CMO's top 8 martech stories for the week - 17 June 2022
- 17 June, 2022 11:35
InMoment acquires customer review management company
Experience management vendor, InMoment, has completed its acquisition of ReviewTrackers, a customer review management software company, for an undisclosed sum.
ReviewTrackers allows clients to better understand and manage their customer reviews across 100+ sites with its review management technology. It works with more than 175,000+ business locations globally.
Together, the companies said they’re planning to accelerate delivery of an integrated solution focused on analysing, amplifying and maximising customer feedback insight and action to accelerate acquisition and improve customer retention while driving more authentic connections with customers. Under the deal, founder and CEO, Chris Campbell, plus the ReviewTrackers team continue in their roles and will play a key part in helping InMoment’s experience improvement ambitions.
“The acquisition of ReviewTrackers makes InMoment the first experience company to extend customer insights, analytics and action across the full customer lifecycle – acknowledging that customer reviews often set the stage for customer experience,” InMoment CEO, Andrew Joiner, said.
“Combining ReviewTrackers’ award-winning customer review management with our award-winning XI Platform will give companies the unique ability to expand beyond surveys to include social ratings and reviews, access a larger share of customer voice, manage online reputation and improve experiences at an unparalleled scale.”
Adobe adds Real-Time CDP innovations
Adobe has made a number of improvements to its customer data platform (CDP) across customer profiling, artificial intelligence-powered targeting and security functionality.
The Real-Time CDP improvements include enriching customer profiles with Adobe Commerce (Magento), allowing retail brands to link first-party commerce data, such as shopping and browser behaviour, to its CDP and other Adobe Experience Cloud applications to better personalised journeys.
AI for advanced targeting and more efficient pipeline building is also being promised through predictive lead and account scoring for Adobe Real-Time CDP B2B (Business-to-Business) Edition and Real-Time CDP B2P (Business-to-Person) Edition. According to the vendor, this allows brands to create a more efficient pipeline by identifying people and accounts likely to become sales opportunities using Adobe Sensei-powered intelligence.
Adobe Real-Time CDP is also introducing new privacy and security enhancements designed to manage customer data. These enhancements include encryption control, tools to automatically honour policies around consumer consent or preferences and attribute-based access controls. In addition, generally available with Adobe Real-Time CDP is HIPAA readiness with Healthcare Shield, a new Adobe Experience Platform offering for healthcare brands subject to securely leverage certain types of sensitive personal data to deliver personal experiences throughout the healthcare customer journey.
Finally, Segment Match in Adobe Real-Time CDP is now generally available to manage and activate audience data across multiple channels while using Adobe’s governance and consent tools to manage and enforce how audience data is collected, and for what purpose.
“Businesses that invest in putting their first-party data into action are the ones that will deliver personalised experiences and beat the competition,” said Adobe senior vice-president, Adobe Experience Cloud, Anjul Bhambhri. “With changing consumer expectations in the digital economy, the time to move away from third-party cookies is now and brands need to adopt a first-party data strategy to stay relevant.”
Adobe also this week announced new services in Adobe Analytics, including support for data across the metaverse and streaming media and a fresh service that transitions data from other analytics products while preserving historical compliance with regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.
Among the Analytics updates is support for Metaverse analytics, extending the reach of Adobe Analytics to measure and analyse specific events, such as the volume of engagement with 3D objects and immersive experiences, as well as collecting interactions across multiple metaverses. This data can then be combined with insights across other channels like the website or mobile app, to understand changing consumer preferences.
On the streaming media front, Adobe has extended Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) so teams can tie digital media consumption to engagement on other channels like social media, websites and offline channels. A retailer, for instance, can see the types of content that drive social engagement and/or in-store activity, to deliver personalisation and drive retention efforts.
Adobe complemented the platform news with a new service for businesses across industries to switch to Adobe Analytics. A bulk data insertion API is now available, for example, to help banking organisation teams to move or activate historical data into Adobe Analytics from online or offline channels, such as point-of-sale devices, CRM systems and mobile applications.
Intelligent data mapping then preserves the underlying structure of data while suggesting new ways to measure the customer journey. Brands can also retroactively apply dimensions to historical data, such as new attribution models.
Databricks introduces data lineage capabilities
Data and analytics vendor, Databricks, has taken the wrappers off new data lineage capabilities aimed at giving customers more transparency and proactive control over how data is used in their lakehouse.
Data lineage describes how data flows throughout an organisation. Using this new feature of Unity Catalog, customers are able to gain visibility into where data in their lakehouse came from, who created it and when, how it has been modified over time, how it’s being used, and much more. Data lineage for Unity Catalog is now available for preview on AWS and Microsoft Azure.
Databricks said data lineage empowers data scientists, data engineers and data analysts to be context aware as they perform analyses, resulting in better quality outcomes. Additionally, data stewards can see which data sets are no longer accessed or have become obsolete to retire unnecessary data.
Key features include automated run-time lineage, with information captured for tables, views and columns and across upstream and downstream data sets. Data lineage also helps organisations better meet compliance standards such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), or Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
“Governance capabilities such as data lineage are critical as we work to build the industry’s most robust lakehouse platform,” said Databricks co-founder and chief technologist, Matei Zaharia. “Without good data lineage, it is challenging to track the business and verification processes that data-driven organisations need to be successful. Our goal is to ensure our customers can focus on insights and move toward proactive data management practices through a unified, transparent view of their entire data ecosystem.”
Neustar debuts Ready-built Marketing and Analytics Clean Room
Neustar, a TransUnion company, has launched its own Marketing and Analytics Clean Room combining identity resolution, machine learning and privacy-enhancing technology capabilities in one platform.
The vendor is pitching the solution as one to power the next generation of privacy-preserving data collaboration, audience targeting and marketing analytics for advertisers and publishers across first-party customer data, as well as second- and third-party channel and media partner sources.
Neustar said its Marketing and Analytics Clean Room was designed to execute a wide variety of marketing, measurement and analytics use cases, while providing the privacy enhancing technologies required to protect against data deprecation and data privacy concerns.
It claims a first by combining native identity data and ML-powered graph capabilities with integrations across the media and marketing world including linear and connected TV providers and the walled-gardens.
Key functionality includes the ability to implement data governance, privacy and compliance controls for data collaboration; model attribute-based, performance-based and lookalike audiences; execute closed-loop measurement including reach and frequency analytics; integrate first-party data from CRM, CDP and other customer data sources; and leverage second- and third-party data.
“Our Clean Room, unlike much of what you see in-market today, powers a wide variety of advanced marketing, measurement and data science use cases right off the shelf,” said Neustar SVP and GM of Product, Steve Silvers. “Our teams have spent years building and refining the core privacy-enhancing technology, machine learning, and identity graph capabilities brands and publishers need to manage and activate consumer data securely across all of their ecosystem partners.”
Shopify unveils new Audiences
Shopify has launched a new Audiences offering to help merchants find new customers with high intent to purchase their products.
Audiences is based on aggregated data from Shopify merchants and buyers and is designed to make it easier for merchants to find prospective customers. To do this, merchants select the product they want to sell more of, then machine learning builds an audience of high-intent buyers tailored per merchant, and the audience is directly and securely exported to their ad network of choice.
Shopify Audiences also offers audience-level measurement, rather than by campaign. Initially, Shopify Plus merchants can sync Shopify Audiences with Facebook and Instagram. The vendor plans to extend this to platforms such as TikTok, Snap, Pinterest, Microsoft Advertising, Criteo, and others in the near future.
“We know that independent merchants may have to pay twice as much to find a new customer as they did a year ago. In fact, one merchant told us their customer acquisition cost climbed 80 per cent over the last year,” said Shopify VP of product, Kaz Nejatian. “We've also seen merchants’ return on ad spend drop, reflecting the growing difficulty of using digital marketing to find new buyers. That’s why we’re launching Shopify Audiences to fix it—without compromising privacy standards."
Shopify Audiences has been available to Shopify Plus merchants in early access since late 2021 in the US and Canada. Global expansion timeframes haven’t been detailed as yet.
Verint Introduces Total Quality, New Quality Management Capabilities
Verint is pitching its Quality Management approach as one that can help organisations gain a more holistic and strategic approach to elevating customer experience quality across the enterprise.
During its Verint Engage 2022 customer conference, the vendor detailed its concept of Total Quality, a more comprehensive way to evaluate customer engagement performance across an enterprise. According to the vendor, traditional quality management solutions monitor and evaluate only a small sample of interactions ranging between one and three per cent.
Verint’s Total Quality approach, based on its array of solutions, aims to allow companies to greatly increase the number of channels and interactions that are monitored, reducing the risk of non-compliance and ensuing more customer perspective of quality is brought into the picture. Its platform mix is also designed to automate real-time coaching to guide calls to a positive outcome.
Verint Cloud Platform solutions comprising the company’s Total Quality approach include Verint Automated Quality Management, which autoscores up to 100 per cent of interactions across voice and digital for greater quality and compliance. The solution also triggers alerts and presents the results of coaching sessions. Verint Interaction Quality then integrates the customers' perception of quality into the quality management scorecards and evaluations, providing insights into the impact of agent and bot behaviour.
Verint Real-Time Coaching taps into the vendor’s Real-Time Agent Assist and uses advanced AI to listen to customer calls as they happen and automatically identify opportunities to guide interactions toward better outcomes. The application can identify a variety of coaching opportunities and offer immediate advice to the agent regarding knowledge, empathy and compliance. Verint Performance Management, meanwhile, displays employee key performance indicators in role-appropriate scorecards, giving employees daily and intraday visibility into objective, data-driven assessments of their performance.
SnapLogic lifts automated data preparation
Another vendor with its eye on improving data management capability this week is SnapLogic. The enterprise automation platform provider has debuted new automated data preparation, transformation and extraction and API capabilities to accelerate time-to-value of cloud data and enterprise integrations.
Latest features and enhancements to the SnapLogic platform include SnapLogic AutoPrep, a new, intelligent data preparation feature that automates and simplifies data preparation tasks and is designed to accelerate data mappings from source to destination endpoints. A second enhancement is new extract, load and transform (ELT) connectors into several cloud data platforms, plus new additions to SnapLogic’s public API management support for systems such as GitHub Enterprise and HashiCorp Vault. This gives companies the ability to publish external third-party APIs and support for Open API Spec 3.0.
SnapLogic said it’s also simplified discovery and adoption of pre-built pipelines in SnapLogic Studio, speeding time-to-value from integrations.
ARInsights Launches ARchitect Interactions for Google Workspace
Analyst relations management platform, ARInsights, has created a Google add on to make it easier to work between its technology and Gmail and Google Calendar environments.
ARchitect Interactions for Google Workspace is a free download from the Google Workspace Marketplace and connects ARchitect, ARInsights’ analyst relations (AR) productivity software, to a user’s Gmail inbox and Google Calendar. The add-on brings Gmail and Google Calendar information directly into ARchitect to increase AR efficiency.
This allows a user to turn emails and calendar appointments directly into interactions in ARchitect, for real-time viewing by team members, link emails with analyst meetings, edit interaction details, search for and reference interactions through Google clients and further interaction.
ARchitect’s platform a database of 8000 industry analysts and influencers, as well as the ability to capture and track analyst interactions, manage projects with them and report on trends in activity and results.
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