Nextiva Workforce Scheduling Gives Companies New Team Forecasting and Scheduling Tools to Improve Customer and Agent Experiences

Nextiva, the leading unified customer experience management (UCXM) platform, has announced the launch of Nextiva Workforce Scheduling. This new feature expands the company’s workforce engagement management suite within the Nextiva Unified-CXM platform, aimed at equipping contact center leaders with the tools necessary to optimize staffing and enhance operational efficiency.

Nextiva Workforce Scheduling provides a comprehensive toolkit designed to reduce costs and increase return on investment (ROI) by automating complex staffing tasks. Key functionalities include:

• Automated Forecasting: Predict staffing needs to align resources effectively.
• Planning and Scheduling: Streamline the scheduling process to enhance efficiency.
• Compliance Tracking: Ensure adherence to labor regulations and company policies.
• Attendance Tracking: Monitor employee attendance in real time.
• Employee Performance Management: Evaluate and improve staff performance.

Additionally, an intuitive app empowers team members to manage their schedules flexibly. Employees can bid on shifts, swap shifts, submit time-off requests, and perform other essential tasks seamlessly.

Expert Insights

“Workforce Scheduling helps optimize staffing levels and schedules to ensure efficient operations and excellent customer service while balancing employee needs and preferences,” said Senthil Velayutham, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Nextiva. “Nextiva is devoted to offering the most comprehensive unified customer experience management platform on the market. The addition of Workforce Scheduling to our portfolio brings essential front-line CX staffing tools seamlessly into our platform as a complete solution.”

Availability

Nextiva Workforce Scheduling is available now. It is included in the Nextiva Unified-CXM Premium package and can also be added to the Essential and Professional packages for existing customers.

Lemma Infibid Ensures Compliance, Optimizes Rates with AI, Seamlessly Connects to Global Ad Platforms and DSPs

Lemma, a leading omnichannel platform for emerging media, has announced the launch of Lemma Infibid, an innovative header bidding solution designed to transform how publishers engage with cross-channel demand partners. This advanced platform enhances ad monetization by integrating various advertising formats into a single, user-friendly interface.

A New Era for Header Bidding

Header bidding is a fundamental aspect of programmatic advertising, enabling publishers to increase revenue by allowing multiple buyers to bid on ad space concurrently. However, traditional header bidding processes can be complex, particularly for smaller publishers with limited technical resources. The introduction of Google's Exchange Bidding in Dynamic Allocation (EBDA) has added to these complexities, raising concerns about transparency and potential biases toward Google’s ad exchanges.

Lemma Infibid: Breaking Barriers and Maximizing Revenue

Unlike conventional header bidding systems that often focus on specific channels or formats, Lemma Infibid integrates a wide array of ad formats into a single, intuitive platform. From Digital Out-Of-Home (DOOH) and Connected TV (CTV) to desktop, mobile, in-app, and in-game video, Lemma Infibid connects publishers with diverse demand sources. This comprehensive approach eliminates traditional media format silos, providing a broader pool of demand and significantly enhancing revenue potential.

Key Features of Lemma Infibid

• Global Compliance: Lemma Infibid complies with Prebid.org guidelines, ensuring adherence to industry best practices and safety standards.
• AI-Powered Floor Rate Setting: Utilizing AI technology, Lemma Infibid predicts and sets optimal floor rates, enabling publishers to achieve better pricing for their inventory.
• Strong Demand Source Connectivity: The platform offers ultra-fast connectivity and integrates with all leading advertising platforms and demand-side platforms (DSPs), ensuring seamless access to a wide range of advertisers.

Expert Insights

“Lemma Infibid marks a pivotal advancement in digital advertising technology,” said Gulab Patil, Founder & CEO of Lemma. “By delivering a unified platform that bridges multiple advertising formats and channels, Lemma Infibid simplifies the programmatic landscape while significantly boosting revenue opportunities for publishers. This launch represents a significant leap forward in header bidding technology, allowing publishers to look forward to enhanced monetization opportunities and a streamlined, efficient bidding process.”

Integration Options

Currently, Lemma Infibid offers both Wrapper and Adaptor solutions. Publishers and developers can choose the integration method that best meets their needs to enhance ad revenues and leverage the benefits of omnichannel header bidding.

Company Ushers in a Bold New Direction with an Improved Sales Experience for Demandbase One™ and an Enterprise-Grade Rebrand

Demandbase, the leader in account-based go-to-market (GTM) strategies for B2B enterprises, has launched a new sales experience within Demandbase One™. This innovative offering equips sales teams with the precision, insights, and speed necessary to close deals faster, aligning sales and marketing efforts like never before.

The Importance of Unified Execution

Success in sales depends on how quickly and accurately teams can execute their strategies. Without clear signals and unified data, even the most skilled teams can struggle to act confidently. Demandbase One consolidates data across the GTM tech stack and transforms it into real-time insights, providing both sales and marketing teams with a single playbook to maximize every opportunity.

Leadership Insights

"With our reimagined sales and brand experiences, we're bringing sales and marketing together like never before," said Gabe Rogol, CEO of Demandbase. "By providing robust tools and real-time insights, sellers can focus on the right accounts, close deals faster, and personalize their outreach for dramatically better results. This launch is pivotal in our mission to align sales and marketing teams, empowering our customers to consistently exceed their revenue goals."

New Features in Demandbase One for Sales

The latest updates to Demandbase One for Sales include:

• Buying Groups for Sales: Sellers can now identify and engage not only the initial contacts but also other critical stakeholders involved in the decision-making process.

• Customizable Prescriptive Sales Dashboards: AI-driven dashboards offer sellers a clear view of which accounts, contacts, and buying groups to target, updated daily based on real-time buying signals and easily customizable.

• Contact Smart Scoring: This feature enhances sellers' confidence in reaching out to the right individuals within target accounts.

• Site Visit Intelligence: Sellers can activate timely and relevant messaging by tracking user interactions on their company's website.

• Action in Third-Party Channels: Integration with sales engagement platforms like Outreach, Salesloft, and Gong allows sellers to add records directly from Demandbase, streamlining their workflows.

Bridging the Gap Between Sales and Marketing

"B2B sales and marketing teams have historically operated on separate platforms," said Umberto Milletti, Chief R&D Officer at Demandbase. "This has often led to inefficiencies and misalignment. With Demandbase One, marketers and sellers utilize shared data and AI insights to coordinate on the same accounts, contacts, and buying groups. This alignment is crucial for maximizing revenue and minimizing waste—truly 'doing more with less.'"

A Fresh Brand Identity

In addition to the platform updates, Demandbase has reimagined its brand identity to reflect its commitment to innovation and leadership in the market. The new branding is sleek, clean, and tech-forward, creating a cohesive experience across the product, website, and all customer interactions.

With these enhancements, Demandbase One stands out as the most comprehensive and actionable GTM intelligence platform available, helping companies unify their teams, drive growth, and ensure every move counts.

Customers can seamlessly connect their CRM platform to their business phone system for enhanced client management

FluentStream has announced a significant advancement in cloud communications designed specifically for small and midsize organizations. The company has introduced an extensive range of new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) integrations, seamlessly connecting its Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) platform with leading CRM systems like Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, and over 100 additional platforms.

Enhancing Customer Interactions

These integrations empower FluentStream customers by enabling real-time data synchronization. This capability allows for the automatic population of call details and notes, along with effortless tracking of customer interactions. As a result, sales and support teams can access crucial customer insights instantly, facilitating more productive conversations and significantly enhancing overall customer service.

Streamlined Call Tracking

The new CRM integration streamlines call tracking by automatically capturing call notes, which eliminates the need for manual entry. This ensures that all customer interactions are recorded in a centralized location, improving productivity for customer-facing teams while elevating the quality of customer service provided.

Leadership Insights

“FluentStream’s UCaaS platform is purposely designed to extend our customers’ flexibility, choice, and control,” said Cass Gilmore, CEO of FluentStream. “By expanding our integration capabilities, we empower customers with greater efficiency and automation, helping them save time and boost productivity.”

Comprehensive UCaaS Offering

FluentStream’s comprehensive UCaaS solution provides small and midsize businesses (SMBs) with enterprise-grade phone and contact center services, enabling seamless collaboration both internally and externally, regardless of device or location. The platform features over 100 cloud-based functionalities, including calling, conferencing, texting, emergency routing, analytics, and reporting, all managed through an intuitive online portal or mobile app.

Unmatched Customer Support

In addition to its robust UCaaS offering, FluentStream is known for its unparalleled customer service, backed by an award-winning, US-based support team available 24/7/365. The FluentStream Customer Support Team adheres to accelerated response standards to address even the toughest technical challenges promptly and thoroughly. Upon joining FluentStream, all customers are paired with a dedicated onboarding specialist to assist them in navigating the company’s wide range of cloud-based phone services, applications, and integration options. Additionally, FluentStream offers an online Knowledge Base with tutorials and how-to guides for quick access to customer queries, ensuring that clients have the support they need when they need it.

With these new CRM integrations and its comprehensive UCaaS offerings, FluentStream is poised to enhance communication capabilities for small and midsize organizations, ultimately leading to improved customer interactions and increased productivity.

Live Connect will enable Snowflake and Treasure Data customers to leverage customer data seamlessly, create actionable insights, and improve efficiencies

Treasure Data today announced the launch of Treasure Data Live Connect for the Snowflake AI Data Cloud. This new integration allows organizations to securely and efficiently access, leverage, and enrich data between Treasure Data’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) and the Snowflake platform. By streamlining data movement and enhancing security governance, data teams can reduce operational overhead while gaining greater flexibility.

"We are thrilled to launch our Live Connect ‘zero-copy’ integration with Snowflake, leveraging Snowflake’s native query interface with the federated query capability," said Kaz Ohta, CEO and co-founder of Treasure Data. "Today’s enterprises need a way for their CDP to more efficiently use and activate the wealth of data stored in platforms like Snowflake and enable better customer experiences. We developed Treasure Data Live Connect to seamlessly connect Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud with our CDP, enabling enterprises to efficiently and securely manage their data and engage their customers. This gives companies the best of both worlds with the flexibility to embrace their preferred architecture."

Core Capabilities of Live Connect

Treasure Data Live Connect includes two core functionalities:

1. Federated Query: This feature allows Treasure Data CDP to query and leverage data stored in Snowflake using Snowflake’s native query interface combined with its own federated query capability.

2. Easy Sync: This simplifies the process of transferring multiple tables from Snowflake into Treasure Data, removing unnecessary complexity.

Benefits of the Integration

Live Connect enhances data integration between Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud and Treasure Data CDP, offering enterprise marketing and data teams increased flexibility and cost control. This integration provides marketing teams with faster access to rich data sets, enabling them to build audience segmentation and activations more effectively. Joint customers will benefit from seamless data movement and activation, streamlined security governance, and reduced operational overhead—all of which contribute to superior customer engagement.

Collaborative Impact

"Treasure Data’s commitment to helping Snowflake mobilize the world’s data is evident in the launch of Live Connect," said David Wells, Industry Principal for Media, Entertainment, & Advertising at Snowflake. "We will drive deep value across the Snowflake AI Data Cloud through our collaboration with Treasure Data, as it will support more efficient and effective omni-channel journey activations."

With the introduction of Treasure Data Live Connect, organizations can unlock the full potential of their data, enhancing customer engagement and improving operational efficiency in an increasingly data-driven world.

Lucid Software, the leader in visual collaboration software, today announced an array of new capabilities designed to enhance agile workflows for both team-level and program-level planning. These enhancements aim to help teams respond to change more effectively, make faster decisions, and deliver value, ultimately driving greater agility, alignment, and collaboration across organizations.

"At Lucid, we understand that agility isn't just about following specific frameworks—it's about how teams collaborate, iterate, and deliver value," said Dave Grow, CEO of Lucid Software. "Whether a team identifies as Agile or seeks ways to work faster and smarter, our new capabilities are designed to enhance collaboration and drive alignment. As the journey toward business agility evolves, we're committed to evolving with our users and empowering teams to work together more effectively than ever before."

Team-Level Coordination Enhancements

Lucid's new team-level coordination capabilities empower teams to maintain high collaboration levels, even in remote or distributed environments. Key features include:

• Facilitation of Agile Events: Customizable templates designed by Agile experts guide teams through daily standups, sprint planning, and retrospectives. These templates include integrated tools like timers and laser pointers, as well as the ability to import Jira issues, enhancing engagement during events.

• Private Mode for Anonymous Input: To promote psychological safety, Lucid's private mode allows team members to provide feedback and ideas anonymously during Agile events, ensuring that all voices are heard in the decision-making process.

• Streamlined Sprint Planning: New estimation capabilities allow teams to assess the effort, complexity, or risk of tasks collaboratively using a poker-planning style approach. Teams can sync their estimates with Jira or Azure DevOps (ADO) for alignment between planning and execution.

• Team Spaces: Teams can create dedicated virtual spaces within Lucid to organize key resources, such as charters and working agreements. These spaces replicate the benefits of physical team rooms, providing a central hub for collaboration.

Program-Level Planning Tools

Lucid's program-level planning tools support large-scale collaboration across multiple teams, aiding organizations in coordinating complex projects and achieving strategic goals. Key features include:

• Big Room Planning Templates: Structured templates for big room planning sessions help teams coordinate cross-functional work, featuring spaces for agendas, team rosters, and breakout sessions to align on dependencies and objectives.

• Real-Time Dependency Mapping: New capabilities allow teams to visualize and manage dependencies directly from Jira and ADO, identifying and mitigating potential risks early in the planning process.

• Integrations with Systems of Record: Teams can sync data between Lucid, Jira, and ADO, ensuring real-time updates and current information across all platforms, which streamlines planning and reduces manual data transfer needs.

• Visual Activities for Consensus Building: Lucid's Visual Activities enable teams to prioritize tasks and conduct confidence votes, aligning efforts and ensuring stakeholder agreement.

These latest innovations from Lucid Software equip teams with the tools to navigate the complexities of agile workflows, from daily coordination to large-scale program planning. By enhancing both team-level and program-level collaboration, Lucid continues to lead the way in providing the most intelligent and comprehensive visual collaboration platform to support modern teams.

Cash App, Instacart, Canva, MGM+ Among Advertisers Spotlighted

First-time TV advertisers are experiencing notable and sustained mid-funnel success upon launching their campaigns. This key insight emerges from the Video Advertising Bureau (VAB) report titled Breaking Through: How New Advertisers Are Using TV To Ignite Interest & Turn Consumers Into Customers. The report, which analyzes 230 first-time TV advertisers, quantifies the positive impact of TV campaigns on mid-funnel outcomes that help convert consumers into customers.

Key Insights from the Report

"In the ever-evolving video advertising landscape, one assured constant persists: truly premium video ignites consumer action like no other media," stated Sean Cunningham, President & CEO of VAB. "As evident across our analyses, long-form, professionally produced video content consistently drives mid-funnel outcomes such as increased search and website traffic. U.S. marketers are clearly leveraging premium video to convert ad-viewing consumers into high-value customers."

Website Traffic Increases

An analysis of 173 brands that measured website traffic before launching their TV campaigns revealed the following:

• On average, advertisers experienced an immediate surge of over 300,000 website visitors upon the launch of their TV campaigns.

• Notable brands such as Temu, Cash App, Instacart, Canva, and Varo reported exponential growth in their monthly unique traffic, with increases of 177%, 47%, 40%, 58%, and 1,223%, respectively.

• Mid-funnel impact was observed across various investment levels:

  • Brands investing below $500K saw a 20% increase in website traffic.
  • Brands with $2M-$5M investments experienced a 25% increase.
  • Brands investing $10M and above reported a 42% increase.

Customer Acquisition Success

An additional analysis of 28 brands that did not measure website traffic before their TV campaign launch found significant customer acquisition results:

• Brands such as MGM+, Cirkul, and GO2Bank experienced substantial monthly website visitors, with 329K, 702K, and 4,193K visitors, respectively.

The findings from the Video Advertising Bureau underscore the effectiveness of premium video content in driving mid-funnel success for first-time TV advertisers. As brands increasingly leverage TV advertising, the results highlight the potential for significant increases in website traffic and customer engagement, ultimately turning viewers into valuable customers.

QuillBot, a pioneer in utilizing AI to enhance writing skills, has announced the appointment of three key leaders to its executive team: Jeremy Pippin as Vice President of Product, Rodrigo Fontes as Vice President of Marketing, and Kelly Varma as Vice President and Chief of Staff to CEO Rohan Gupta. All three will report directly to Gupta as the company continues its mission to help millions of users write with clarity and confidence.

Leadership Insights

"QuillBot helps millions of people around the world write with clarity and confidence," stated Gupta. "Jeremy, Rodrigo, and Kelly's combined expertise in product innovation, marketing strategy, and operational leadership will be invaluable as we continue to innovate the writing process. Their unique perspectives and shared commitment to excellence will play a pivotal role in shaping our vision and delivering exceptional experiences to our QuillBot community."

Jeremy Pippin: Vice President of Product

With over a decade of experience in senior product management, Pippin has held key positions at companies like Zeera (formerly Real), Clearing, and FanDuel.

"There are few things you can do for a person as impactful and equitable as improving the clarity of their communication," Pippin commented. "I'm deeply committed to QuillBot's vision and incredibly honored to work with such a talented team."

Rodrigo Fontes: Vice President of Marketing

Fontes brings more than 20 years of experience in leading marketing strategy across various industries, including telecommunications, education, and technology. His most recent role was Vice President of Global Marketing at Tinder.

"I'm incredibly excited to join QuillBot as the Vice President of Marketing, a company whose mission and vision resonate deeply with me," Fontes expressed. "I look forward to helping shape QuillBot's journey as we pioneer innovations that enable better written communication across languages and cultures."

Kelly Varma: Vice President and Chief of Staff

Before joining QuillBot, Varma led strategic efforts at LinkedIn and Google, focusing on AI product and regulatory strategy for Gemini. She also provided critical strategic consulting to Fortune 500 leadership at McKinsey & Co. Varma holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and an A.B. in Chemistry from Princeton University.

"QuillBot's deep focus and rapid execution to deliver the best AI communications tools have positioned it for success," Varma said. "I look forward to collaborating with Rohan and the QuillBot team in leading the organization into its next evolution, addressing the needs of a much broader set of users."

The new appointments at QuillBot signal a commitment to enhancing product innovation and marketing strategies, positioning the company for continued success in the AI-driven writing tool space. With a strong leadership team in place, QuillBot aims to deliver exceptional experiences and broaden its impact on users worldwide.