In today’s fiercely competitive market, delivering personalized experiences is crucial for customer engagement and loyalty. However, marketers who fail to adapt to the transition from decision-tree to trigger-based engagement strategies risk falling behind and missing out on the opportunity to captivate customers at every touchpoint with hyper-personalized experiences. 

In this workshop, discover how to seamlessly collaborate with your data team to unlock the full potential of your first-party data and create personalized experiences that captivate your customers at every touchpoint. 

Register and attend “How To Power Next Best Action with First-Party Customer Data,” presented by Snowplow.

Click here to view more MarTech webinars.

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Attracting interest in a tool or product may be the easy and fun part of building a business, but converting inquiries to purchasers is when it gets hard. So many brands today continue to struggle with acquiring, converting, retaining and creating loyal customers for life. Yet leading companies across the globe seem to be accomplishing all of that and then some.

Want to know how? Register and attend “Harnessing the Power of Customer Data to Stay Ahead of the Competition,” presented by Tealium.

Click here to view more MarTech webinars.

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What are you hoping to get out of your marketing technology? Do you need help getting there?

At the heart of marketing technology, customer data platforms offer marketers and advertisers a powerhouse of capabilities to drive relevant, personalized customer experiences. And at the heart of the CDP lies the data that fuels customer insights. 

Learn more by registering and attending “Get to the Heart of Customer Experience With Data that Delivers,” presented by Salesforce and Acxiom.

Click here to view more MarTech webinars.

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With so much uncertainty right now, one thing has remained constant: programmatic campaigns work. Programmatic is built for the open internet and provides a seamless cross-channel experience for consumers. Unparalleled targeting, customizable architecture, and advanced optimizations make programmatic an option you can rely on.

Register today for “The Power of Programmatic Advertising: Stay Relevant With This Reliable Tactic,” presented by Adtaxi.

Click here to view more MarTech webinars.

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Looking to create powerful marketing campaigns and better customer experiences? Marketers constantly seek new ways to unleash more power from their martech stack. The growing role of the data warehouse as the source of truth for customer data plays a key part in delivering these delightful customer experiences.

In this webinar, Juan Mendoza and Scott Brinker will discuss the emerging role of the category of warehouse-native and composable marketing technologies, the future of the martech stack, and the transition from packaged technologies to composable and modular solutions in the effort to reach customers better.

Register today for “The Next Big Thing in Martech: The Data Warehouse,” presented by Hightouch.

Click here to view more MarTech webinars.

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The all-cash agreement reflects a $12.5 billion valuation of Qualtrics.

SAP and Qualtrics. Since SAP bought Qualtrics in late 2018, it has moved to integrate its AI-driven experience management capabilities across SAP’s customer experience solutions, including SAP Service Cloud and SAP Sales Cloud. SAP says that Qualtrics has more than tripled its revenue since the acquisition. SAP floated the platform in 2020 but retained a majority share.

Qualtrics describes itself as an online survey tool. It uses AI to measure both customer satisfaction and employee engagement in real time. It claims to improve customer experience, team performance and product design.

“SAP intends to remain a close go-to-market and technology partner, servicing joint customers and continuing to contribute to Qualtrics’ success,” said SAP CEO Christian Klein in a release.

Why we care. What to make of the SAP Qualtrics story? Towards the end of the 2010s, SAP — under then CEO Bill McDermott — was plainly looking to put its CX offerings on a footing to rival Adobe, Oracle and, above all, Salesforce. Building on its 2013 acquisition of successful, Swiss-based commerce solution Hybris, by 2018 SAP had added Gigya and Callidus Cloud to its portfolio and launched C/4 HANA.

C/4 HANA was the umbrella term for SAP’s CX offerings — and the name was aimed at positioning it alongside SAP’s leading enterprise ERP suite S/4 HANA. Although Qualtrics joined the party, SAP never seemed to completely absorb it, as it had Hybris, for instance, which became SAP Commerce Cloud.

Qualtrics is the clear leader in its category and now begins another chapter in its story under long-time CEO Zig Serafin.

Dig deeper: Why did SAP buy Qualtrics?

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The company also announced a partnership with OpenAI, out of which a ChatGPT app (currently in beta) is available for Slack. The partnership will also make other “out-of-the-box” integrations between Salesforce tools and ChatGPT.

Dig deeper: OpenAI unveils ChatGPT API at very low prices

Einstein GPT. Billed as the world’s first generative AI CRM technology, Einstein GPT matches Salesforce’s proprietary AI models with real-time data from Salesforce’s Data Cloud. Salesforce customers can then connect that data with OpenAI’s models or other generative AI models, and generate content within their Salesforce CRM.

Customer data in the CRM allows marketers to communicate with their customers, and from that, the generative AI can help create personalized messages. For instance, salespeople using the tool will be able to generate personalized email responses or create other personalized content in campaigns that can potentially drive up response rates.

Integrations. In addition to integrations in all of Salesforce’s clouds, as well as Slack, Einstein GPT will also integrate in Tableau and MuleSoft, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in a statement.

“The world is experiencing one of the most profound technological shifts with the rise of real-time technologies and generative AI,” said Benioff. “This comes at a pivotal moment as every company is focused on connecting with their customers in more intelligent, automated and personalized ways.”

Marketing and sales capabilities. Here are all the Einstein GPT tools Salesforce announced:

• Einstein GPT for Sales. Auto-generate sales tasks like composing emails, scheduling meetings, and preparing for the next interaction.
• Einstein GPT for Service. Generate knowledge articles from past case notes. Auto-generate personalized agent chat replies to increase customer satisfaction through personalized and expedited service interactions.
• Einstein GPT for Marketing. Generate personalized content to engage customers and prospects across email, mobile, web, and advertising.
• Einstein GPT for Salesforce’s Slack app. Deliver AI-powered customer insights in Slack like smart summaries of sales opportunities and surface end users actions like updating knowledge articles.
• Einstein GPT for Developer.: Improve developer productivity with Salesforce Research’s proprietary Large Language Model by using an AI chat assistant to generate code and ask questions for languages like Apex.

Generative AI Fund. Salesforce Ventures also announced a new $250 million generative AI fund, the aim of which is to develop the AI ecosystem and bolster development around responsible generative AI.

Why we care. So far, this has been the year of generative AI. For years, Salesforce has been developing its Einstein AI capabilities. Now, that intelligence is given more pointed chat and content generation functions through its integrations with OpenAI’s Chat GPT.

Of course, AI in marketing has other flavors of functionality. For instance, Petco uses Einstein to generate product and experience recommendations to customers. They also keep a human close by to review many of the personalized templates the AI comes up with.

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Virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa, which are a growing part of the digital customer experience, from discovery via search marketing to customer support, may soon be used by protesters to disrupt organizations by flooding customer support channels, according to a study by Gartner. They believe this is one consequence of the increasing use of virtual assistants for legitimate customer support requests.

By the end of next year there will be 8.4 billion virtual assistants in use, up from 3.25 billion in 2019, according to Statista. These devices are rapidly becoming more sophisticated and are being used by customers to interact with companies. By 2025, 37% of customers will try using a virtual assistant to interact with customer service, according to The Gartner 2023 Leadership Vision for Customer Service and Support report.

Currently these interactions are for entirely legitimate reasons, like waiting on hold and ordering a pizza. Making them as seamless as possible is an increasingly important part of a customer’s interaction with a brand, even though the customer themselves aren’t directly involved.

Why we care. This is a fascinating and worrying example of a technology’s unintended consequences. Making something more efficient and easier-to-use is a big market advantage. Especially when it comes to customer service. As every marketer knows, few things build loyalty like great customer support. Do it poorly and you have a big weak spot in your brand.

Now, it may be that technological ease-of-use could also be a weak spot. What to do? Automate more, increase capacity and be ready to deploy more resources. Who knows if these attacks will come to pass, but be prepared is a prudent attitude.

As for the future, it is difficult to imagine all the possible things that may happen. The Pentagon employs a panel of science fiction writers to help them anticipate future threats. If these attacks come to pass, private industry may want to do the same.

Dig deeper: 3 steps to get ready for Siri, Alexa and other machine customers

Legitimate interactions with virtual assistants are going to increase. As of last year, Amazon Alexa had more than 130,000 skills people could potentially leverage to automate transactions. Soon virtual assistants will be able to request service, receive messages, make recurring transactions, report problems issues and gather product information via every customer service channel.

This by itself poses a challenge to organizations by increasing the demand for customer service. Within two years, 20% of inbound contact volume will come from virtual assistants, according to Gartner.

In response, many companies are investing in systems that use these capabilities — like a printer ordering more ink so a customer doesn’t have to. They are also automating customer service with chatbots and interactive voice systems.

But these legitimate interactions using virtual assistants will pave the way for protests, say Gartner’s analysts.

“Protests against business and government organizations are increasingly digital,” the report states. “In 2021 there were at least 9.84 million distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks designed to shut down organizations’ websites by overwhelming them with traffic. This was a 14% increase from 2019.” 

Ease of use will make virtual assistants a powerful vector for protest.

“Citizen-led denial of service attacks (cDoS) are a new type of denial of service, led by average people, not hackers, and performed through virtual assistants,” according to the report. “By 2024, citizens will shut down a major global enterprise company’s contact center through denial of service attacks launched by virtual assistants.”

These attacks are expected to be triggered by people protesting “social issues as opposed to maliciously motivated hackers.” They could be costly, as large businesses could lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in operational expenses responding to them. That’s in addition to the costs from lost productivity, customer churn and long-term brand impact.

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But deciding whether or not your company needs a call analytics platform is no simple task. It requires the same evaluative steps involved in any software adoption, including a comprehensive self-assessment of your organization’s business needs, staff capabilities, management support and financial resources.

Before jumping in, gather your team and answer these 10 questions to help you decide if these platforms are right for your organization.

Are we optimizing inbound phone calls as a sales or lead-generating channel?

The phone continues to play an integral role in customer communications, particularly as more consumers work and shop from home. An Ipsos report commissioned by Google found that 70% of mobile searchers have used click-to-call capabilities to connect with a business.

How much of our revenue (if any) do we attribute to inbound phone leads?

If the revenue you are already attributing to inbound calls is greater than the cost of the platform, then it makes sense to invest in one. For example, if you are in the automotive, financial services or telecom industries, your customers have a high propensity to use the phone to qualify “considered purchase” decisions.

Explore platform capabilities from vendors like CallRail, Invoca, CallSource, DialogueTech and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on enterprise call analytics platforms.

Click here to download!

What is our process for analyzing inbound phone conversations?

What kind of data can we pull out of calls? Call analytics platforms use AI- and machine learning-based speech analytics and natural language processing to provide robust insights into call quality, particularly around caller sentiment, tone and intent.

What call analytics capabilities does our organization need?

Prioritize the available call analytics features based on your most pressing business needs. For example, do you need to get started with basic call tracking data? Or send reports to clients (if you are an agency)? Are call conversions, missed opportunities or other in-call metrics most important? Or are pre-call tools, such as intelligent IVR and call routing more critical to your goals? The answers will help your organization choose a vendor that can help you meet your goals.

Who will use the platform? At what level in the organization will it be managed?

C-suite buy-in and appropriate staffing are crucial to the effectiveness of any call analytics platform. Increasingly, martech platforms such as call analytics are being managed by the CMO – and not the CTO or CIO. In either case, without the proper resources in place, the platform can end up becoming an expensive reservoir of untapped data with unfulfilled potential to increase revenue and improve your customer experiences.

How much training will we need?

Different platform vendors provide different levels of customer service – from self-serve to full-serve – and strategic consulting services. It’s important to have an idea of where you fall on the spectrum before interviewing potential partners. Training is essential. If your organization chooses not to hire internal staff, then consider whether you need to use a certified platform partner to effectively use the system.

Can we successfully integrate a call analytics system with our existing martech or ad tech systems?

Many enterprises work with different partners for email, ecommerce, CRM, social media, paid search, SEO and display advertising. Investigate which systems the call analytics vendor integrates with – whether natively or via API – and find out if they offer seamless reporting and/or execution capabilities with them.

What are our reporting needs?

What information do your marketing managers, salespeople, customer support teams and IT departments require to improve decision making? You want to know the specific holes in your current reporting that will be filled by additional functionality and, more importantly, you want to be sure that that extra information derived from call analytics will drive better decisions.

What is the total cost of ownership?

Enterprise call analytics platforms use on-demand pricing, meaning customers pay a monthly subscription fee that will vary by usage. The majority of vendors profiled in this report charge for both phone numbers and minutes. Some have platform and onboarding fees, and some do not. Examine your feature requirements closely, as modular pricing models mean vendors vary in their inclusion of some features as standard or add-ons.

How will we define success?

What KPIs do we want to measure and what decisions will we make based on call analytics data? Set your business goals for the call analytics platform in advance to be able to benchmark success later on. Without them, justifying the expense of the platform or subsequent marketing campaigns to C-suite executives will be difficult.

Our latest report Enterprise Call Analytics: A Marketer’s Guide is available here

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“I’m sure I told you that!”

It’s also a problem in business. It’s very easy to assume that everyone else knows what you know. Here are some examples of where this particular bias can crop up in business situations, along with some proposed solutions. 

Dig deeper: How marketers can use cognitive biases to influence customer decisions

Customer service

My friend Ralph had a job at a fast-food restaurant in high school and he would sometimes complain at the lunch table about dealing with customers. Someone would ask if they could get a complimentary cup, and Ralph would get frustrated and point to the obvious sign that said “no complimentary cups.” 

The thing is, the sign is very obvious if you’ve worked there 15 hours a week for three months. It’s not as obvious if it’s your first visit. You can’t expect people to read every sign everywhere they go. 

Solutions 

• Regularly remind your staff that they have special knowledge and familiarity that your customers don’t have. 
• Find a way to track where customers are getting confused and either find a better way to communicate with them or amend your policy to fit their preconceptions. After all, what’s more expensive, giving away a free cup or having frustrated staff and customers? 

Website design

The curse of knowledge also interferes with web, app and ecommerce design. What’s obvious to the programmer, or the designer, is not necessarily obvious to the customer — especially those “intuitive” things we’re all supposed to know somehow. 

When I got a new phone a while ago, I had to look up instructions to change some of the settings and some of them started with something like “go to your home screen,” which just made me have to look up “where is the home screen on a Pixel?” 

Don’t assume your customers know what you know. 

Solutions 

• Where possible, use the standard features everyone is used to. Or in other words, when in doubt, copy Amazon. 
• Before you roll out a design change or a new feature, have several people who know nothing about the project review it. 
• Have Apple users test your Android instructions and vice versa. 
• Create reporting mechanisms to track problems. If you expect people to follow a certain path, check to see if they’re behaving the way you expected. 
• Make it easy for customers to report when they’re confused or frustrated. 
• Reinforce the attitude that if a customer misunderstands, you have not communicated well enough. 

Dig deeper: 4 cognitive biases and psychological drivers for influencing behavior

Project management

I’m afraid I’m guilty of this one. “The updates are always in that spreadsheet I shared with you during the kickoff meeting. Didn’t you bookmark it?” 

Just because you said something doesn’t mean people heard you, understood you or took action based on what you said. A project manager is in the project every day. It’s obvious to the project manager that we need X before Y, that we already decided on 1 vs. 2 and that Z is due on Tuesday. It’s not obvious to people who have other worries and responsibilities. 

The curse of knowledge can also go the other way, where the technical people are aware of a problem, but the project manager is out of the loop. 

Solutions 

• Overcommunicate. Yes, it’s annoying, but it’s better than miscommunication. 
• Include links to important project documents in your regular updates. Make sure people know where they can find updates. 
• Project managers should check in with the technical people to hear their perspectives on looming problems. 

Buzzwords and industry lingo 

Do your salesmen speak in incomprehensible gibberish because they use buzzwords and acronyms? They might think it makes them sound like they know what they’re talking about, or maybe they’re so used to the buzzwords that they can’t help it, but it’s turning off many of your prospects. 

Solutions 

• Make it a habit to use the full name for something before you use the acronym. 
• Stop yourself when you use an industry buzzword and find another way to say the same thing. In addition to not sounding like a tool, you’ll expand your vocabulary and end up understanding the concept better. 

Taking offense over breaches of etiquette

I don’t play golf, but I understand there are a lot of rules for business meetings on the golf course. One of them is that you don’t talk business while you’re playing golf. I didn’t know that until yesterday, so if someone invited me on a golf trip, I might mess up and talk business on the 7th hole. 

There are lots of situations where we fear being the “ugly American” who doesn’t know the local customs, but the problem can go the other way as well. Just like the foreigner can think the American is being rude when the truth is that he simply doesn’t understand the expectations, we can mistakenly assume someone is being rude when they don’t understand our norms. 

Solutions:

• Never assume malice when ignorance is a good enough explanation. 
• Before you do something new, take a few minutes to learn the rules, including the social norms. 

It cuts the other way as well 

You don’t want to assume that people know things you know, but it can be annoying if you go too far the other way. For example, I recently heard a vendor speak to an association of publishers. These folk probably know more about subscriptions than anybody on the planet. The vendor spent five minutes explaining what a subscription is. That can be annoying. 

In other words, while you don’t want to assume everyone knows what you know, you also don’t want to treat educated, professional people like novices. It can be a hard balance to strike, but if you frequently remind yourself about that pesky “curse of knowledge,” you’ll do great. 

Dig deeper: Using psychology and better data practices to get customers closer to purchase

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