation’s FAPI (Financial-grade API) standard.

FAPI is a fully open standard designed for banks and fintechs in Europe and around the world to build Open Banking standards for secure exchange of consumer financial information.

For two years, ForgeRock has worked with the Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE) to provide a Model Bank with APIs built to specification. Most recently, ForgeRock delivered a Sandbox-as-a-Service to enable agile development teams to achieve compliance with Open Banking and the Revised Payment Service Directive (PSD2).

Verint launches Anomaly Detection

Verint announced the addition of Anomaly Detection as a new capability to its expanding Voice of Customer (VoC) solutions. Anomaly Detection is part of Verint’s analytics solution that aims to help companies automate insights and prioritise improvements to customer experience (CX) to drive business impact.

Anomaly Detection acts as a ‘virtual CX analyst’ enabling faster, smarter issue resolution and less risk of bias. Machine learning algorithms run in the background and surface significant, sudden changes in CX scores and top possible causes by analysing thousands of data combinations that would be impossible to do manually.

Key features include: constant monitoring of significant changes to NPS, CSAT or driver scores based on past and predicted performance; rapid investigation of most likely causes behind sudden changes in CX; and real-time alerts via SMS or email to speed time to action and resolution.

Optimove launches BI Studio

Optimove, a relationship marketing hub, announced its new BI Studio offering. Optimove's BI Studio builds on Optimove's existing CDP (Customer Data Platform) capabilities by empowering marketers to create personalised, sophisticated business intelligence reports, all from within Optimove.

With the addition of BI Studio, organising, analysing and sharing data and insight throughout an organisation is easier. Optimove BI Studio features include: powerful reporting, interactive data visualisations and permissions management.

Freshworks expands Australian footprint

Freshworks, the provider of cloud-based customer engagement software, has expanded its operations in Australia with the opening of its office in Melbourne. This is the company’s second office in the A/NZ region, after Sydney, in three years.

The Melbourne office is a result of soaring local growth, with annual recurring revenues increasing by five times, since the inauguration of the Sydney office in September 2015.

With the addition of the Melbourne office, the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company, headquartered in San Mateo, USA, has grown its workforce to over 2000 employees, spread across four continents.

Freshworks secured $100 million in investment led by Accel and Sequoia, with participation from CapitalG, bringing Freshworks’ total amount of capital raised to $250 million as of July 2018.

FullStory closes funding round

FullStory just closed a US$32 million series C funding round, bringing total funding to around US$57 million. The round was led by New York-based Stripes, a new investor to the group, with additional new investor Dell Technologies Capital joining alongside existing investors GV (formerly Google Ventures), Kleiner Perkins and Salesforce Ventures.

FullStory aims to tell marketers when, where and why they are losing CX-related revenue and operationalises concern for the digital customer experience across organisations in a secure, scalable and privacy-compliant way. The resulting insights are actionable, intuitive, real-time and easy to access for organisations big and small.

FullStory plans to use the funds to further evolve its digital experience platform into an engine for digital intelligence.

Quantum Metric unveils Activate

Quantum Metric, a digital experience intelligence platform, announced Activate, a capability that empowers businesses to dynamically respond to user behaviour in the moment.

Activate leverages Quantum Metric’s real-time data engine to surface digital insights and make them actionable within any platform. The relevant information is computed and shared via Activate’s real-time webhook to numerous endpoints, all within milliseconds of a user experience anomaly.

Key features of Quantum Metric Activate include: rescue: detect frustrations and deploy rescue attempts immediately; Re-engage: create dynamic segments for retargeting or personalisation based on unique behaviours, including rage-clicking or feature engagement; and Enrich: pass behavioural information into other analytics tools for alerting, reporting or segmentation purposes.

SugarCRM announces product enhancements

SugarCRM announced several new platform capabilities to help companies accelerate their business growth. These new capabilities will enable them to resolve customer issues quickly, collaborate more effectively, make faster and more informed decisions about their customers, eliminate time-consuming manual processes, and expand real-time mobile access to critical customer information.

New enhancements to help customers: Collaborate more: new email and comments log features enable customer service representatives to collaborate more effectively, resolve customer issues faster and increase customer satisfaction by providing a more unified and consistent service experience; Know more: customers can now harness the data in Sugar to make better and more informed decisions and optimise their sales and support operations; Do more: workflow automation has been taken to a new level with advanced capabilities in the new SugarBPMTM; Sell more: to make it faster and easier for customers to sell more, Sugar 9 enables them to create fully customised and personalised quotes; Protect more: to help protect customers, the company has bolstered its security organisational processes and evidence gathering capabilities; and Go faster: new optimisations improve performance.

Khoros launches Ads Capabilities

Khoros (formerly Spredfast and Lithium), a digital customer engagement platform, announced the launch of Ads Capabilities to help enterprises maximise their paid and organic social media programs.

As the first innovation released by the recently merged company, Ads Capabilities drives home the need for enterprises to have clear sight into every piece of their organisation and stay connected to their customers.

With Khoros Ads capabilities, organic and paid social teams have direct access to see what ads and posts are going out in real time. Ads capabilities are an overlay across Khoros Social Marketing that brings best-in-class planning and reporting on organic content to native advertising tools like Facebook Ads Manager.

Key features include: visibility, governance, reporting, and moderation.

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