Fifth annual Customer Data Platform Report shows embracing CDPs that are interoperable with data warehouses is key to capitalizing on AI

Businesses are integrating customer data platforms with AI and analytics to personalize customer experiences and drive business success, according to a new report from Twilio Segment. The fifth annual Customer Data Platform Report, which reflects the findings of anonymized usage data from Twilio Segment’s 25,000+ customers, finds that businesses are prioritizing data quality to harness the power of AI and quickly act on nuanced customer insights. 

Amidst the widespread adoption of AI, businesses are grappling with an exponential increase in data volume. Twilio Segment processed a record high 12.1 trillion API calls in 2023—increasing by hundreds of billions from 2022. This increase is indicative of a larger trend towards more sophisticated, data-centric operations, emphasizing the essential role of real-time data processing and seamless AI technology integration. The ability to quickly harness data insights through CDPs that are open and interoperable with data warehouses is a critical competitive edge, enabling businesses to efficiently collect, unify, and activate data across various platforms.

“In 2024, more and more brands will turn to AI to deliver better, more personalized experiences for their customers. Our report showcases the essential role customer data plays in maximizing AI’s effectiveness,” said Kathryn Murphy, SVP of Product and Design at Twilio. “With data warehouses, and data lakehouses like Databricks becoming central to customers’ data strategies, it's crucial for CDPs to support seamless integration with these data warehouses. At Twilio, we're seeing a significant trend towards leveraging the interconnectedness of AI, data warehouses, and digital communication channels. The ability to interoperate with data warehouses is essential, ensuring that CDPs act as a pivotal technology for brands eager to leverage AI and data to forge even stronger relationships with their customers.”

"As businesses look to break down data silos and rely on a unified data platform to power their analytics and AI initiatives, the importance of data sharing and data quality has never been more apparent," said Chris Hecht, SVP, Corporate Development and Product Partnerships, at Databricks. "Our collaboration with Twilio Segment signals our dedication to ensuring that organizations leverage the full potential of their data – no matter where it lives – and can effectively bridge the gap from data to insights using cleaned and verified event profile data."

Key findings of the 2024 Twilio Segment CDP Report include:

1. Data quality is the bedrock of AI success: The effectiveness of AI hinges on the data it’s trained on, highlighting the importance of quality data as organizations work to process explosive growth in data volume. With 60% of businesses recognizing high-quality, accurate data as a key ingredient for growth, emphasizing data integrity is essential for deriving meaningful customer insights and leveraging AI competitively.
2. The ascendance of data warehouses: Data warehouses continued to spike in popularity as one of the most popular destination categories for customer data in 2023, as businesses pave the way for deeper analytics and AI-driven insights. This reflects a broader shift towards data centralization and quality as businesses outgrow the constraints of traditional CRMs. With data warehouses and lakehouses as the backbone for storing and analyzing vast data sets, CDPs facilitate real-time data integration, identity resolution, and activation of customer insights across different touchpoints. This interoperability is essential, allowing organizations to not only store and analyze data at scale, but also to activate these insights in real time, ensuring a flexible and effective data strategy that leverages the strengths of both CDPs and data warehouses.
3. Predictive AI is now a core strategy: Businesses are continuing to realize the potential for predictive AI to help them glean deeper customer insights and anticipate customer needs and behavior. Predictive AI is quickly growing in adoption on the Twilio Segment platform, with over 426 Predictive Traits created so far. With CustomerAI Predictions—Twilio Segment’s latest feature—companies are empowered to adopt a proactive customer engagement strategy where they can target users with an increased likelihood of performing an event based on their customer data. Brands like Box are using Predictions to optimize campaign performance, improve customer retention, and unlock revenue opportunities.
4. Enterprise solutions continue to show growth: The Twilio Segment platform helps customers activate their data by connecting to 450+ out-of-the-box integrations. Google Universal Analytics was the most popular app (used by 55% of Twilio Segment customers), followed by Mixpanel (44%) and Facebook Pixel (37%). Companies that are tasked with collecting data from all digital touchpoints and preparing that data for analyses are turning to CDPs to help solve for fragmentation and with tools like Functions, enabling seamless integration with nearly any app available offers unmatched adaptability. This move towards greater flexibility and the ability to avoid vendor lock-in reflects a growing market preference for systems that are not only modular but also highly interoperable. With a CDP, businesses benefit from smarter, data-driven strategies that can enhance the customer journey.

The full Customer Data Platform Report 2024 is available here.

CDP Report Methodology: The report is based on anonymized, aggregated usage behavior of Twilio Segment's 25,000+ customers, during the period of 11/01/2022 to 11/01/2023.

Join Twilio Segment on February 29 for CDP Live, a virtual summit featuring experts from PwC, Hubspot, and Trade Me, for a discussion on how harnessing clean, flexible data can build smarter, more engaging customer experiences.

Updates include accessibility developer tools, single sign-on, and improved testing capabilities 

AudioEye, Inc., the industry-leading web accessibility platform, today announced a series of enterprise-level updates to help organizations better address ongoing accessibility compliance at scale.

"As we continue working toward a more inclusive digital world, we must equip our customers with the tools needed to address accessibility across their digital properties no matter where they are in their accessibility journey," said David Moradi, CEO of AudioEye. "Drawing from extensive customer feedback, our latest offerings provide web developers and users an intuitive experience that prioritizes compliance with the latest Web Content Accessibility Guidelines."

AudioEye's latest updates offer streamlined processes, including coding and web development, that address testing accuracy and enhanced security for customers as they build compliant websites. Key highlights include:

Accessibility Testing Software Development Kit (SDK) for Developers
AudioEye's Accessibility Testing SDK allows developers to identify and quickly address accessibility issues at the source, empowering them to proactively implement changes in pre-production environments. Recognizing the need for consistency in issue detection, the SDK employs the same automated test logic utilized by AudioEye's accessibility experts during customer site audits and automated monitoring. This ensures that issues are caught and addressed earlier in the software development life cycle process, preventing surprises in production with unresolved accessibility issues.

Enhanced Security with Single Sign-On (SSO)
With new SSO capabilities, customers can log into AudioEye using the same credentials they already use within their organization, simplifying the login process and enhancing security by centralizing authentication. With SSO, AudioEye addresses the stringent security requirements of enterprise clients, providing a deeper level of security and policy adherence.

Advanced Testing Rules to Test Quality and Legal Compliance
AudioEye continues to improve its rules engine and has made ongoing quality improvements to its test suite, including incorporating advanced rules that more accurately test for compliance with current legal guidelines, further improving AudioEye's industry-leading lawsuit protection.

Customizable solutions increase process effectiveness, reduce risk, and boost employee productivity by eliminating friction in mission-critical workflows for HR, Sales, IT, and Finance

WalkMe Ltd., a leading provider of digital adoption solutions for effectively navigating technology change, today unveiled Workflow Accelerators — a robust set of predefined solutions for eliminating friction in key workflows — revolutionizing the way businesses address workflow inefficiencies. By identifying the difficulties people face when interacting with software and removing friction in mission-critical workflows such as employee onboarding, sales opportunity management, and IT service requests, enterprises can improve software adoption to drive measurable business outcomes including revenue growth, productivity, efficiency, and compliance.

WalkMe’s Workflow Accelerators are based on best practices and insights from over 600,000 deployments and 7 billion annual user interactions across 2,000 global enterprises. Each Workflow Accelerator identifies the most common places users run into trouble, and is mapped to a set of fully-customizable templates that contain predefined WalkMe in-app guidance, automations, data validation, and more. Workflow Accelerators overlay onto specific workflows, task by task, across any number of applications to eliminate friction and drive effective and efficient workflow adoption among users.

According to the 2024 State of Digital Adoption Report,¹ 93% of enterprise leaders agree that optimizing digital assets and their associated workflows will be key to solving many organizational challenges, including increasing productivity in 2024 to remain competitive.

"Visibility into which workflows are adopted or impeded across a business will be increasingly crucial for organizations as they build cross-functional work models. WalkMe’s Digital Adoption Platform enables clients to quickly identify issues in their critical business workflows, optimizing end-to-end processes and driving value for digital adoption success,” said Amy Loomis, research VP, Future of Work, IDC Research.

"Workflows are the backbone of every business. When they don't run smoothly, business outcomes suffer,” said KJ Kusch, global field CTO for WalkMe. "WalkMe is the only Digital Adoption Platform that meets customers where they are in their digital maturity, empowering business leaders to see where people are struggling and where processes fall short across critical workflows — and proactively fix that digital friction across applications. This new approach to digital adoption allows businesses to optimize workflows, maximize software investments, and become pros at managing the constant cycle of technology change."

WalkMe customers have been using Workflow Accelerators in beta testing to increase effective employee adoption of their workflows, achieving significant results.

"With Workflow Accelerators, WalkMe provides time-saving, pre-built solutions that help resolve friction in our sales processes and overall user experience,” said Andrea Rodriquez, senior enablement systems digital adoption manager, Okta. “This content not only helps our builders accelerate the overall execution of critical WalkMe deliverables, but also inspires new ideas and solutions that help drive sales productivity."

"Any organization with complex workflows in their employee experience would benefit from WalkMe's Workflow Accelerators as a way to fast track improvements to employee productivity and compliance, and ultimately business success,” said Nikki Merchant, workflow systems analyst, Thrive Pet Healthcare.

“We’ve accomplished 80% of our planning and execution process thanks to visibility into specific HR workflows and performance management tasks. We identified areas we need to address and now have the prescriptive solutions we need, configured to our business," shared a digital adoption leader at a financial corporation with 2,000 employees.

WalkMe’s predefined solutions for key workflows across business domains include:

• Human Resources workflows such as employee separation, job change, candidate recruitment, and compensation management.
• Sales workflows such as configuring price quotes, order management, opportunity management, and forecasting.
• Information Technology workflows such as service request fulfillment, access management, and incident management.
• Finance workflows such as vendor onboarding, contract lifecycle management, and travel management.
• Other domains including operations and supply chain, customer service, engineering, security, enterprise portfolio and project management, etc.

WalkMe Workflow Accelerators accelerate time to value for digital adoption, driving faster results and business impact. Now, business leaders across domains can more quickly and easily create a frictionless user experience customized and configured to align with their unique workflow requirements.

Improvado, an AI-powered marketing analytics and insights platform, has announced a formal partnership with South by Southwest® (SXSW®) Conference & Festivals as their official Marketing Analytics Partner. The strategic collaboration marks a significant step in revolutionizing how large consumer brands integrate, analyze, attribute, and extract insights from large marketing datasets.

As the leading enterprise marketing analytics platform, Improvado helps SXSW, large consumer brands, and agencies streamline and aggregate disparate marketing data to build comprehensive attribution and ROI reporting, enabling marketing teams to have a full view of what's working—and what's not. The company's expertise in embedding and applying artificial intelligence (AI) in large dataset analysis translates into quicker insights for the brand and e-commerce marketers who use Improvado every day.

"While we are overjoyed to be working with SXSW as its official partner, we are especially looking forward to engaging with the vibrant SXSW community and exploring new frontiers—and new problems to solve—in the broader marketing analytics space." – Daniel Kravtsov, Co-Founder & CEO at Improvado.

"SXSW is proud to partner with Improvado as this year's Official Marketing Analytics Partner. With the evolving state of data and privacy, SXSW needed a reporting platform that provides the tools and guidance to unify our data into actionable insights. Improvado was the obvious choice, empowering us to be agile in our decision making and inform our business strategies." – Bryan Culver, Director of Digital Marketing at SXSW.

As an Official Partner, Improvado will showcase AI-powered analytics and insights solutions at this year's SXSW Creative Industries Expo. Attendees will be able to experience first-hand the marketing technology Improvado is known for today and a new suite of proprietary AI tools built on the company's newly released AI Marketing Intelligence Core™.

RingCentral, Inc. , a leading provider of AI-driven cloud business communications, contact center, video and hybrid event solutions, today announced that Prat Bhatt has been appointed to the Company’s Board of Directors, effective March 1, 2024. Bhatt has been named a member of the Board’s audit committee.

Bhatt is an accomplished technology industry veteran and financial expert, having previously served as Chief Accounting Officer of Cisco Systems. In his more than 20 years at Cisco, Bhatt was instrumental in scaling operational and financial initiatives in the face of rapid technological change while facilitating successful business outcomes and driving long-term value for shareholders. A certified public accountant, Bhatt began his career as an auditor at Ernst & Young before joining Kaiser Permanente as Director of Financial Operations. Bhatt currently serves on the board of Seagate Technology, a leading innovator of mass-capacity data storage solutions, where he is chair of the Audit and Finance Committee. He also serves on the Governing Board of the Center for Audit Quality, a nonpartisan public policy organization focused on building and maintaining trust in the capital markets.

“Prat brings executive management experience from a Fortune 100 technology company, and will bring to our board significant financial and operational insights built from his over 25 years in the communications technology industry,” said Vlad Shmunis, Founder, Chairman and CEO of RingCentral. “As we bring new and disruptive technologies to market while executing our disciplined strategic plan to drive long-term growth, Prat’s track record of financial and operational growth is a strong complement to our Board.”

“RingCentral is core to organizations around the world who rely on trusted and innovative communications platforms to keep their businesses running,” said Bhatt. “I am proud to join the Board and look forward to working closely with Vlad and my fellow directors at this exciting time for the company.”

Additionally, Allan Thygesen, who has served on the Board for nine years, will be transitioning off in the second quarter of 2024 to focus on his other commitments.

New integrations for Acquia’s digital asset management solution enable marketers to reuse high-quality assets faster across digital channels

Acquia, the digital experience leader, today announced new integrations for its digital asset management solution, Acquia DAM, that expand its brand management capabilities. These integrations — with Acquia Campaign Studio, Adobe Stock, and Google Translate — reduce the complexity of maintaining a consistent brand experience across digital channels, saving time for marketing and creative teams and helping them get the most value from their content assets. 

“Brand leaders today are looking to free up their teams to be more creative and to use digital content assets in new ways,” said Jake Athey, Vice President, Go-To-Market, DAM at Acquia. “These new integrations help customers scale their use of digital content across digital channels and across regions to deliver a better brand experience in less time.”

Acquia DAM is now integrated with Acquia Campaign Studio, the company’s full-scale marketing automation solution. The integration leverages Acquia’s instant search connector tool, so once a user is authenticated in the DAM connector within Campaign Studio, they can search, view, and select the asset of their choice within Campaign Studio’s email and landing page builders. Pictures in email and landing page builders dynamically change when updated in Acquia DAM. With the new integration, marketing teams save time and reduce the chance of using off-brand content. This is particularly valuable for brands that have hundreds or thousands of instances to support franchises or distributors.

An Adobe Stock integration automatically syncs a customer’s newly licensed Adobe Stock assets with Acquia DAM, bringing in essential metadata and offering smoother workflows. Creative pros can choose which types of Adobe Stock assets to monitor and sync, and the integration handles file copying and categorization in Acquia DAM. Integrations with Getty Images and Shutterstock are also available.

Acquia has also integrated Acquia DAM with Google Translate to ensure branded content is accessible, searchable, and relevant for diverse user groups. Customers can now use Google Translate to automatically translate text from selected metadata fields within Acquia DAM. The DAM automatically repopulates these fields with translated content in up to 20 languages.

Acquia DAM may be used as a standalone solution or with content management systems such as Drupal or other products in the Acquia Digital Experience Platform (Acquia DXP).

MediaFlows Harnesses Generative AI to Build and Scale Media-Rich Applications

Cloudinary, the image and video platform that powers many of the world's top brands, today announced that MediaFlows by Cloudinary, a low-code platform used to automate visual media workflows, is now generally available. MediaFlows’ generative AI technology FlowAI empowers users to build media-focused workflows simply by typing what they want to achieve, and letting FlowAI create the workflow for them. 

“Since launching the beta last year, MediaFlows has been a game-changer for our customers, dramatically cutting down costs and accelerating their time-to-market,” said Amit Golan, group GM of Emerging Business and acting GM of MediaFlows at Cloudinary. “We believe it’s a groundbreaking solution for building and scaling media-rich applications. We’re excited to be bringing its capabilities to a much broader audience of users and businesses.”

With pricing ranging from free to enterprise, MediaFlows offers AI-powered capabilities to help automate edits across media assets, standardize assets for compliance purposes, or synchronize with third-party services, APIs, or out-of-the-box integrations with Akeneo, Shopify, Twilio, and more.

With MediaFlows, users can:

• Reduce coding costs and time: Use its drag-and-drop interface to build, QA, and update workflows involving images and videos, saving development and maintenance costs. Free up the team’s time for more creative and innovative initiatives.
• Empower cross-functional teams: Open up Cloudinary’s capabilities to business users, removing development bottlenecks and streamlining time-to-market.
• Build simply, scale infinitely: Tap into pre-built templates, integrations, and workflow logic to bring media-rich applications to life, whether users are developers or non-developer builders (“citizen developers”).
• Offload maintenance: Let MediaFlows handle maintenance for both the generated code and the infrastructure on which it runs.
• Collaborate and integrate: Seamlessly link visual media ecosystems to Cloudinary APIs and third-party services with just a few clicks.

SPORT 2000, a leading European sportswear company, needed to ensure their online customers get the most updated and highest quality product images on their e-commerce platform. In order to automate this process of updating assets, they partnered with MediaFlows by Cloudinary, saving them hours of work migrating 1.3 million assets and ensuring industry-best customer experience.

“MediaFlows allows us to effortlessly create and manage workflows, streamlining the entire process of providing product images for our customers,” said Tobias Stiedl, SPORT 2000’s online marketing manager. “With MediaFlows we have significantly reduced the time and effort required to keep our online store up-to-date with the latest product images.”

“MediaFlows is an absolute game-changer," said Christian Ferranti, Tech Lead at GlobalDots, a global cloud and web consultancy. “It lets us easily tap into the full power of Cloudinary's APIs – while giving us hours of development time back every day. With MediaFlows, we have the visual building blocks to build complex media applications without writing a single line of code.”

RingCX has been identified as a Leader in The Aragon Research Globe for Intelligent Contact Center for SMB, 2024

RingCentral, Inc., a leading provider of AI-driven cloud business communications, contact center, video and hybrid event solutions, today announced that RingCX™, a native, AI-first contact center with capabilities powered by its RingSense™ AI platform, has been identified as a Leader in the Aragon Research Globe for the Intelligent Contact Center, SMB, amid increasing momentum in customer adoption. 

In the Aragon Research report published today, RingCX was named a Leader, identified for strengths including its cloud contact center capabilities, the RingCentral brand, team messaging and collaboration functionality, ease of configuration and deployment, open platform, and integrated UCaaS and CCaaS functionality.

“We are honored that Aragon Research has positioned RingCX as a leading contact center solution,” said Kira Makagon, Chief Innovation Officer of RingCentral. “Every company needs to provide smarter customer experiences, and RingCX fills a big gap in the market for an all-inclusive contact center solution with digital channels, voice, and robust AI capabilities. It is simple to deploy, easy to use and manage, and comes at a disruptive price point. We’re seeing tremendous reception to RingCX, and look forward to building on this early success with more AI-first capabilities for our customers.”

RingCX has more than 100 customers, up from 50 since it became generally available in November 2023. Organizations of all sizes are choosing RingCX to power their contact center requirements, including those with 1,000+ agents, such as a Fortune 500 waste disposal company and a Fortune 1000 insurance company, which selected RingCX for its rich omnichannel capabilities, ease of use, and simple deployment.

RingCX’s modern and intuitive user interface along with native AI capabilities helps equip agents with AI-generated call summaries and transcripts, enhancing efficiency and enabling more effective customer interactions. New customers, including SmartSign, a top online sign retailer, have praised RingCX’s AI and analytics capabilities.

"Our decision to upgrade to RingCX was driven by the desire to leverage the cutting-edge technologies of voice, digital and AI,” said Tahyna Colon, Director of Sales and Customer Relations, SmartSign. “These features have enabled our team to gain a deeper understanding of our customers' needs and preferences, and to ensure that we deliver on our promises with greater accountability and accuracy. We are thrilled with the potential that these advanced tools offer, and we look forward to continued success with their support. RingCX also offers our management team the tools they have been seeking for exceptional analytics, while also providing our agents with remarkable flexibility in terms of connectivity."

RingCX is establishing a strong foothold with customers in the insurance industry, with notable wins such as Investors Heritage, and one of the nation’s leading auto and life insurers. It is also building momentum with shipping and logistics sector customers, such as Worldwide Express, the second largest privately held freight brokerage in the U.S.

"RingCX enabled a seamless transition from our legacy system and will deliver significant cost-savings as we transform our service operations,” said Richard Chavous, Manager of Enterprise Cloud Engineering, Worldwide Express. “The user interface is much more modern and intuitive, which helped our agents ramp up quickly. The transition has enabled simplified workflows, allowing agents to seamlessly manage channels and conversations."

RingCX includes voice, video, over 20 digital channels, AI summaries, and unlimited domestic inbound and outbound minutes. Attractively priced at $65 per agent per month¹, RingCX provides major cost savings and pricing predictability. RingCX has broadened its reach with international customers, with general availability in the U.S., U.K., France, and Germany. New customer wins include a century-old major player in automobile and industrial vehicle distribution in France and a leading French insurance group, covering more than 2 million beneficiaries worldwide.