With SOCi Surveys, multi-location enterprises gain access to first-party data, enabling businesses to measure customer sentiment and improve retention

SOCi Inc., the leading comarketing cloud for multi-location enterprises, has launched SOCi Surveys to empower businesses to proactively collect continuous first-party feedback from customers to create more personalized experiences. With real-time customer insights, SOCi Surveys will help businesses measure customer sentiment to understand their satisfaction and preferences.

Understanding customers is paramount to retaining and growing a customer base, and SOCi Surveys empowers multi-location enterprises to stay one step ahead. By harnessing the power of first-party data, which a brands' competitors do not have access to, SOCi Surveys transforms feedback into valuable insights that inform and improve business operations, resulting in enhanced customer satisfaction and retention.

"SOCi Surveys unlocks a world where multi-location businesses can understand their customers on a deeper, local level and make data-driven decisions to improve operations where it matters most – inside the stores," said Cynthia Castro, VP of Product, SOCi. "No brand will ever be closer to their consumer than its local stores. Adding this reality to the fact that consumer behavior patterns are volatile, the need and struggle to capture location-based customer insights becomes clear – especially at a time when brand visibility is more critical than ever."

The integration of first-party data collection with SOCi Surveys is not only a boon for personalized customer experiences but also plays a critical role in enabling marketers to leverage advanced AI technologies. A rich and robust repository of first-party data better supports AI models and tools, translating into more accurate customer segmentation, sharper targeting strategies, and more effective personalization. By boosting first-party data collection, SOCi Surveys helps marketers unlock the true potential of AI.

Key features and benefits of SOCi Surveys include:

• Effortless Survey Creation: SOCi Surveys offers out-of-the-box templates and the ability to build fully custom surveys, empowering marketers to engage with customers in new and impactful ways.
• Multichannel Deployment: Marketers can reach customers wherever they are by deploying surveys on preferred customer channels, including email campaigns, SMS campaigns (coming soon), and online survey forms.
• Real-time Interaction: By leveraging SOCi Surveys, marketers can interact with customers in real time, personalize experiences, and automatically react to survey responses with additional questions, delving deeper into the areas that matter most.
• Actionable Insights: SOCi Surveys transforms customer feedback into valuable insights, helping enterprises identify critical satisfaction factors and uncover trends that improve business operations.
• Own First-Party Data: Marketers can collect and own their first-party data, reducing reliance on external sources and gaining a competitive edge in the market.

With the addition of SOCi Surveys, used in tandem with SOCi Reviews, brands like Lee's Famous Recipe Chicken are able to improve communication with customers and increase brand awareness on both a corporate and operator level.

"SOCi Surveys and Reviews have been a game-changer for our company. We dabble in some local social media, but SOCi makes it easier for operators to respond to customers," said Dan Sokolik, VP of marketing, Lee's Famous Recipe Chicken. "Our Vice President of Operations has begun sending out daily examples of customer survey feedback from stores to the entire company. Since we've started doing that, we've seen more engagement, and franchisees get to hear more of the good, and the bad, from leadership. All of our multi-store operators are now using SOCi, which we see as a win."

The launch of SOCi Surveys solidifies SOCi's commitment to providing a cutting-edge CoMarketing Cloud solution that addresses the unique challenges faced by multi-location enterprises. By offering a comprehensive suite of tools, including SOCi Genius Reviews with more AI-powered Genius products on the way, SOCi continues to revolutionize the way enterprises approach digital marketing.

Production Investigation Room is the first all-in-one root cause analysis tool providing a seamless, notebook-like digital environment for investigating real-time production data

Aporia, the leading ML Observability platform, today announced the launch of Production IR (Production Investigation Room), the first of its kind tool that is radically distinguished by its intuitive ease of use, redefines the process of investigating production data. This all-in-one root cause analysis tool provides data scientists, ML engineers and analysts with a seamless and easy to navigate digital environment for real-time data analysis, root cause investigation and deep insights, all within a unified monitoring platform.

Historically, investigating production data has been complex and time-consuming, hindered by limited collaboration and code changes. Aporia's Production IR simplifies these complexities and serves as a comprehensive solution for data professionals, streamlining the investigation process with its intuitive, user-friendly and customizable interface that resembles a notebook. By eliminating the need for extensive coding, Aporia’s platform empowers stakeholders to delve into their production data, gain valuable insights, and improve root cause analysis (RCA) while enhancing ML model performance.

"By providing quick access and insights to production data, Production IR changes the game for investigating ML events and anomalies," said Liran Hason, CEO of Aporia. "Data scientists and engineers now have a fast and effortless way to extract valuable information from their production code with a simple click of a button. Our goal is to enable an innovative and effective root cause analysis process that allows users to swiftly understand the factors impacting their model's performance.”

The analysis tool is designed with accessibility in mind for users of all levels. It offers high customizability to suit specific needs, and can be easily configured to accommodate different datasets and requirements, facilitating a seamless visualization of investigations. Aporia handles the heavy lifting when it comes to managing Big Data, freeing users from the burdens associated with large-scale production model/data analysis. Additionally, the highly collaborative nature of Production IR encourages knowledge sharing, enabling users to easily compare analyses and share insights within the Aporia platform.

Production IR offers a range of powerful features to facilitate effective investigation, including segment analysis, data statistics, drift analysis, distribution analysis, and Incident Response. The ability to provide Incident Response plays a crucial role in ensuring the robustness and productivity of AI products by providing decision makers with the confidence that issues or threats are dealt with effectively. By incorporating Incident Response into AI practices, organizations can address any potential challenges and practice and maintain responsible and ethical AI deployment. The tool also boasts an impressive embedding projector capability that allows users to visualize unstructured data in both 2D and 3D using UMAP dimension reduction. This feature helps users identify different clusters within the data and uncover underlying patterns within each cluster. It is suitable for NLP (Natural Language Processing), LLM (Large Language Models), and CV (Computer Vision) models, providing a holistic understanding of the production data and driving impactful improvements in ML models.

Dispatcher ScanTrip Cloud Offers True Cloud Scan Workflow Automation for Flexible, Cost-Efficient and Customizable Document Processing from Anywhere, Anytime

Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A., Inc. today announced the launch of Dispatcher ScanTrip Cloud, a new cloud service that offers powerful, fast and simple document processing that enables small to large-size businesses to advance their digital transformation.

Built from the ground up and based on the worldwide success of the company’s Dispatcher Phoenix offering, the new solution gives companies access to zero-footprint scan workflow automation with OCR processing in the cloud to help optimize the way users work, saving time and money.

Dispatcher ScanTrip Cloud, a Konica Minolta-owned intellectual property, leverages more than 25 years of experience in designing and developing proven true cloud architectures and solutions. A key benefit is anywhere, anytime access due to no on-premises footprint. In addition, with its intuitive interface, users can quickly and easily scan, process and route to all of today’s popular cloud destinations including SharePoint Online, OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, Dropbox, Box, email and more.

“Different departments require different workflows, so Dispatcher ScanTrip Cloud can be customized to provide a company with exactly what its users need,” said Chris Bilello, Vice President, Business Solutions Development, Konica Minolta. “Licensing is easily scalable, allowing the solution to grow alongside a business’s needs so that workflow automation, workforces and MFP fleets are always in perfect sync.”

Centralized management provides all essential personnel with the time-saving workflows they need on their Konica Minolta devices via an intuitive, web-based portal for Workflow, Device and User Management. Dispatcher ScanTrip Cloud also features zonal OCR and data extraction to further streamline work processes. As an example, OCR can be set up to detect invoice numbers, addresses and dollar totals, pull that information out and export it to email or one of the cloud solutions the company connects to, such as DropBox, SharePoint Online and more.

“Dispatcher ScanTrip Cloud provides customers with true cloud scan workflow automation,” said Manuel Couceiro, Vice President, Solutions Engineering Center, Konica Minolta. “There is no coding required with this new solution – it features a simple drag-and-drop workflow designer that allows users to create and deploy automated workflows in seconds. There’s no hosting, no on-premises infrastructure, and no IT services are needed. It’s all included in the service. And of course we built Dispatcher ScanTrip Cloud to exceed rigorous security standards established by HIPAA, GDPR and more.”

Dispatcher ScanTrip Cloud is designed to work for small offices up to Fortune 1000 companies, and is easy to onboard and use. A selection of preconfigured workflows is included with every tenant, as well as access to a growing online library of advanced workflows. In addition to setting up their core scanning workflows, users can also use the dynamic renaming feature right at the MFP panel. And with the dynamic and direct connectors to popular cloud services, companies can be sure documents are saved correctly and available instantly to the employees that need them.

New Tool Allows Marketers to Easily Manage Influencer and Ambassador Offers

IZEA Worldwide, Inc. , the premier provider of influencer marketing technology, data, and services for the world’s leading brands and agencies, today announced the launch of Flex Offers, a new tool that streamlines influencer deal flow across social media platforms. Flex Offers equips marketers with the tools to build, send, and track the offers they make effortlessly, providing a dashboard that displays the status of all deals in flight and the details of each offer.

“As brands have grown their budgets and influencers have become more sophisticated in their operations, deal structures and campaign logistics have grown increasingly complicated,” said Ted Murphy, Founder and CEO of IZEA. “It is not uncommon for brands to have multiple simultaneous negotiations in flight as influencers consider terms and pricing for a collaboration. In most cases, a large field of influencers is identified at the onset and slowly pruned to find the optimal matches. Flex Offers make it easy to construct and send well-documented deal terms to influencers at scale no matter the social media platforms they want to activate on.”

Flex Offers include:

Streamlined Negotiations
Marketers can significantly reduce the effort required to negotiate complete contracts using IZEA’s standardized creator agreement. They can also customize their default settings for content licensing, payment terms, and other requirements.

Budget Allocations
Campaign budgets can be tracked using the new feature, helping influencer program managers better understand their total commitments and statuses within a campaign. Flex Offers ensures resources are allocated appropriately, maximizing the campaign's impact and return on investment.

Outcome Tracking & Management
Marketers can manage the state of individual offers to influencers. Open, accepted, and declined offers can be viewed quickly, allowing marketers to make real-time adjustments to their campaigns based on influencer responses.

Enterprise-Wide Visibility
Offers can be associated with more than just individual campaigns in Flex. They can be associated with other data objects within the platform, giving marketers a holistic view of history and performance. For instance, a Contact record can display the complete history of creator offers within Flex across multiple brands within a parent organization. Marketers can use these new insights to better understand offers by platform or creator type to ensure programs are diverse and inclusive.

Easily deployed and configured, the platform ensures security and compliance as data is stored and moved through analytics pipelines

Baffle, Inc. today unveiled Data Protection for Analytics, a single data security solution that provides end-to-end controls for data ingestion and consumption, making it easier for analytics and data science professionals to meet compliance requirements without high deployment or management overhead.

Data is invaluable to modern business. It informs decisions and is directly tied to revenue and profitability. As more teams and business units access data for analysis and decision-making, data sprawl has become a challenge with increased cost and risk. Also, the growing number of rigorous data privacy regulations add complexity, leading to potential fines or worse for companies that don’t have proper controls over regulated data. However, implementation and ongoing management are often cumbersome, which causes delays or sometimes stops analytics projects altogether.

Baffle Data Protection for Analytics is the easiest and fastest way to secure analytics while meeting increasingly stringent compliance mandates. With no code changes, the platform encrypts, tokenizes or masks data as it is ingested into the most popular analytics databases and data warehouses to ensure a strong security posture when data is stored and moved through analytics pipelines. It also enforces access control policies and/or dynamic masking when data is accessed, ensuring true “end-to-end” protection of sensitive data.

“Many teams are trying to secure their analytics data through a patchwork of third-party monitoring solutions, security exceptions that can delay projects, and procedural controls that do not account for errors or malicious attacks. This creates burdensome management overhead and leaves companies open to massive risk,” said Ameesh Divatia, CEO and co-founder of Baffle. “The Baffle platform removes implementation friction, making it easy to secure and manage regulated data in analytics.”

End-to-End Data Protection for Analytics
Baffle Data Protection for Analytics provides end-to-end controls for data ingestion, from applications into data stores, to consumption, from data warehouses for processing and analysis. Fine-grained access control ensures no unauthorized users, including cloud admins, database administrators, data analysts or data scientists, can access sensitive data in clear text. The data is kept in a “fail-safe” security posture, meaning unauthorized access leads to encrypted or masked data, which minimizes the risk of data breaches. Data is protected even when it is shared with another database, data warehouse or data lake. Baffle provides additional capabilities for completing analytic operations on encrypted data.

Baffle is designed for performance and scalability, minimizing impact on application and database performance. The solution offers more control and less risk with comprehensive key management along with bring your own key (BYOK) and keep your own key (KYOK) capabilities, which give companies full control over data, even in cloud data stores.

New partnership between Google and low-code solution Slingr promises industry-leading uptime and scalability capabilities for customers

Slingr, a low-code software solutions company for startups and enterprises, announced today that it has joined Google Cloud Partner Advantage. The Google Cloud Partner Advantage is a program limited to companies with proven GCP expertise where they are offered tools, technology, and support to deliver great service to their customers.

As a Google Cloud partner, Slingr will use GCP infrastructure to host its low-code platform and offer customers the highest scalability, security, and performance levels to build and run low-code applications.

Slingr helps businesses automate processes. The company uses cutting-edge low-code tools to create custom solutions that save time and money for every business. For instance, Slingr’s low-code software solutions enabled the company to integrate AI-powered tools into a client’s HRM workflow, resulting in time and cost savings for their recruitment processes.

The platform and accompanying software solutions come with enterprise-grade security solutions. It allows users to define complex authorization schemas and supports SSO and OAuth 2.0. Through Slingr, businesses can create apps compliant with SOC2 and HIPAA. Users can build powerful automated workflows and monitor their performance and status.

Slingr is also designed to be low maintenance and offers businesses significant cost reductions in the long run. Its low-code capabilities provide companies to be lean and agile and adapt quickly to changing market conditions. Slingr’s extensive list of integrations ensures that the platform doesn’t add one more data silo within the organization but rather enables the organization to connect all of its platforms.

By becoming a Google Cloud Partner, Slingr will be able to offer enhanced performance for its customers. It will give startups better infrastructure to support their operations.

Truepic’s Lens SDK will power authenticity and transparency across the internet

Truepic, provider of authenticity infrastructure for the Internet, is being recognized as a leader in risk management and security. Nominated by Keyfactor, the identity-first security solution for modern enterprises, Truepic Lens has been named a CSO50 Award winner.

The CSO50 Awards celebrate the achievement of 50 security projects and initiatives that exhibit exceptional business value and thought leadership. An eminent panel of judges, comprising security leaders, industry experts, and academics, evaluates the CSO50 Awards using a consistent set of criteria. The CSO Hall of Fame acknowledges the contributions of leaders with significantly advanced information risk management and security.

In 2022 Truepic released Truepic Lens, a novel iOS and Android Software Development Kit (SDK). With this product, any organization can seamlessly embed Truepic's secure image capture technology into its mobile applications. Truepic, with its cutting-edge Controlled Capture technology, provides assurance of digital photos and videos' integrity from the moment of capture. By adopting Keyfactor's EJBCA and SignServer, Truepic was able to create a highly scalable and reliable next-generation technology that can be trusted. This switch from blockchain to public key infrastructure (PKI) has been instrumental in achieving this feat.

“In our hyper-connected world, trust can’t be assumed, it must be built. This is especially true for the photos and videos we consume online. Keyfactor is proud to be Truepic’s trusted partner in their mission to bring authenticity to the internet, using Keyfactor’s PKI and signing solutions as the backbone to securely authenticate, sign, and verify content at massive scale,” said Ryan Sanders, Senior Director, Product Marketing and Research at Keyfactor.

“It is a privilege for us to honor the outstanding accomplishments of the winners at the CSO50 conference, and to bring together the information security community for great learning, networking and problem solving,” said Stephen Corrick, SVP, Events, IDG, Inc. "The powerful expertise and experience of our winners and partners make this a can’t-miss opportunity for everyone in the field.” 

"We are honored to receive this prestigious recognition from CSO5O," said Nick Brown, EVP of Technology at Truepic. "Our Lens SDK enables businesses to integrate Truepic's secure image capture technology into their mobile app, ensuring the utmost security, privacy, and trust. We strongly believe that visual trust is vital for the digital economy's future and society as a whole."

Truepic will be recognized alongside the other CSO50 Award recipients at the CSO50 Conference + Awards in Fort McDowell, AZ, from October 2-4, 2023.