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.
Category: Marketing & e-commerce (Page 23 of 77)
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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Bloomreach announced its acquisition of Exponea, a Customer Data and Experience Platform (CDXP). Bloomreach also announced an investment of $150 million from Sixth Street Growth to fuel the growth of its digital commerce experience platform (brX).
Bloomreach’s e-commerce search and content services combined with Exponea’s customer data platform and marketing automation will create an integrated product and customer data platform. This combination accelerates the speed of execution for businesses to create, personalize, and optimize commerce experiences and accelerate revenue growth for both B2C and B2B brands.
The combination of Bloomreach and Exponea will deliver a commerce experience platform that unifies the full spectrum of customer and product data for Bloomreach’s real-time, AI-based recommendations, and actions that allow clients to drive purchases and loyalty. Further, Exponea’s experience in consumer data, privacy, and security ensures that current and future customers can securely access and manage this combination of data.
https://www.bloomreach.com/en/news/2021/bloomreach-poised-to-be-the-next-e-commerce-saas-unicorn-with-acquisition-of-exponea.html, https://exponea.com
Acquia announced Acquia Digital Commerce, a solution to enable marketers to unify data, content, commerce, and digital merchandising into a single data layer to deliver a seamless omnichannel experience across the customer lifecycle. Using Acquia Digital Commerce with Acquia Open Digital Experience Platform (DXP), marketers can drive real-time, personalized, shoppable experiences at every customer touchpoint. Together with partners commercetools and Lucidworks, Acquia has built a composable commerce solution, giving marketers flexibility to create digital experiences across the customer journey. Acquia Digital Commerce delivers the agility to build digital experiences across every channel, and the flexibility to support multi-tenant architectures and composable, multi-site experiences. With a microservices-based architecture, Acquia Digital Commerce helps ensure repeatability and reuse to drive standardization and compliance, and enables continuous refinement and testing to optimize results.
Teams can maximize their commerce investments by integrating this headless, cloud-native shopping platform with Acquia Open DXP. commercetools provides an omnichannel shopping platform and the Lucidworks AI-powered product discovery solution delivers personally relevant products and content to customers. Today also marks the launch of the Acquia DX Alliance, the company’s open technology partner community, to drive collaboration through an ecosystem of leading technology vendors providing choice and jointly delivering interoperable solutions that extend Acquia Open DXP.
https://www.acquia.com/why-acquia/acquia-digital-commerce
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