The report also reveals the impact of poor Digital Employee Experience on workers, 57% report serious friction with work tech at least weekly and 61% say negative experiences with work tech impacts morale

Ivanti, the tech company that elevates and secures Everywhere Work, today announced the results of its 2023 Report: New Imperatives for Digital Employee Experience, which details how technology drives employee satisfaction, retention and productivity. Ivanti surveyed 7,800 IT professionals, executives and end users around the world, across a broad range of industries, to gauge their opinions on the current state and future of digital employee experience (DEX) – including how they believe the advancement in AI has and will impact employees.

While many IT workers see the productivity benefits of AI, 56% believe it benefits employers more than employees. Additionally, 63% are concerned generative AI tools might take their job in the next five years compared to 44% of office workers. Interestingly, when office workers need IT for a problem, they prefer to have a human on the other end, adding to IT's workload. When asked about leveraging a chatbot/automation that is as helpful as using a human, 58% still preferred human interaction. In short, IT professionals and employees aren’t sold on AI quite yet, so it is up to executives to address their employees’ fears and allocate resources to advance DEX.

The report revealed that inadequate DEX practices are much more than a tech problem for knowledge workers:

• 78% say they could be more productive with different tools.
• 57% report serious friction at least weekly while using workplace technology.
• 17% have either quit due to poor tech or would consider it — and the figure is nearly 2x as high for Gen Z.
• 61% say negative technology experiences impact morale.

“Organizations globally are grappling with how to optimize Digital Employee Experience (DEX) for the entire workforce,” said Jeff Abbott, Ivanti CEO. “Best-in-class organizations view DEX as a powerful tool to improve accessibility, employee retention and the security of their organization. However, with the rapid progress of AI and automation, the real DEX opportunity is for organizations to enhance employee productivity, speed, and value creation with the best possible IT solution platform.”

Notably, IT professionals who are tasked with implementing DEX in the organization don’t always reap the benefits of it. While the vast majority of IT professionals (84%) want to continue to work remotely at least some of the time, they’re also significantly more likely to experience a wide range of technology problems at work compared to other office workers. Among the IT workers we surveyed:

• 85% spend at least part of their week at home, yet over a quarter (27%) say their tech tools are not as effective when working remotely.
• 39% report too many logins, 47% report too many digital notifications and 42% report too many tools/platforms required as a tech problem they experience at work.
• One in five say they don’t have full visibility into which workplace applications employees use.

SVP of Global Account Management, Jim Tobolski, will be responsible for prioritizing the customer amidst high growth for the business

Validity, the leading provider of data quality and email deliverability solutions, announced the addition of its new Senior Vice President of Global Account Management, Jim Tobolski, to its leadership team. He will focus on fostering a collaborative and high-performing revenue team to support the customer experience and fuel the company's aggressive growth goals.

Tobolski brings over 25 years of experience in software and data sales where he has consistently showcased his expertise in creating and executing transformative strategies that deliver exceptional results for both customers and industry-leading organizations. Most recently he served as Vice President of Global Alliances & Channels at BrightEdge and Senior Vice President of Sales, Client Management & Strategic Alliances at Vericast. Furthermore, Tobolski's success is proven by his ability to orchestrate highly organized collaborations among cross-functional sales and customer success teams.

"Jim is known for his unwavering commitment to putting the customer first, with a distinguished reputation for inspiring results-driven customer strategies that not only cultivate strong client loyalty through value-driven engagement, but also influence revenue expansion and growth," said Jeff Lundal, CRO at Validity. "He is a critical addition to the leadership team to ensure Validity continues to uplevel the customer experience as we work toward achieving our growth goals."

"Validity is a key player in the ever-evolving data and email deliverability space. In the competitive and challenging economic environment of today, we must remain committed to putting the best possible customer experience first," said Jim Tobolski, SVP of Global Account Management at Validity. "I am passionate about software and data and can't wait to play a role in shaping and implementing innovative strategies to elevate the experience and results for our valued customers."

This hire follows significant momentum from the company, with the addition of Jeff Hassemer as SVP of Marketing and Jeff Lundal as Chief Revenue Officer, as well as new features and functionalities within DemandTools to make high-quality data more accessible across the globe.

AtData releases a robust machine-learning-based Engagement Score to identify the most engaged email addresses into its flagship SafeToSend email and verification hygiene solution.

AtData, the leading provider of email address intelligence, today announced the addition of its new Engagement Score within its SafeToSend® service which ranks email addresses based on a wealth of engagement and activity signals. The AtData Engagement Score will help clients identify actively used emails and utilize various levels of engagement to increase core metrics, improve deliverability, more accurately segment, and better qualify leads.

Investing heavily into machine learning – as seen with recent enhancements – the Engagement Score factors in recency, quantity, type, and sources of activity based on processing billions of email opens, website visits, and other usage signals every month. This new score provides a comprehensive view of a single email address and its activity across the web to inform an organization how an email behaves beyond the silo of its own email list or email service provider. This enables improved activation and segmentation as emails with varying scores can be targeted, messaged, and analyzed differently. The Engagement Score helps businesses get to know the individual behind the email address better, and, by targeting highly engaged emails, it can be used to improve inbox delivery and response.

With the addition of the Engagement Score within SafeToSend - an already best-in-class email validation service AtData continuously improves upon - organizations gain access to an efficient method to distinguish audiences of value. They can benefit from the score ranges more likely to engage with them and become customers, identify lookalike audiences to improve ROI, and increase conversions.

"By leveraging the power of our unparalleled data and our innovations utilizing advanced machine learning, AtData is developing tools no modern organization should be without," said AtData's CEO, Tom Burke. "We have the capabilities to minimize unknown rates on the status of an email address, identify dangerous domains rapidly, and monitor email lists to protect their integrity. Our Engagement Score has profound implications with email-centric data strategies, and we're including it to continue to improve upon our SafeToSend service."

The new Engagement Score is available to all new SafeToSend subscribers at no additional cost.

"Generally, email verification services only tell you whether an email address is deliverable or not. AtData is taking a leap forward to help marketers determine if an email address is active and engaged," said AtData's VP of Marketing, Mallory Green. "The addition of the Engagement Score into SafeToSend sets it apart from other verification solutions, providing more value and rapidly benefitting our customers."

Integration fully-governs data through automation, fine-grained controls, data classification and policy enforcement to secure data and improve transparency

Extend End-to-End Data Governance to generative AI to unlock innovation

Privacera, the AI and data security governance company founded by the creators of Apache Ranger™ and the industry's first comprehensive generative AI governance solution, today announced its integration with Collibra, the Data Intelligence company, which enables seamless end-to-end data security and data governance. From data cataloging and data classification to enforcement of data access policies, the integration automates data governance and streamlines compliance and auditing.

The new Privacera connector functionality for Collibra enables users to:

• Import Collibra's data classification tags into Privacera, ensuring consistent classification definitions between data catalog and data security governance platforms
• Automatically create and enforce Privacera's data access and security policies including data masking and encryption based on Collibra data classifications
• Surface Privacera's data access policies through Collibra UI, achieving a single and complete view for compliance

"Together with Collibra, we are enabling our joint users to build fully-automated data security and governance workflows with ease. This includes the initial step of discovering and classifying sensitive data, ensuring the automatic enforcement of relevant data policies, and the ability to streamline audits," said Balaji Ganesan, CEO and co-founder at Privacera. This integration is taking away the burden for users of performing manual, complex and error-prone tasks in an increasingly complex data and AI landscape."

"Privacera's Integration for Collibra is a major step to automate consistent data governance and policy enforcement," said Robert S. Seiner, Author of Non-Invasive Data Governance and Non-Invasive Data Governance Strikes Again (Technics 2014 & 2023) and the President and Principal of KIK Consulting & Educational Services. "Collibra users will be able to seamlessly push their data classification tags into Privacera. Based on those classifiers, Privacera will automatically apply fine-grained controls to sensitive data. In turn, these data access policies will be transferred back to where Collibra houses and maintains policies. This integration creates improved transparency for data stewards, simplifies audits and ensures a consistent policy enforcement at scale."

The Privacera integration with Collibra will give enterprises the confidence to secure their data end-to-end. Key capabilities include:

End-to-End Compliance
A complete compliance management solution integrates the processes for sensitive data discovery, classification, policy creation, and control implementation.

Automate Data Security
Import Collibra data classifications and automatically apply masking and encryption policies natively in the data sources, automating data security and ensuring data is protected, and adhere to privacy regulations such as GDPR or CCPA.

Enhanced Data Controls
Leverage Collibra classifications for fine-grained data access controls and enforce data access policies based on user roles or other user attributes, which enables granular control over who can access specific data assets, ensuring data confidentiality and eliminating the risk of unauthorized data access.

A Single View of Compliance
Integrate data security and access control policies into Collibra, allowing data stewards, internal auditors, and external auditors to have a one-stop shop for demonstrating regulatory compliance.

The integration will elevate the fan experience to expedite customer information-seeking.

Satisfi Labs, a leading provider of conversational AI solutions, ushered in a new era of live event customer service with AXS, a global leader in ticketing for live entertainment, giving fans access to more accurate and timely information than ever as they prepare to attend an event.

Everyday questions like, "How do I transfer my tickets?" or "Can I sell my tickets?" are now immediately answered through the generative AI enhanced chat feature allowing the AXS Contact Center human representatives to spend quality time solving more complex situations fans may encounter. AXS deployed the AI chatbot in their North America, Europe, and Australia markets, to elevate customer service offerings on major buying platforms - axs.com and the AXS App, powered by Satisfi's patent pending Context Large Language Model (LLM) Response System. AXS saw immediate reduction of customer service wait times and increased satisfaction since implementing the system.

"Quickly resolving inquiries, particularly during major event on-sales, is critical to the overall fan experience.  For three years, Satisfi Labs has helped us quickly and easily service our customers and address their inquiries." said Tom Andrus, Chief Operating Officer for AXS. "We look forward to continuing our integration and improving together as we deliver the best customer experience in the industry."

AXS is pioneering the use of LLMs for customer satisfaction and efficiency in ticketing commerce with the use of Satisfi Labs' technology leading to the chat experience leverages enhanced intent routing, automated answer generation, intent reporting, and language capabilities, which will soon be used to engage AXS customers. This technological leap empowers brands to take command of their answers, combining generative AI efficiencies with meticulous control to ensure consistently on-brand and compliant responses.

"We are incredibly proud to support AXS in their mission to improve the customer experience," said Don White, CEO of Satisfi Labs. "Ticket service providers like AXS are embracing the current moment and the technology that will allow them to take the customer experience to new heights, understanding the positive impact that it has on both the customer and the provider. We look forward to continuing this partnership and seeing what we can accomplish together."

Instant Correlation Analysis, Sensitivity Simulations, Anomaly Detection, and Prescriptive Analytics

"Now!! I have seen the future of Data Analytics."

That comment came from the marketing director of a billion-dollar company when he saw IDA in action at the Ai4 conference in Las Vegas, reacting to the newest features added to Intuitive Data Analytic's IDA Business Intelligence platform.

"IDA had the chance to present our new features on correlational analytics on a time-based series, trend analysis, and enhanced predictive — and prescriptive — analytics," said Rafael Cortes, Head of Global Sales, Intuitive Data Analytics.

Two new features captured the attention of those attending the Ai4 conference:

• Correlation Analytics and Sensitivity Simulation (CAS)
• Anomalies Detection & Prescriptive Analytics (ADPA)

Correlation Analysis & Sensitivity Simulation 
CAS empowers non-data scientists to spontaneously determine relationships between a target result to all factors and properties. Users can interact with the data and adjust factors with a touch of the screen to see the impact on the targeted result.

This enables users to run any number of scenarios and see how interdependencies affect outputs, finding the ideal combination of factors for optimal results.

Anomalies Detection & Prescriptive Analytics 
ADPA discovers anomalies and uncovers deeper insights into potential root causes. ADPA auto-performs multidimensional and multi-level deep root cause analysis to deliver prescriptive reporting in a collaborative workspace, uncovering patterns in Big Data that human analysts might miss.

ADPA offers advanced preventive foresight to developing trends & patterns, enabling users to see what's developing and how it impacts operations so they can make better business decisions.

No-Code, Instant Dashboard Generation
These latest advances are available to users of Intuitive Data Analytics' powerful business intelligence platform, empowering users to create personalized dashboards and do deep data dives without any programming knowledge. IDA is an interactive BI tool that supports the journey of discovery. With IDA, users can ask any question and see instant visualizations without having to pre-build reports. Robust natural language processing allows users to interact using voice or swiping the screen.

IDA allows you to visualize endless "what-if" scenarios, predict disruptive events, and do instant impact analysis to leverage data-driven decisions more quickly.

"IDA´s no-code, ultra-quick, instant dashboard generation capabilities allow corporations to speed up and deepen their business intelligence in real-time," said Cortes. "This lets them find the 'aha' moment using a stronger collaborative process into data management, forecasting, and decision-making."

User-Friendly Tool Allows WordPress Users to Easily Share Links Via Email, Offers Seamless Integration with CloudSponge’s Popular Contact Picker

In a bid to alleviate the challenges of email sharing for website visitors, CloudSponge has officially launched “Better Sharing,” a WordPress plugin designed to make it easier for users to share content with their email contacts. Designed for seamless integration with CloudSponge’s acclaimed Contact Picker tool, Better Sharing offers users swift access to multiple address books, streamlining the sharing process. This innovative combination not only enhances the user experience but also empowers marketers with a robust tool to amplify referral success.

The development of Better Sharing was driven by two essential truths – email isn’t dead and remains an essential part of marketing for businesses, while the equally common "mailto" links are universally hated. Mailto links, often in the form of an envelope icon beside social media sharing icons, are both clunky and unsafe; they open a generic email program in a separate window, make it hard to copy an email address, and are commonly used by spammers.

The CloudSponge team recognized that website sharing options in WordPress are primarily focused on social networks rather than email, the most social network of all, and don’t provide any access to a full list of contacts through the user’s address book. To fill this need, CloudSponge set out to develop Better Sharing – an elegantly simple, open-source plugin for WordPress.

Colin Smith, co-founder of Veteran-owned and operated digital marketing firm Terminus Agency, shared the impact the plugin has made for his clients: “Better Sharing is great because it gives us a simple but powerful toolset to improve the virality of content for our projects. We’re honestly relieved to leave mailto links behind and offer a word of mouth marketing tool that offers UX best practices around content sharing.”

Better Sharing can be downloaded and installed for free on WordPress sites. Future versions will include other site-building platforms such as Bubble, WebFlow and Wix. As a peer-to-peer sharing tool, it offers a site-integrated solution with a clean user interface and limitless UI customization, such as field personalization and multiple templates. Site visitors can manually input a comma-separated list of email recipients to share a website. For site owners with the CloudSponge Contact Picker, users can directly access contacts via their Google, Outlook.com, Yahoo, Microsoft 365, and dozens more address books. Better Sharing has also been designed to integrate with eCommerce plugins used on WordPress such as WooCommerce, with potential expansion to others like Shopify.

“Better Sharing is a much-needed WordPress tool that will make it far more easy and useful for visitors to share links to sites they like,” said Jay Gibb, founder and CEO of CloudSponge. “Despite the rise of text and social media, email is still one of the most widely used communication platforms, and we’ve had great feedback from everyone who’s used the new plugin during its beta phase.”

Latest Release Builds on Marigold’s Best-in-Class Multi-Channel Engagement, Personalization and Privacy Capabilities to Help Brands Accelerate Customer Trust and Loyalty

Global martech pioneer, Marigold, today unveiled the industry’s most comprehensive Relationship Marketing solution focused on helping marketers achieve hyper-personalization at scale while navigating complex, ever-evolving privacy and deliverability challenges. Marigold’s latest release fuses best-in-class email, omnichannel marketing, SMS, and loyalty technology with integrated zero-party data, robust permission and preference management, and dynamic personalization tools to help brands and businesses build trusted, long-term relationships with their customers, faster.

“Relationship Marketing is a long-term strategy focused on the customer relationship over time, not on a single touchpoint, campaign or transaction,” said Desta Price, Chief Product Officer of Marigold. “With Marigold’s Relationship Marketing solution, marketers have access to messaging and loyalty program data to deliver key use cases, and the ability to integrate with data lakes or data warehouses such as Snowflake, Databricks, Google, Redshift and more, empowering marketers to create more meaningful and real-time connections throughout the customer lifecycle. Today, we set the stage for a new era of customer engagement and brand success.”

Open, API-friendly, and data agnostic, Marigold’s Relationship Marketing solution provides real-time visibility across the full customer lifecycle – from acquisition to engagement to loyalty – and allows marketers to access and action customer data across all Marigold and third-party applications, regardless of where that data resides. Built on a flexible, composable architecture, this latest release allows customers to easily leverage and consume the Marigold Relationship Marketing capabilities that best support their use cases, timing and maturity. Customers can also utilize Marigold’s zero-party data and personalization tools to extend and amplify their non-Marigold martech investments. By delivering these capabilities in a unified, one-stop shop experience Marigold is making it easier – and faster – for marketers to build fully permissioned audiences, deliver personalized content and offers in the moments that matter, and ultimately turn their customers into superfans.

Designed to address a broad range of marketing use cases and maturity levels, Marigold’s Relationship Marketing solution is comprised of best-in-class technology, tools and expert services that help marketers personalize and optimize every interaction in a customer’s journey:

• Marigold Engage+ is the industry’s most sophisticated, enterprise-class omnichannel messaging platform available today. Marigold Engage+ is highly configurable and supported by a services organization with deep industry, use case and campaign execution expertise.
• Marigold Engage is a powerful omnichannel messaging platform built for marketers and designed to activate marketing-focused growth plans that facilitate long-lasting customer engagement and loyalty.
• Marigold Engage Express offers intuitive, out-of-the-box, omnichannel solutions, purpose-built for specific verticals and use cases, including SMB, agencies, higher ed, non-profit and franchises. Ideal for organizations looking for a turnkey solution that delivers personalized marketing campaigns to the highest ROI channels. Marigold Engage Express includes Emma by Marigold and Campaign Monitor by Marigold.
• Marigold Grow allows marketers to easily capture zero-party data and consumer preferences through customizable interactive experiences, and serves as an audience builder tool that helps expedite trust by facilitating customer-focused value exchange. Integrates seamlessly with Marigold Engage+ and Marigold Engage, and is sold standalone for organizations looking to expand their audiences.
• Marigold Loyalty robust, flexible and natively integrated into Marigold Engage+ and Marigold Engage, marketers can continuously optimize their messaging and loyalty programs by leveraging the same data. Designed to drive repeat purchases, retention and growth, now any marketer has the ability to create targeted offers and points systems to turn customers into loyal superfans.
• Marigold LiveContent, powered by Liveclicker is Marigold’s dynamic, real-time personalization tool that natively integrates with Marigold Engage+ and Marigold Engage, and allows marketers to deliver relevant, up-to-the-minute content without complex integrations or expensive development work.

“Today’s announcement represents a significant milestone in our vision to provide clients with an orbital view of their customers across the full Relationship Marketing continuum. This visibility allows them to orchestrate data-rich engagement programs in a cohesive solution powered by our martech heritage and expertise,” said Wellford Dillard, CEO of Marigold. “We are again leading the way, helping marketers do and deliver more by providing a smarter-not-harder approach for brands to win more business, earn customer trust and future-proof their growth strategies.”