We rarely cover vendor executive appointments here. With some 6,000 plus companies in the space, not counting agencies and consultancies, there are worthy appointments every day of the week. We do make some exceptions. The recent appointment of former Microsoft U.S. CMO Grad Conn as CXMO at Sprinklr seemed a worthy one, both because of Conn’s high-flying resume and the explicit customer experience element in his new role.
Is it our fault if Sprinklr then goes ahead and makes another splash? Okay, here’s the unadorned news. The federal government’s first CIO, appointed by President Barack Obama, has joined Sprinklr as COO. Vivek Kundra joins Sprinklr direct from a five year spell as EVP at Salesforce.
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Speaking of CX, a recent report from Accenture Interactive suggests that the online experience may actually be getting worse. The 2018 Personalization Pulse Report notes a dismaying 20% YOY increase in consumers leaving a website to make a purchase elsewhere because of a poorly curated experience. It’s almost an understatement to say, as the report does, that “digital experiences are trending in the wrong direction,” but a glass-half-full perspective might see the statistic as reflective of increased consumer expectation. “91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands who recognize, remember, and provide relevant offers and recommendations.” In other words, they’re quicker to punish the ones who don’t.
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Also in the air:
- Social media management platform Spredfast claims an industry first with Spredfast Vault, a twin solution for credential and access management. It’s already common for such platforms to offer credentialed users the ability to manage and publish content without needing to know a passwords (thus protecting the passwords from theft). Spredfast Vault allows password-free native access, with its increased functionality, and also serves as a central location to grant, manage, and revoke credentials.
- Apttus, that valuable underlabourer in space between marketing and sales, aligning quote-to-cash manoeuvres, announced the launch of Omni. Omni is AI-powered middle office solution aimed at tying together revenue, contract, and procurement operations across front and back offices. It’s a single view, to use the term of art, across the space which falls between CRM and ERP.
- Centro, the digital advertising software vendor, has licensed cross device technology from Tapad. Centro’s Basis programmatic ad platform will step up to identifying users across their various devices, allowing optimization of ad service not only per creative, but per device, location, and time of day.
- And from Braze (formerly Appboy), the growth marketing platform, news of a physical move on APAC with the opening of a new office in Singapore aimed at developing its existing base of over 50 local clients.
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Finally, the European Union has declared May 25 a Europe-wide holiday, to be known henceforth as GDPR Day! Okay, that’s fake news, but the truth is that GDPR comes into force on Friday, changing the way you all manage the personally identifying data of European data subjects, including all the data you collected and stored already. All set? Great: If not, we’re re-posting some of our GDPR coverage this week, and will have new GDPR content on Friday. Before it’s too late.
