Just a quick news roundup before everyone starts gearing down for the holiday.
Today Sprout Social, the social media management platform, announced a certified integration with Hubspot. Customer support is that the center of the relationship, with users able to route social media messages seamlessly to their Hubspot service team, and collaborate to resolve tickets, with status being visible in both Sprout Social and Hubspot.
More details here.
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Pega toots its horn, winning top score in three out of four use cases in Gartner’s new Critical Capabilities for CRM Customer Engagement Center report. The report looked at 13 CRM vendors, including Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP. Pega beat the field in complex processes, B2B, and global, and came third in B2C.
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Just last week, PwC put some numbers around the concept of customer experience in the eleventh global Digital IQ survey of business, experience, and technology executives in 60 countries. Here’s the good stuff:
- 65 percent view CX as critical to business performance, and 70 percent as critical to digital transformation
- 76 percent have an executive responsible for CX
- They were split on who owns CX; 27 percent cited the Chief Experience Officer, 22 percent the CMO
- Mobile is the critical CX technology, with the IoT not far behind
- IoT is the most disruptive upcoming technology; the cloud is currently the most important.
And setting aside customers ever so briefly, how about the employee experience (anyone calling that “EX” yet?):
- 72 percent believe employee experience is critical to performance, and the same percentage say they have an executive responsible for it
- 67 percent believe their employee experience strategies are effective.
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With the holidays poised to spring upon us, we have a slew of holiday marketing articles in the works. To kick things off, here are some holiday ad/media consumption trends identified by OpenX, the programmatic ad exchange network. The headline is a “significant shift from retail to mobile.” It should be a strong season, with 80 percent of consumers surveyed expecting to spend more on gifts than last year. But with 55 percent on their smartphones more than three hours per day, and millennials devoting five times the attention to their mobile devices as to live television, marketers need to meet potential customers where they’re consuming content and making purchase decisions.
Said Dallas Lawrence, chief brand officer at OpenX, “Online vs in-store traffic is split about 50/50 now. Mobile in particular is taking off, with millennials and parents — two of the most important groups for retailers — now making one quarter of their purchases through mobile. Last year, about $720 billion was spent on holiday gifts, so it’s safe to say that this year, there will be over $350 billion spent online and via mobile. We expect about 18% of total sales to be via mobile, which would put mobile sales over $140 billion for the year.
