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Painful Customer Support Experiences Bring 52% of American Consumers to Tears and Profanity

Genesys Survey Highlights Cultural Differences as US, China and India Show Highest Rate of Frustration While Seeking Help

More than half (52%) of US respondents in a recent survey reveal they become so frustrated when soliciting customer support that they swear or even cry. This figure is similar to UK survey results (50%) but pales in comparison to the 60% response in India. Other highly emotional country results include China (58%), Singapore (55%), and Malaysia (51%), comparing to only 19% of South Korean respondents.

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These insights are the latest in a series of research-based announcements from Genesys, the global leader in omnichannel customer experience and contact center solutions. Genesys commissioned surveys in 13 countries around the globe to examine consumer opinions on the increasingly automated customer experience: Australia, China, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, the UK and the US.

Which Americans cry and swear when contacting customer support?

Survey respondents selected just one option — frequently, occasionally, rarely, never — to this simple question: “Do you ever get so frustrated trying to get customer support that you swear or cry?”

In the US survey, 15% of consumers say they “frequently” become so frustrated that they swear or even cry, with an additional 37% saying this “occasionally” happens. But not all Americans resort to tears and profanity during their customer support interactions. The survey data shows several interesting distinctions among US respondents by gender, age, and geographic region — sometimes contrary to expectations.

  • Men lose their temper more than women. Within the US, more than half of male survey respondents (56%) say they “frequently” or “occasionally” become so frustrated by customer support that they swear or cry. This compares to 49% of women. The gender difference is even more noticeable when looking at those who answered “frequently” — 20% of men versus only 11% of women.
  • Generation X whines while senior Boomers chill. In the US survey, 19% of people ages 35-44 and 22% of those ages 45-54 admit they “frequently” swear or cry during a customer support experience. Meanwhile, seniors over age 65 are by far the least likely to get angry, with 28% saying they “never” get so frustrated by customer support that they swear or cry.
  • The West is not the best. Among the four US geographic regions, survey respondents living in the West say they have the highest incidence (59%) of swearing or crying during a customer support experience — 19% “frequently” and 40% “occasionally.” They also have the lowest “never” rate (16%).

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“Throughout the year, and especially during the chaotic holiday shopping season, it’s a challenge for many organizations to provide frustration-free customer experiences,” said Janelle Dieken, senior vice president of product marketing at Genesys. “When implemented correctly, technology can remove the friction, enable businesses to predict customer needs, and deliver experiences that keep holiday spirits bright.”

Who has customer support meltdowns?

While Americans have more emotionally charged customer support exchanges than survey respondents in other Western countries, 33% in India admit they “frequently” cry or swear, the highest rate among the 13 countries surveyed. China, with 20%, is the only other country besides India to show a higher response than the US.

South Korean and Japanese consumers have the lowest propensity to swear or cry during a customer support interaction, with only 4% saying they “frequently” do. However, if factoring in those who say they “occasionally” swear or cry, South Korea is the true outlier among the 13 countries in the survey. Just 19% of South Koreans say they frequently or occasionally swear or cry, versus 34% of survey respondents in Japan.

Only 20% of Americans are so relaxed with customer support that they “never” swear or cry. Among the 13 countries in the survey, only China (14%), Singapore (14%), and India (11%) had a lower response rate. This compares to the relatively stoic people in South Korea (50%), Thailand (41%), Indonesia (31%), and Germany (29%).

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WalkMe Joins the AWS Partner Network Global Startup Program

WalkMe, a leading Digital Adoption Platform and one of the fastest-growing software companies globally, announced that it has joined the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) Global Startup Program. The APN Global Startup is a unique “white glove” support and go-to-market (GTM) Program for selected startup APN Partners, so that they can build on their AWS expertise, better serve shared customers, and accelerate their growth. To be selected for the APN Global Startup Program, WalkMe has to meet pre-defined criteria, including a clear, demonstrated product-market fit for an innovative enterprise tech product, be backed and recommended by a top-tier venture capital firm, and have a strategic commitment to building their AWS and cloud expertise.

Read More: What Does The Acquisition Of SnapApp Mean For Uberflip Users?

The APN Global Startup Program enables qualifying startups to gain product design wins, visibility, exposure, leads, and commercial opportunities made possible with exclusive APN resources and dedicated Startup Partner Development Managers (PDM) with deep AWS knowledge and startup business experience, that guide startups in their growth journey with APN. By becoming an APN Global Startup Partner, WalkMe will receive benefits ranging from a tailor-made plan for mapping the startup needs and opportunities to a selection of AWS services and APN programs, promotion support to drive visibility and awareness around the startup offering, to resources for helping startups sell and deploy innovative solutions on behalf of AWS shared end-customers.

“Joining the APN has helped WalkMe access and leverage various AWS resources and gain access to a wide network of customers and other APN Partners,” said Rafael Sweary, President and Co-founder of WalkMe. “WalkMe continues to strategically work with leading technology players such as AWS and others that help push WalkMe and the DAP vision forward.”

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WalkMe pioneered the Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) to bridge the gap between humans and technology. With WalkMe’s Digital Adoption Platform, users are more efficient and productive, executives have better visibility into digital usage, and organizations maximize the full value of their digital assets to successfully guide their enterprises through digital transformation. As a trusted product and vendor for more than 2,000 enterprise companies across all market segments, WalkMe works with over 30% of Fortune 500 companies and over 40% of Fortune 100 companies.

AWS is enabling scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solutions from startups to global enterprises. The APN is a global program helping partners build a successful AWS-based businessby helping organizations build, market, and sell their offerings. The APN provides valuable business, technical, and marketing support, to help startups achieve exponential growth.

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Simon Data Appoints CPO Doina Harris to Accelerate Customer Data Platform Innovation

Former Appnexus and Google Executive Joins Leading CDP Executive Team to Support Growing Enterprise Demand for Advanced CX and Personalization Technology

Simon Data, the market-leading enterprise customer data platform that enables brands to deliver incredible customer experiences everywhere,  announced the appointment of Doina Harris to Chief Product Officer.

Harris previously spent 4 years at AppNexus (now part of Xandr, the advertising technology arm of AT&T), first as Global Managing Director of the Ad Tech Buyer division, and then as Head of Customer Success, and finally as Head of Analytics and Finance. Prior to AppNexus, she spent 8 years at Google in multiple Strategy and Partnerships leadership positions.

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“The CDP category represents the intersection of marketing, advertising, data and analytics,” said Jason Davis, Co-Founder and CEO, Simon Data. “Doina brings to Simon Data a unique and expansive skillset centered around a deep focus on customers and a strategic understanding of overall market trends, that will further define Simon Data’s offering and more broadly shape the CDP space as it evolves.”

As part of the Simon Data executive leadership team, Harris will oversee product development, commercialization, strategy and finance. Working closely with co-founders CEO Jason Davis, President Josh Neckes, and CTO Matt Walker, she will continue to advance Simon’s product roadmap, develop greater CDP education and adoption in the marketplace, and identify new innovative technology to further enable marketers to engage in a personalized way with their customers.

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“Traditional customer data engagement models have lost efficacy. Marketers are now looking for solutions to better understand their customers, experiment and adapt faster around the customer experience in a way that does not drive further complexity,” said Doina Harris, CPO, Simon Data. “Simon Data is at the forefront of this shift, and I am excited to join and further accelerate their growth trajectory.”

Active within the technology and marketing industries, Harris has spoken at various events, including Advertising Week and DMEXCO, on topics including customer engagement and women in leadership. She loves spending time with her husband and two young children, as well as indulging her nostalgia for classic programming languages and how it informs the way we think about systems today. Harris holds a BA from Harvard University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

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Sales Readiness Platform Brainshark Acquires Sales Scorecard Provider Rekener

Sales Scorecards Combine with Brainshark’s Best-Of-Breed Readiness and Enablement Solutions to Radically Improve Sales Performance

Brainshark, Inc., the industry’s only data-driven sales readiness platform, announced that it has acquired Rekener, a leading sales scorecard provider. The acquisition extends Brainshark’s position as an innovative force and leader in the sales readiness and enablement software market, with the most effective and comprehensive solutions for preparing client-facing teams to perform at the highest level.

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With Rekener, Brainshark will provide cutting-edge visibility into sales team activities, behaviors and productivity, helping customers make real connections from improved readiness to increased revenue. These insights will give organizations a powerful new way to identify sales performance challenges and  skills development needs early, and address those issues more effectively via Brainshark’s best-of-breed training and coaching solutions.

Founded in 2016, Rekener was developed to provide a simpler way for sales and marketing professionals to use data to drive growth. The platform automatically creates a 360-degree view of sales rep and customer account activities using data from a variety of critical systems, including customer relationship management (CRM), marketing automation and other sources. Rekener captures this data to deliver powerful sales scorecards that enable key performance indicators (KPIs), pipeline metrics and benchmark data to be analyzed easily. Sales leaders use this analysis to identify performance issues and optimize coaching efforts.

Alex Laats, co-founder and CEO at Rekener, said: “Rekener puts the power of data directly into the hands of sales managers in their regular one-on-ones. We’re joining forces with Brainshark so sales managers can use data to diagnose what’s working and what’s not working, and then motivate sales reps to improve with training and coaching from Brainshark’s world-class readiness platform. The end result is better quota achievement and increased revenue production. That’s the promise of data-driven sales readiness, and we’re thrilled to be part of it.”

The Rekener technology will add to Brainshark’s award-winning solutions for sales onboarding, training and skills development; sales coaching and practice; content authoring and more, plus dashboards and analytics that easily track training progress and overall readiness across the entire sales force. The newly combined platform will launch a new era of data-driven sales readiness that now serves more than 1,100 companies worldwide.

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Greg Flynn, co-founder and CEO at Brainshark, said: “For years, we’ve said that true readiness is not just about the training a team member completes, but also understanding how effectively they put those skills and knowledge into action. We believe the right readiness platform should provide these insights, and that’s what this announcement is all about. The combined platforms of Brainshark and Rekener will give CEOs, sales leaders and managers a new, impactful way to directly correlate learning activities to sales performance – and use that data to prescribe customized, data-driven training and coaching.”

The acquisition is the latest example of Brainshark’s innovative approach to addressing sales productivity challenges, which includes the 2018 release of Machine Analysis, the company’s acclaimed artificial intelligence (AI)-powered feedback and scoring engine for video coaching.

Earlier this year, Brainshark was recognized as a Leader in four G2 Grid Reports for the categories of “Sales Training and Onboarding,” “Sales Coaching,” “Sales Enablement” and “Course Authoring.” In addition, Brainshark has been a winner in the Golden Bridge Awards (“Best Training Solution”), Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service (“Best Sales Enablement Solution”), International Business Awards (“Best Corporate Learning/Workforce Development Solution”) and other programs this year alone.

“Rekener marks a significant milestone in our continued efforts to deliver the most valued readiness solutions on the market, and to help organizations make meaningful connections between readiness and revenue,” said Flynn. “We couldn’t be more excited about what this means for the future of our platform, and the increased value we’ll be able to provide Brainshark customers in the coming year.”

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Zendesk Talk Partner Edition Expands Amazon Connect Support

Zendesk Selects Amazon Connect as a Preferred Contact Center Voice Solution for Global Deployment with Zendesk Talk Partner Edition

Zendesk, Inc. announced a strategic, go-to-market solution package based upon an enhanced integration between Amazon Connect and Zendesk Talk Partner Edition. The enhanced integration allows both Amazon Connect customers and Zendesk Support customers to leverage multiple sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) services from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to improve contact center agent efficiency while reducing the time end-customers spend interacting with customer service. This solution is designed to allow businesses to deploy the latest generation of proactive, anticipatory customer service.

Read More: What Does The Acquisition Of SnapApp Mean For Uberflip Users?

“We are excited to continue our work with AWS to help companies provide some of the best proactive contact center experiences for their customers,” said Adrian McDermott, president of products, Zendesk. “By tapping into AI and machine learning, businesses can easily create an intelligent contact center customer service experience that allows businesses not only to resolve questions and issues more quickly and efficiently, but also in some cases, even eliminating the need for their customers to wait to speak with an agent at all.”

“Finding the right balance between humans and technology is the key to providing personalised customer experiences faster – that’s why Singapore is focusing on the ‘human-centric’ approach to deploying AI on a national scale. The partnership between AWS and Zendesk equips customer service teams with the speed and efficiency of AI-enabled tools, which helps businesses deliver and scale support as quickly as Southeast Asia’s customers expect,” said Abhishek Deshmukh, Managing Director of Singapore and Vice President of Engineering, Zendesk.

According to the Zendesk Benchmark Report, AI-enabled teams see 21 percent faster resolution times while handling about six times the volume of requests compared to their peers. Companies using the enhanced connector in contact centers can benefit from AWS’ AI and machine learning services such as Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Comprehend. This allows companies to provide a more proactive, anticipatory customer experience in which agents are more efficient in anticipating and solving customer issues, as well as helping businesses to address routine problems and questions through intelligently automated self-service.

“The updated connector for Amazon Connect and Zendesk Support is designed to offer the next generation of customer service by empowering businesses to anticipate and intelligently address their customer needs in real-time using AWS Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning services,” said Pasquale DeMaio, General Manager, Amazon Connect, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “We look forward to delighting customers around the globe with this integrated customer service solution in 2020.”

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Zendesk has chosen Amazon Connect as a preferred contact center voice solution to deploy with Zendesk Talk Partner Edition globally. As a result of the enhanced capabilities delivered by Zendesk and Amazon Connect, current Zendesk customers such as Carsales.com are already benefiting from the new capabilities. Additionally, AWS Service Delivery Program-accredited Amazon Connect SI partners including Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), VoiceFoundry, Mission Labs, USAN, Conn3ct, and tecRacer, will be able to integrate an existing contact center solution with Zendesk Support using Talk Partner Edition, in all major geographies globally.

“AI and machine learning have absolutely changed how we work in our Customer Contact Centre. In a matter of months we implemented efficiencies within our own working practices and started to observe real benefits which of course translate into a better, more cohesive  experience for our customers,” said Muhammad Masri, Customer Service Manager, Carsales.com. “I’m confident that by integrating the new enhanced Zendesk integration with Amazon Connect, our teams will have more informed and productive conversations with our customers.”

This is the latest integration between Zendesk and AWS. In June 2019, Zendesk announced the Zendesk Events Connector for Amazon EventBridge. These connectors are part of a larger effort for Zendesk’s open and flexible CRM platform, Sunshine, to further accelerate the ability for companies to free customer data and allow developers to build out functionality with the tools they love – entirely on open standards with the security, scalability, and reliability of AWS at its core.

The enhanced Zendesk connector for Amazon Connect will be available as a pre-integrated solution starting in late January 2020. It will be deployed directly and through trusted partners globally.

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What Does the Acquisition of SnapApp Mean for Uberflip Users?

It Is No News That Personalization Is the Key to Achieving High Conversion Rates in Sales. The Million-Dollar Question Is- How Do Companies Ascertain That Their Personalization Efforts Are a Cut Above That of Their Competitors? 

Uberflip‘s acquisition of SnapApp is aimed at helping demand marketers within their ecosystem to gauge and sharpen their content strategy. The acquisition will help the company give more insights that will help marketers automate the personalization of content.

Why insights are needed in the content experience?

Your marketing content might be lying in various platforms like Youtube, Slide Share and Twitter. Uberflip has been investing a lot over the past years to help integrate these. The new acquisition of SnapApp essentially helps marketers to understand whether these integrated content is gaining traction. For instance, Uberflip helped its client Snowflakes to identify specifics in their content that drive sales and accommodate these hooks into their marketing e-mails.

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  “Content makes the biggest impact on a buyer when it’s personal. Bringing SnapApp’s team and capabilities onboard will enable Uberflip to improve lead qualifications for demand marketers by providing additional insights to automate more personalized content experiences,” said Yoav Schwartz, CEO and Co-founder of Uberflip  

To drive its point, Uberflip quotes Gartner study which says around 70 percent of the prospects would have already decided on their future with an organization before engaging them. This makes it important to pitch the right message, in the right way, at the right time.

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Making Rapid Strides

The Toronto-based Uberflip was founded in 2012 and it has around 150 staffers. Boston based-SnapApp has only over a dozen people now. They will now join the workforce of Uberflip. Uberflip has an estimated revenue of around $15 million. It has recently engaged in deep collaboration with Bombora and 6sense. Uberflip connects to popular tools, such as Demandbase, Engagio, Google Analytics, and Adobe Analytics among others. It has raised around $41 million Series A funds last year.

 “Uberflip re-defined content marketing’s potential by coining the term content experience and building out a platform that equips marketers with the right content at every touchpoint to drive demand,” said Seth Liberman, CEO of SnapApp. 

 “SnapApp joins the company to help continue its unprecedented growth and bring a broad array of new platform capabilities to Uberflip for demand marketers,” he added.

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Looking for the Perfect SalesTech Stack?

When it comes to Sales, every Salesperson or Sales team will have a set of qualifying questions in place just to make sure that they go after the most viable prospects. The B2B buying and selling process is already infamous for its longevity and complexity. Knowing how your salestech stack can help reduce sales cycles while increasing the incidents of wins is crucial to sales success today!

When it comes to technology sales, or more specifically, B2B sales, the right salestech stack can enable your efforts more successfully.

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What is a Salestech Stack?

A salestech stack is a collection of sales software that an organization chooses to use to help achieve central goals. The aim of any salestech stack or sales stack is to help make the sales process more efficient and effective,

Sales Technology is evolving rapidly, enabling sales teams to focus more of their time on actual selling as opposed to tactical or administrative tasks.

When picking your SalesTech Stack

Leading CRM vendor HubSpot uses their own Inbound Sales Methodology to frame their sales process and to some extent their sales tech stack adoption policy.

They do this because identifying the right salestech stack for a particular company’s specific needs begins with identifying lags in the current sales process! This also helps in streamlining the sales processes further while making the day to day work lives of every sales person far easier.

So how do you get the perfect salestech stack?

It might help to start with:

  1. Product Demo Software

Half of a salesperson’s task will be successfully accomplished if their pitch resonates with the prospect! In technology sales, product demos when done right can help a prospect visually see the value-add a product offers besides just knowing more about their solutions and features.

In technology sales, a product demo is oftentimes essential to the overall sales process. Meaning that, the right presenting software is as crucial in enabling better win rates as the actual sales pitch and sales process!

A few things to keep in mind when choosing a Product Demo Software:

Make sure it’s,

  • User-friendly
  • Easily shareable
  • Compatible across devices/platforms

Key takeaway:

Since video is a sales rep’s best friend in today’s time it helps to ensure that your product demo software supports rich video content formats!

Some Product Demo Software to Consider:

Zoom
Zoom’s platform can have your presentation and collaboration needs covered. It allows you to:

  • share your screen with prospects,
  • host video meetings,
  • have a seamless presentation experience

Prezi
With Prezi, you can turn your Brand’s PowerPoint into a dynamic presentation. Their features give you the ability to add movement to your slides, and to collaborate with upto 10 people at a time to work on a presentation at once. The good thing is that Prezi is compatible with PC and Mac desktops as well as iPhones, iPads, and Android devices.

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2- Scheduling Meetings

Scheduling meetings is what sales is all about. Giving your prospects the chance to schedule a meeting with you as per their convenience will help make it easier to book more meetings.

Propose a time and if that doesn’t work, ask the prospect to set a time!

Additionally, the right appointment scheduling software will reduce the immense back and forth it takes to get your meeting on the card.

Some Examples of Scheduling Software to Consider

Calendly
With Calendly, you can connect with up to six of your calendars to automatically check availability. The app also has a scheduling feature and gives users the ability to host several invitees.

HubSpot Meeting Tool
When used with the free HubSpot CRM, the HubSpot Meeting Tool can be used to invite prospects to schedule meetings on your calendar, it can be synced to your Google or Office 365 calendar, and allows you to send group meeting links, and embed meeting links on your site.

3- Sales Enablement Software

The right sales enablement software and automation tools can contribute to a better email outreach, prospecting cadence, live chat experience, content creation strategy and reporting facilities.

Email is still often a primary mode of communication across age groups, with 86% of business professionals saying they prefer email over any other form of communication.

When it comes to sales, the right email, at the right time, based on the buying stage of your prospect matters.

That’s where features like email sequencing can contribute to a more tightened outreach and followup process. Products like Sales Hub or MailChimp that offer email sequencing with personalization and complete automation of followup emails allow you to reduce the time spent on chasing after every lead.

Sales enablement software is used by successful sales teams to also plan, create, send relevant content in the form of custom case studies, blogs or pdfs. By using features to understand your audience’s content consumption metrics, sales people can identify which type of content seems to be resonating most with prospects and at what stage to schedule and send those pieces of content accordingly so as to result in faster sales closures.

Successful sales leaders will also often use Sales Enablement software to align sales KPIs like Client Acquisition Rate, Number of Calls, Number of Emails, Deal Size and Conversion Rate within the CRM or reporting software.

Some Examples of Sales Enablement Software to Consider

Zoho Analytics
With Zoho Analytics, you can dive deep into sales analytics and keep track of KPIs and sales execution processes. You can integrate it with your CRM to get custom reports that track your sales pipeline.

LeadGnome
Another tool that integrates with your CRM to give you better insight into the emails your team is sending is LeadGnome. LeadGnome allows you to protect your database of prospects and customer information, while offering powerful workflows

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Gong.io
If you are looking for better visibility on your teams sales conversations, Gong might help! This sales enablement software integrates with your CRM to analyze dialer calls and helps identify the best performing sales reps.

Quick Tip:

Before buying any sales software, check in with your existing martech stack to look for best-fit integrations, add-ons or plugins!

4- CRM

Sales can’t work without CRMs. Or can it? A CRM is the base foundation that supports Sales teams while also ensuring team-wide sharing of information related to prospects and customers. In short, a CRM is like the backbone for your company!

Tech Marketing and Sales teams use CRMs to facilitate better prospect relationships and to speed up their sales cycle.

When selecting a CRM, ask yourself:

What you need the CRM to do for you?
What challenges you need solved with this technology

Some Examples of CRMs to Consider

Some of the best enterprise CRM solutions change given the changing demands of the marketplace. As new technology like AI and ML becomes more common in the mainstream enterprise technology market, features will appear and disappear.

CRM vendors like Salesforce, bpm’online, Zoho, Insightly, Maximizer, Nextiva, Nimble provide an array of applications and tools in order to provide their users with as much choice as possible. HubSpot CRM offers all you need to organize, track, and nurture leads.

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Sprinklr Acquires Nanigans’ Social Advertising Wing to Boost its Performance Advertising

  • Performance-based advertising comprised 61.8 percent of internet ad revenues.
  • Sprinkler manages more than $1.5 billion of annualized ad spend across major social channels.
  • Nanigans will maintain ownership of its incrementality business.

Nanigans’ social advertising business is a perfect complement to what Sprinklr has been building for the past decade – one platform for customer experience management

Sprinklr, a Unified Front Office for Modern Channels on Tuesday announced that it has acquired Nanigans’ social advertising business. Nanigans’ social advertising business is a perfect complement to what Sprinklr has been building for the past decade – one platform for customer experience management.

With this transaction, Sprinklr is now the definitive powerhouse in performance and brand social advertising, managing more than $1.5 billion of annualized ad spend across major social channels including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Brands with complex governance, compliance and analytics requirements can rely on Sprinklr Modern Advertising to help them reduce risk, cut costs, and quickly increase return on ad spend.

Read More: Top SalesTech News Of The Week

What the acquisition will have to offer

Nanigans is a performance advertising software company supporting brands in the e-commerce and gaming space, including Wayfair, Zynga, and Quicken Loans. Sprinklr is acquiring Nanigans’ social advertising business including data management, predictive analytics, optimization, campaign management, and granular real-time reporting across today’s most valuable advertising channels: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Additionally, Sprinklr is welcoming many former Nanigans employees to the company. These accomplished advertising specialists will enhance Sprinklr’s performance advertising expertise and support clients worldwide. Nanigans will maintain ownership of its incrementality business which measures the effectiveness of an advertisement.

Sprinklr + Nanigans: Data about advertising performance should not sit in a siloed department. It should be shared across customer-facing functions such as research, marketing and customer care. Sprinklr help brands make sense of advertising performance data and then share this insight across teams that collaborate on Sprinklr’s platform.

Read More: Adzooma Integrates Microsoft Into Their PPC Platform Alongside Facebook & Google

Performance Advertising is Growing: Today’s transaction shows Sprinklr’s commitment to expanding in the performance advertising space. With performance advertising, brands purchase ad space and pay the publisher only when someone reacts to their ad. Consumer reactions brands pay for include online sales and app installs.

Performance advertising presents a growing market opportunity for Sprinklr. Last year in the U.S, performance-based advertising comprised 61.8 percent of internet ad revenues. Additionally, social media apps are increasingly gaining mindshare at the expense of shopping apps. 

According to a Goldman Sachs survey, millennials prefer Facebook for shopping more than any other platform, and retailers are spending their marketing dollars accordingly.

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Highspot bags $75 Million Series D-1 Funds, Vows to Enable Revenue Teams Better

  • The platform gives revenue teams guidance in every unique customer conversation.
  • Company’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) more than doubled year-over-year.
  •  Highspot SmartPages deployed by customers has increased 607 percent in a year.

The sales enablement platform Highspot on Wednesday announced that it has raised a $75 million D-1 funding round with participation from existing investors ICONIQ Capital, Madrona Venture Group, OpenView, Salesforce Ventures and Sapphire Ventures. 

The company’s total funding is now $200 million. The D-1 investment will bolster Highspot’s technology innovation, industry vertical expansion, and enterprise services and support capabilities.

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“We’re laser-focused on enabling everyone who engages customers to have conversations that win deals, build loyalty and drive sustainable growth” said Robert Wahbe, CEO, Highspot.

Accelerating Strategic Growth

Highspot enables organizations around the world to elevate customer conversations that accelerate strategic growth. Highspot is the only sales enablement platform that equips revenue teams with guidance on what to know, say and show in every unique customer conversation. Continuing to expand on these capabilities, the company launched its industry-first SmartPage technology earlier this year to help teams turn strategy into action. 

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“Highspot has a strong vision – to enable revenue teams to drive growth through great customer conversations,” said Doug Pepper, General Partner, ICONIQ Capital. “We believe they have the leading product and the strongest team in the market to achieve this vision, so we see great things ahead.” 

Strong customer traction drives growth for Highspot

Highspot’s lifetime customers, users and annual recurring revenue (ARR) more than doubled year-over-year.

As the number-one-rated sales enablement platform, the company’s expansion ARR has increased more than 350 percent year-to-date

The total number of Highspot SmartPages deployed by customers has increased 607 percent over the last 12 months 

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Poly Launches New Device for Contact Centers to Enhance Customer Satisfaction

  • New Additions are EncorePro 300 headset and MDA 500QD Series audio processor.
  • EncorePro line provides scalable options for fully integrated audio.
  • MDA 500QD Series is designed for cloud.

Plantronics, Inc.aka Poly (formerly Plantronics and Polycom)  on Wednesday announced the introduction of the EncorePro 300 headset and MDA 500QD Series audio processor. These endpoints join Poly’s portfolio of voice and video solutions designed to address the needs of the modern-day contact center and ultimately enhance customer satisfaction.

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55% Self Service Instance Escalates to Voice Interaction

According to a recent Nemertes study1, 55 percent of self-service instances eventually escalate to voice interactions with contact center agents, proving that reliable headsets and cloud communication tools still outweigh the chatbot trend. This means those call center agents and their supervisors are more dependent than ever on reliable, durable technology and audio to hear clearly as they troubleshoot customer problems.

“Growing consumer expectations, ever-present social media touch-points, and brand transparency continue to increase the demand for reliable communication tools within the contact center,” said Richard Kenny, Senior Product Marketing Manager for the Contact Center, at Poly. 

Long-Wear Durability and Clarity

Poly’s long-standing EncorePro family of headsets brings the crystal-clear audio, comfort, and long-wear durability. The EncorePro 300 is the entry-level headset in the EncorePro family which also includes the EncorePro 500 Series and the EncorePro 700. The EncorePro line provides scalable options for fully integrated audio and asset management for today’s knowledgeable contact center workforce.

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MDA 500QD Series Brings PC-Desk Phone Audio Together

The MDA 500QD Series is designed for organizations moving their contact center to the cloud. Audio processors allow contact center users to connect from either a desktop phone or PC/Mac to offer a level of flexibility for hybrid scenarios that may require multiple use cases of bringing PC audio and desk phone audio together. The MDA 500QD Series also provides insight through analytics to ensure optimization for each call and supports call centers on any stage of their journey to the cloud.

“Today’s customer-care representatives are much more skilled and educated. They have to be in order to solve complex, sensitive, and personalized issues that chatbots and self-service knowledge bases cannot address,” says Robin Gareiss, president of Nemertes Research, who adds that 70 percent of successful companies are hiring more skilled agents and increasing compensation by 28 percent, according to a recent study of more than 500 companies. 

“As CX becomes more vital to business success, demand will continue to increase for a diverse set of tools that help agents communicate clearly and efficiently,” he added.

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