BlueConic, a pure-play customer data platform (CDP), and Nagarro, provider of digital engineering and technology solutions, announced a strategic partnership to help enterprise organizations deploy BlueConic. Nagarro’s expertise in BlueConic’s technology, combined with the implementation and utilization best practices already used by BlueConic, will help ensure joint customers get value from their investment. Making first-party data a strategic asset is the future of all businesses. Yet accessing unified, actionable customer data can be challenging for innovative disruptors and established stalwarts. As these companies embrace the need for business transformation, they are confronting the pain of trying to use technologies with multiple unique ways of storing data and recognizing customers to support a fast moving, end-to-end customer experience.
Category: Marketing & e-commerce (Page 18 of 73)
SAP SE said it has created one marketplace for solutions and services from SAP and its partners, merging SAP App Center for partner solutions with SAP Store for SAP solutions to simplify the customer shopping experience. New SAP Store capabilities include a unified home page and intelligent search functionality, which bring together all of SAP’s digitally available solutions from partner apps. Partner solutions certified by SAP and SAP Endorsed Apps are prominently noted with visual identifiers. These features make it easier to navigate through SAP and partner solutions, allowing customers to browse by industries, categories, SAP products and lines of business. Additional features include an updated category menu, guided search, favorite product pages, and search filtering tips.
SAP’s consolidated search was built with impartiality in mind to help customers discover products and solutions that best fit their needs. Although SAP products are visually identifiable, SAP says the search functionality is fair and unbiased, presenting all products that fit the search. The same holds true for the content accompanying each search and offering. Category landing pages show customer reviews of SAP and partner solutions, with quotes and ratings. SAP’s goal is to provide a better customer experience whether purchasing for personal use or for a large enterprise.
Zendesk, Inc. announced the general availability of a comprehensive messaging solution as part of the new Zendesk Suite. The new package brings together all Zendesk’s service capabilities, including messaging, into an offering that brings more simplicity to the enterprise. Zendesk’s messaging tools are designed to give businesses the ability to have continuous, convenient, and personalized conversations whether customers want to text, chat on their computer, reach out over WhatsApp, and more, for a better customer experience. Companies can now provide connected conversational experiences across web, mobile, and social channels that work out-of-the-box with built in automation and the ability to scale to support modern enterprise needs. Zendesk’s messaging solution also offers proactive notifications, enabling specialized third-party bots, and allowing customers to transact directly within the conversation when browsing products, reserving seats, or making payments. As part of the new Zendesk Suite, Zendesk also packaged all its service capabilities into one solution with five new plans to meet a variety of business needs.
Khoros, a provider of digital-first customer engagement software, announced that it has acquired Flow.ai, a conversational AI platform for designing and managing chatbots. Adding Flow.ai’s technology advances Khoros’ conversational AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities, data science expertise, and reflects the Company’s continued investment in the automation framework that powers Khoros’ customer engagement platform. Khoros currently offers its customer-facing chatbot, Khoros Bot, as a fully developed, ready-to-use service that easily integrates with its digital customer care solution, Khoros Care. With Flow.ai, Khoros will extend the AI/ML capabilities available to brands for greater self-service and operational agility.
With the open APIs available in Khoros’ automation framework, the Company remains “bot agnostic” and will continue to enable brands to integrate with any third-party bot provider. The Company also offers expert guidance on bot strategy through Khoros’ Strategic Services team, who can help brands identify the steps in the customer journey that are best suited for automation and how to maximize the satisfaction and ROI of those experiences.
https://khoros.com/platform/ai-ml, https://flow.ai
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Xerox Holdings Corporation expanded its growing software portfolio with the acquisition of CareAR, an augmented reality support platform company that provides real-time access to expertise for customers, employees, and field workers. With CareAR software, remote agents and experts can virtually see the situation and visually guide a solution using a suite of augmented reality tools via desktop, mobile, and smart glass devices, as if they were in-person. Many field service on-site calls require remote expert assistance to resolve issues but cannot effectively communicate the context of the situation. This causes delays, creating negative customer perception while risking loyalty and retention. CareAR is the latest addition to a series of solutions Xerox has launched to provide digital transformation tools to customers. These include automation and centralization solutions like DocuShare, a content management platform providing tools to automate processes and support cloud-enabled digital transformation; and XMPie, a flexible technology that allows customization and personalization of assets across customer touchpoints, both online and offline, for full marketing campaign integration.
SOCi, an all-in-one marketing platform built for multi-location marketers, announced the availability of its new listening solution in its localized marketing stack. In today’s digital and local landscape, conversations are happening across hundreds or thousands of national and local digital pages. SOCi Listening enables multi-location marketers and local managers alike to surface and manage these conversations, discover user-generated content, identify social selling opportunities, monitor competitive insights, and deliver a positive customer care experience at every location. Most brand conversations are not directed at the business or even happening on the business’s page. Whether the conversation is a positive one that could benefit the local business, or a negative one that could go viral and impact the entire brand, each conversation carries the potential to affect business. Yet most brands, especially at the local level, lack the visibility into these conversations and with it, the ability to engage consumers and customers at scale when it means the most.
Episerver announced it has rebranded to Optimizely, following its acquisition of the business last year. Rooted in a heritage as a customer-centric digital experience platform (DXP), the new brand reflects the innovation potential of digital experiences with a data-driven, digital-first approach to empower people to unlock digital potential to create and optimize excellent experiences. Optimizely now offers a stronger combination of user and site level data, tied with omni-channel experimentation insights, giving marketers, merchandisers and developers advanced analytics to understand what is happening in each experience as well as how to continually optimize it. Also announced, Optimizely is launching Optimization-as-a-Service. This new offering combines targeting, testing and recommendations, bringing together the solutions from Optimizely Web and Episerver Content Recommendations. Partners like Perficient, Rightpoint and Kin + Carta are expanding their practices to offer optimization. Over the course of 2021 Optimizely will launch content-as-as-service, a headless DXP with authoring and editing capabilities.
https://www.episerver.com/company/press-room/episerver-reintroduces-itself-as-optimizely
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Algolia, a Search-as-a-Service company, announced that it has acquired MorphL, a Google Digital News Initiative-funded startup, to help power Algolia’s new AI offering. This new suite of API-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) models enables developers, data scientists, and marketers to predict users’ intent, personalize online experiences, and create targeted offers. Applying AI to every point in a user’s journey can be complex. Historically, developers’, data scientists’, and marketers’ options have been limited to a reliance on either “opaque” proprietary or open source offerings, or to build their own models from scratch, which could take several weeks or months. Algolia’s AI offering simplifies the ability to understand users’ intent so that it is possible to personalize experiences and offers, even from “first visit” and “first search.”
This acquisition extends Algolia’s intelligent search APIs, with recommendations and user behavior models all along the customer journey, so companies can deliver intent-based experiences and iterate quickly in response to market trends and user propensity profiles. It also allows them to leverage their market knowledge to manage and tune the entire experience.
https://www.algolia.com/products/ai-studio
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