This year's report found that B2B buyers' top priority for the next 12 months is increasing efficiency in their processes, while 94% also prefer to work with businesses that continuously evolve their digital capabilities.

Today, Hero Digital, a leading customer experience transformation company, released its annual B2B Buyer Report. The report highlights the top customer experience priorities of today's B2B buyers to meet complex demands, high digital expectations, and strict budgets.

In today's volatile economy, B2B buyers need to do more with less. They're reevaluating their external partnerships to ensure investments deliver the expected value. And they will only work with organizations that provide a seamless digital customer experience.

Simply going digital won't cut it anymore. Faced with economic uncertainty, inflation, and increased interest rates, today's B2B buyers require technology and service partners who understand their unique business challenges, how market conditions impact their business, and can translate their customer data into actionable insights that drive revenue. A deep understanding of your prospects', customers', and clients' unique needs is critical to success.

Hero Digital's B2B Buyer Report surveyed 150 B2B buyers employed at organizations with over $250 million in annual revenue, spanning industries including, but not limited to, financial services, manufacturing, and consumer packaged goods (CPG).

The report revealed that B2B buyers' top priority for the next 12 months is increasing efficiency in their processes. The report also found that 94% of B2B buyers agree their company prefers to work with businesses that continuously evolve their digital capabilities and experiment with offerings, while 88% of B2B buyers said they would turn to a competitor if their supplier's digital channel could not keep up with their desires as a buyer. 

"Businesses are looking to uncover innovative ways to improve operational efficiency and drive revenue," said Scott Webb, Chief Commercial Officer of Hero Digital. "We're seeing more and more executives revisit their existing digital transformation solutions, marketing efforts, digital experiences, and purchasing processes for opportunities to wring every last dollar out of their technology investments. At the same time, their B2B buyers are asking for the latest and greatest digital experiences. We help them prioritize and accomplish both."

According to the research, B2B buyers are looking at more than just their own internal operations. B2B buyers are reevaluating external partnerships to ensure these investments deliver the expected value, and they look to work with suppliers that provide a seamless customer experience (CX) and digital user experience (UX). 

Key findings from the report include:  

• 92% — B2B buyers agree economic uncertainty has placed additional pressure on their organization to make more cost-effective purchases.
• 92% — B2B buyers experience at least one pain point with their suppliers' use of current technology.
• 79% — B2B buyers would pay a higher price for a product or service if the supplier provided an excellent digital UX.
• 81% — Organizations currently use a combination of the default capabilities provided by their digital platform(s) as well as some customized capabilities.
• 60% — Organizations use a combination of digital platform(s) they've purchased and built in-house.

Braze Feature Flags drive personalization and enable more efficient marketing and product teams

Braze, the comprehensive customer engagement platform that powers interactions between consumers and the brands they love, today introduced new product innovations, including Feature Flags, an agile feature management tool that allows brands to create meaningful experiences at scale, which is designed to drive in-product conversions and revenue for brands. Feature Flags pair with the customer journey orchestration to enable brands to deliver and improve personalized experiences in their mobile and web applications. Jon Hyman, Cofounder and CTO of Braze, announced Feature Flags, along with other upcoming product innovations at the company’s annual customer conference, Forge at Metropolitan Pavilion in New York.

In today’s highly saturated world, consumers have more choices than ever about where to spend their time and money. Contextually relevant and personalized experiences are what set successful brands apart when reaching their target audience. According to Deloitte, organizations with mature personalization strategies report nearly 2x improvements in customer engagement, 1.5x improvement in customer loyalty, and 1.5x increase in revenue per customer. With Feature Flags, brands are able to more easily deliver and improve personalized experiences in mobile and web applications by unlocking relevant features and functionality for customers in the app or website using first-party customer data in Braze. Feature Flags integrate seamlessly with customer journey orchestration and are designed to assist brands in increasing their operational efficiency by breaking down silos between marketing and product teams to create campaigns faster, which, in turn, may reduce customer operational costs.

“With Braze Feature Flags, we were able to reduce campaign development time by 50%,” said Paolo Sabatinelli, Chief Product Officer of Immobiliare.it. “The tool has been instrumental in allowing us to easily coordinate feature releases with customer messaging with a single click and eliminate risks of inconsistency in segment targeting. Our product teams have been able to run with feature flags and collect valuable insights efficiently and independently, enabling us to provide the seamless and personalized experiences to our customers that they have come to expect.”

In addition to Feature Flags, Braze announced an upcoming Landing Pages product that can help brands easily capture information on prospects and convert them into leads and loyal customers. Landing Pages is designed to reduce technical complexities for marketing teams of all sizes and resource levels with its low-code visual editor to build and launch custom landing pages from Braze. With Landing Pages, brands can retain customers by seamlessly capturing first-party data from new and existing customers, which can help drive further monetization for customers.

New AI Products Encourage Marketers to Efficiently Experiment

Braze also announced upcoming additions to its Sage AI by Braze™ products aimed at helping marketers save time with efficient experimentation that guides them toward the most personalized and relevant customer engagement experiences. These products include:

• AI Recommendations: Braze has launched a beta version of AI Recommendations engine that uses machine learning (ML) to match relevant items from Braze Catalogs with the customers most likely to buy them. This feature is designed to create personalized experiences, which may result in increased revenue and boosted brand loyalty for customers.
• Canvas AI Step: Also in beta, the AI step in Braze Canvas Flow uses a third-party large language model (LLM) to quickly interpret user-provided inputs, like survey feedback, to determine the appropriate response and trigger messages. Brands can leverage the Canvas AI step to create meaningful customer journeys that can increase retention and support increased revenue.
• Message Content Recommendations: Currently on Braze’s product roadmap, the objective of Message Content Recommendations will be to aid marketers in saving time and increasing conversions. This upcoming product is intended to recommend copy and content for messages created via native Braze channels, as well as predict which message variant will perform better based on proprietary predictive models without the need to run a full experiment.

“At Braze, we are continuing to push the boundaries when it comes to delivering the most personalized and well-tested brand experiences for our customers,” says Jon Hyman, Cofounder and CTO of Braze. “Forge was the perfect stage to share these exciting enhancements and our roadmap of product innovation that we are working diligently to deliver to our customers. By releasing Feature Flags, announcing Landing Pages, showcasing our extensive product roadmap in AI, data flexibility, and cross-channel engagement, we're demonstrating our commitment to building powerful and cutting-edge customer engagement tools at Braze.”

In the past five months, Braze has released several product enhancements to help Braze customers improve customer engagement, including new and enhanced data features, new additions to the existing AI suite (Sage AI by Braze™), and a new suite of productivity features.

New integration enables hyper-personalization for ABM campaigns

Intellimize, the leading AI experience optimization platform, today announced their partnership and integration with Demandbase, the leader in AI-driven account-based go-to-market.

Shared customers of Intellimize and Demandbase can now use firmographic attributes to build custom audiences that deliver personalized experiences. For example, customers can target specific accounts, or groups of accounts based on company size, industry, revenue, and more, to show a dedicated experience on their website. This integration enables marketers to deliver dynamic website experiences across the buyer's journey, a critical element to account based marketing (ABM) program success.

Coupa, a SaaS company, is using the integration to deliver personalized landing pages to target accounts in specific industries and has seen great success. By breaking out their campaigns not only by industry, but also revenue tier, they're able to further tailor experiences to key accounts and deliver messages that resonate with each visitor.

"We used the Intellimize integration with Demandbase to personalize pages on our website by industry and by revenue tier, and as a result we were able to boost conversions by an average of 8.4% (and for a certain industry it was a 227% boost in conversion rates!). We were also able to figure out which messages work best for which industry and which revenue tier, which is extremely valuable across all of our marketing efforts." 

- Ally Vandenherik, Senior Digital Marketing Manager, Coupa Software

This integration will not only enable users of both products to curate highly personalized experiences for target accounts, but will also allow them to ensure those experiences are consistent across all website properties, landing pages, and other content, better educating buyers across all points of their journey. Additionally, the integration will unlock significant upsell and cross sell opportunities for brands looking to create account-specific special offers, amplifying countless revenue opportunities.

"We are excited to partner with Intellimize, so our joint customers can create more meaningful experiences for their customers," remarked Michael Wilczak, chief strategy and development officer at Demandbase. "We're all about using data and AI to light up the buyer journey and remove friction for both the buyer and seller. Our partnership with Intellimize is a perfect fit for this vision." 

A significant addition to Jivox omnichannel personalization platform, putting control in the hands of marketers seeking to improve creative and media performance for achieving relevance at scale

Jivox, the personalized commerce marketing technology leader, today announced the breakthrough enhancements to IQ Blaze Analytics, Powered by Snowflake. The current release provides high-impact metrics in a package, combining instant creative and media analytics in one place. Market-leading IQ Blaze Analytics delivers creative clarity through in-line creative previews via LiveBoards, which are live, interactive charts and graphs displayed in a dashboard format. Keeping user experience in focus, IQ Blaze Analytics visualization is paired with the natural-language query capability that puts the control and insights at the fingertips of the busy, modern-day digital marketers.

IQ Blaze Analytics is built on Snowflake's single, integrated platform and produces fast queries, drill downs and various analytics from the petabytes of data generated by marketing campaigns run on the Jivox platform"IQ Blaze Analytics is a breakthrough innovation," said Jivox founder & CEO, Diaz Nesamoney. "What's unique about these enhancements to our IQ platform are the depth and granularity of the data–because it's not only at the campaign performance level, but down to creative, asset, product, and audience levels. Within creative performance, IQ Blaze Analytics drills further down to specific messaging and products. Importantly, this data is organized into powerful insights that enable marketers to truly understand key performance drivers. In this release, insights can be visualized in real time through intuitive, natural language queries, exactly when and how marketers want it. Marketers can be notified about creative fatigue or drops in performance, allowing them to make adjustments to creative or strategy in real time and to restore performance immediately, getting the best ROI on media performance."

"Marketing leaders at large global advertisers can divine greater, more precise insights in their personalized marketing activations thanks to Jivox's innovations on the Snowflake Data Cloud," said David Wells, Industry Principal, Media, Entertainment, & Advertising at Snowflake. "Our scalable platform allows Jivox to collect and process all manner of data. Moreover, Jivox makes insights associated with that massive volume of data accessible, which allows advertisers to identify segments or micro segments of individuals whose shopping activity is a little different or whose affinities might skew towards specific products at specific times of the year."

"As third-party cookies go away from the digital marketing ecosystem, and with increasingly more media platforms turning into walled gardens, brands that want to control their own destiny must invest in strong campaign data management infrastructure in order to enable audience creation, attribution and measurement of their own," Mr. Nesamoney added.

With Jivox's technology, brands are able to measure offline attribution, such as store sales as a result of consumers seeing the ad creative. This type of sales attribution requires significant data processing: by matching offline sales data with online sales data. All of this data with actionable insights are available in IQ Blaze Analytics.

IQ Blaze Analytics Enhancements: Key Benefits:

Gain Instant Creative Clarity

• See which creatives outperform the rest of the pack with previews built directly into visualizations
• Assess real-time campaign data for actionable insights
• Get an instant performance snapshot by accessing LLM generated graphs of KPIs

Share Insights Intuitively

• Build, save, and share custom LiveBoards for the metrics that matter
• Create visualizations with a choice of charts for any KPIs
• One-click sharable insights – no screenshots to PowerPoint needed

Harness AI For Queries Using Natural Language

• A "search engine" for campaign data: ask Jivox for specific insights, and LiveBoard charts will be auto-generated instantly
• Drill down to learn more about a specific creative, day, placement and more with one click
• AI-powered natural language queries mean anyone can dig deeper into performance, no data science qualifications necessary

"Relevance is measured through analytics based on the granular data we collect," Mr. Nesamoney added. "Only then, marketers can compare different messages for different audiences and really zero-in on what is working best for each audience. That allows them to produce the right type of creative, the right type of messaging, and the right type of offers. That works best to engage consumers and ultimately produce more sales."

IQ Blaze Analytics and its advanced enhancements are available immediately to customers using Jivox's omnichannel personalization platform based on its automated Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) technology.

Industry leading applications are Powered by Snowflake. By building on Snowflake, product and engineering teams are able to develop, scale, and operate their applications without operational burden, delivering differentiated products to their customers. With the Powered by Snowflake program, builders get access to resources to help them design, market, and operate their applications in the Data Cloud.

The world's leading brick-and-mortar digital experience platform has partnered with TikTok, bringing a best-in-class content experience to thousands of public establishments

Raydiant, the industry-leading in-location Experience OS, is excited to announce a new partnership with TikTok, the leading destination for short-form mobile video, leveraging the platform's newly announced 'Out Of Phone,' offering

This TikTok and Raydiant partnership is set to bring TikTok's highly engaging and entertaining content beyond the mobile phone to Raydiant's network of thousands of brick-and-mortar clients across the US. This new TikTok channel will not only entertain patrons but also provide businesses with a powerful opportunity to showcase advertising alongside TikTok's captivating feed, which has been optimized for public settings, and display it across screens in retail stores, restaurants, hotels, banks, and more.

"This integration with TikTok represents an exciting leap forward in redefining how brands engage with their customers," said Bobby Marhamat, CEO of Raydiant. "By seamlessly infusing TikTok's dynamic content into physical spaces, we're unlocking a powerful channel for businesses. Raydiant is at the forefront of revolutionizing in-store digital experiences, and this collaboration marks a pivotal moment."

"Expanding the TikTok experience beyond the mobile phone and into physical locations with Raydiant, allows us to bring the joy and creativity of TikTok to patrons of Raydiant's clients' brick and mortar locations," said Dan Page, Global Head of Distribution, New Screens at TikTok. "This partnership will also provide digital advertisers a powerful and unique new advertising channel, combining the power of TikTok's captivating content with Raydiant's high-visibility locations."

The TikTok integration with Raydiant will give brick and mortar operators and brands to showcase TikTok content across experiences that they are building to engage with their end users. 

Verint^®, The Customer Engagement Company^®, today announced the launch of the Verint Personal Identifiable Information (PII) Redaction Bot giving organizations a way to automate compliance, reduce risk, and protect their customers’ sensitive personal data such as credit card and social security numbers, dates of birth, etc.

“With data privacy laws increasing across the globe to help protect citizens, brands need to comply, or they risk having damaged reputations and a lack of trust from customers due to the possibility of data breaches. And even if that data doesn’t fall into the wrong hands, it can still spell financial disaster from costly fines due to non-compliance,” says Verint’s David Singer, global vice president, go-to-market strategy. “Verint’s PII Redaction Bot joins the large team of bots available on the Verint Open CCaaS Platform and leverages Verint’s DaVinci AI and Engagement Data Hub to elevate an organization’s existing data protection strategies.”

Verint’s Open CCaaS Platform offers multiple approaches to data protection, helping ensure the highest levels of data security and compliance for customers. Redaction has been practiced in the industry for quite a while based on manual processes, leaving room for human error. The Verint PII Redaction Bot automatically identifies and removes PII in interaction data. It can be used in combination with other approaches like automated screen triggers to redact PII.

The Verint PII Redaction Bot is part of Verint’s team of specialized bots powered by the Verint Open CCaaS Platform with Verint Da Vinci AI and Verint Engagement Data Hub at the platform core.

Innovations usher in a new era of operational efficiency by scaling human expertise with the power of automation and AI

PagerDuty, Inc., a global leader in digital operations management, today announced new AIOps and automation capabilities for the PagerDuty Operations Cloud^SM, enabling customers to accelerate and optimize their critical operations in service of business transformation. The PagerDuty Operations Cloud Fall 2023 release includes event orchestration, runbook automation and updates around its recently announced generative AI (GenAI) use cases, helping organizations cut operating costs, accelerate innovation, and mitigate risk of operational failures.

According to a recent survey conducted by IDC, more than 53% of organizations say an hour of downtime on a revenue-generating service costs them a minimum of $100,000, with nearly 20% of respondents saying it costs them $250,000 per hour or more.¹ In another IDC survey, 36.7% of respondents said the average time it takes to restore a service when a production outage occurs is between one hour and one day, with 31.5% of respondents in the same survey saying their average restoration time is between one day and one week.²

By using the PagerDuty Operations Cloud, enterprises are able to ensure up to 75% less downtime³. This can equate to millions of dollars saved or revenue preserved in a single year. To optimize digital experiences and reduce costly downtime, enterprise CEOs and CIOs are seeking integrated platforms like PagerDuty that go beyond patchwork solutions and leverage AI and automation across their entire product portfolio. To help customers remain competitive, retain and expand customers, and accelerate innovation in a resource-constrained environment, the PagerDuty Operations Cloud offers next-generation AI and automation to quickly resolve issues, minimize interruptions, reduce tool sprawl, and build more automation faster.

Do more with less at scale with event-driven automation to trigger intelligent remediation:

• Event Orchestration Variables empower organizations to build intelligent automation that helps inform other tools and processes for faster, more targeted incident response that can be standardized across the organization for better cross-team collaboration.
• Runbook Automation Add-On allows customers looking to automate actions triggered by AIOps, incident responders, or customer service representatives to benefit from capabilities of both Automation Actions and Runbook Automation on a single SKU. This provides a more powerful solution for gathering deeper information from a customer’s environment for triage and diagnosis and running remediation changes to resolve incidents. Leveraging the synergies of Runbook Automation Add-On and AIOps helps resolve incidents up to 95% faster⁴ by allowing the delegation of repetitive tasks to incident responders while also freeing up specialists’ time. With the Runbook Automation Add-On, customers can also reduce planned downtime by 85%⁵ and support costs by 55%⁶.

Increase team productivity and time for innovation with AI and AIOps:

• Global Alert Grouping reduces interruptions by grouping event data across all your services for teams to gain a better understanding of the incident scope when you need to coordinate with other teams to quickly resolve issues. Whether you need to curb noise on one or multiple services, PagerDuty allows you to customize how event data is grouped. On average, customers using PagerDuty AIOps are able to reduce the overall number of incidents by 87%⁷, minimizing unnecessary interruptions and keeping teams in flow.
• AI-Generated Incident Postmortems enable teams to save hours–and in some cases, days–of effort, removing toil and improving accuracy associated with post-incident analysis. PagerDuty automatically creates a draft postmortem using GenAI to empower teams to focus on refining their learnings and action items for improving their operational processes. With the click of a button, PagerDuty triangulates and collates incident data to help generate comprehensive summaries of what happened, when, how it was resolved, and key action items. This ensures that incident analysis is timely and relevant, and enables a continuous loop of learning. The feature is now in beta–interested customers should sign up for the waitlist.
• AI-Generated Status Updates remove manual work associated with stakeholder management during incident response to keep teams focused on resolution. Early customer feedback of AI-Generated Status Updates has shown that some companies designate as many as three responders to handle stakeholder communication. With AI-Generated Status Updates, drafting the message only takes one click, making it easier for the responder to review, edit and send updates to keep internal stakeholders and executives in the loop. This can potentially cut down the number of responders needed from three to one, saving costs and helping scale your workforce. The feature is now in beta–interested customers should sign up for the waitlist.

Improve operational resilience with a platform that fits with the way you work:

• Google Cloud Personalized Service Health Integration sends proactive, customized and detailed alerts about Google service disruptions to get ahead of customer impacting issues. The PagerDuty and Google Cloud partnership offers a vital platform for efficient cloud operations, aiding customers in responding to disruptions and ensuring smooth digital experiences.
• Slack/Chat as a Contact Method allows chat app users to elect to use chat apps as a contact method for incident response, adding to an already comprehensive integrated experience for customers using PagerDuty with Slack.

Supporting quotes:

“PagerDuty Operations Cloud is the single source of truth of what's actually happening at any given time,” said Yasin Quareshy, Head of Cloud Technology at TUI. “On average, the time to recover from an incident is at least 30% quicker. With automated recovery it can be 90% quicker. If TUI already knows a scenario, PagerDuty learns and responds by executing automated scripts to recover from service disruptions. Customers don’t even notice that we’ve had an issue. The business impact is in the millions of dollars saved.”

“Organizations today can quickly become overwhelmed by interruptions and data, but by leaning into the power of automation and generative AI, there’s an opportunity to reduce the amount of noise and turn passive data into actionable insight,” said Sean Scott, Chief Product Development Officer at PagerDuty. “PagerDuty is giving teams the ability to do their jobs even more efficiently so they can focus on delighting their customers and building the next generation of innovative technology.”

LiveRamp, a leader in data collaboration, today launched its new partner solution for AWS Entity Resolution by Amazon Web Services (AWS). LiveRamp’s leading identity resolution capabilities now support additional identifier types and are available natively within AWS Entity Resolution. With this integration, marketers, publishers, tech platforms, and agencies can extend interoperability of data in the cloud to marketing and advertising destinations using RampID™, LiveRamp’s durable, privacy-centric identifier connecting clients to the digital and martech ecosystem.

Recently launched at AWS New York Summit, AWS Entity Resolution helps companies easily match, link, and enhance related records across applications, channels, and data stores. Customers can get started in minutes using easy-to-configure entity resolution workflows from AWS that are flexible, scalable, and can seamlessly connect to their applications and data service providers. AWS Entity Resolution offers advanced matching techniques such as rule-based, machine learning (ML)-powered, and data service provider-led matching, to help customers more accurately link and enhance related records of customer information, product codes, or business data codes.

“The Washington Post delivers and fosters engagement around politics and culture. LiveRamp’s integration with AWS Entity Resolution is an exciting marketing enhancement that will enable us to bring experiences to our audiences in a data-driven way,” said Josh Peters, Head of Global Commercial Data Strategy, Partnerships, and Governance at Washington Post. “Enhancing the data solutions in our cloud environment is critical for us to better reach and engage our audiences and securely collaborate with partners.”

LiveRamp’s enhanced identity resolution solutions are designed to consolidate all common identifiers into a stable, pseudonymous key available directly within a client’s AWS cloud environment. By integrating these capabilities into AWS Entity Resolution, data and operations teams gain a no-code solution to enhance collaboration, activation and media measurement while streamlining cloud data operations. LiveRamp also increases connectivity to the wider media landscape by providing the ability to connect person and household-based audiences to hundreds of media destinations with enhanced scale.

RampID can accelerate critical marketing data operations with other native AWS services. It supports and enhances cross-channel media measurement workflows in AWS data lakes, media collaboration in AWS Clean Room collaborations, and artificial intelligence (AI) model development with Amazon SageMaker. RampID also helps brand marketers enrich their cloud data infrastructure by unlocking more granular insights about their customers.

“AWS Entity Resolution helps brands connect and enhance their customer records safely and efficiently with more precise results,” said Erin Boelkens, VP of Product, LiveRamp. “Now data teams can quickly scale their future-ready AWS marketing stack by integrating media analytics, AI, and partner data collaboration, enhanced by LiveRamp’s identity and connectivity in the cloud and beyond.”