Inbenta, a complete customer experience platform powered by AI, today unveiled three enhancements to its award-winning Digital Instructor product (formerly Horizn Digital Demos). The enhancements are aimed at making Inbenta's interactive how-to tutorials more engaging and easier to share.

Digital Instructors are interactive simulations of a digital product, service, or task, demonstrating features and guiding customers with step-by-step visual instructions. Digital Instructor can be used by any company that provides services or facilitates transactions online or through a mobile app. The tool lets companies create a library of helpful how-to content, providing direct support to customers and employees.

Inbenta's Digital Instructor can be leveraged in a variety of use cases, including:

• Self-serve customer-direct: Provide customers with Digital Instructors to help them navigate your products or services without having to call support.
  
  
• Assisted-serve for on-call and on-site support: Arm contact center agents and frontline staff with Digital Instructors to help them more easily walk customers through their product and service challenges.
  
  
• Frontline employee training and onboarding: Apply Digital Instructors to educate and train employees on how your products and services work.
  
  
• SaaS: A no-code software solution to build your own Digital Instructors for customer support or employee training.

Companies using Digital Instructor can foster greater adoption of digital products and payments; reduce handle time and increase one call resolutions; aid in the launch of new products and features; and better engage older consumers who are less familiar with newer online features.

The three enhancements released today create an even more powerful tool for improving the digital customer experience and supporting employee training and onboarding. Enhancements include:

1. VOICE: Customers can now enable step-by-step voice instructions on every Digital Instructor. This feature improves clarity and accessibility, letting you give customers more context and direction. The AI-generated voice is fully customizable for a lifelike customer experience.
   
   
2. AUTOPLAY: Customers can now choose to autoplay each Digital Instructor, turning every step-by-step guide into streaming instructional content. This gives customers the flexibility to consume each Digital Instructor at a set pace, either on their main display or in the background, similar to video streaming.
   
   
3. DOWNLOAD: Customers can now download PDF versions of each Digital Instructor to store, share and reference offline. These PDF files reproduce every step of the demonstration, along with the related help copy and any contextual pop-ups.

"These upgrades are an exciting new addition to our best-in-class Digital Instructor product," says Melissa Solis, CEO at Inbenta. "These step-by-step visual guides are a proven way to communicate your digital capabilities and accelerate digital adoption across the board. The addition of Voice, Autoplay and Download makes our Digital Instructor tool even more intuitive and effective."

Industry-first solution from Constant Contact leverages Telgorithm API to help solopreneurs reach new customers, drive more sales and grow 

Telgorithm, a cutting-edge messaging API provider, today announced a groundbreaking partnership with Constant Contact, a digital marketing and automation platform that has helped millions of small businesses and nonprofits globally. By leveraging Telgorithm's unique SMS API, Constant Contact is now the first omnichannel digital marketing platform to offer SMS marketing to sole proprietorships. This collaboration addresses a significant gap in the marketing mix for solopreneur businesses.

There are over 300 million smartphone users in the United States, and SMS marketing allows small businesses to directly engage with those consumers to increase sales and build loyalty by leveraging the immediacy and personalization of SMS communication. However, because most sole proprietorships do not have a federal Employer Identification Number (EIN) or tax ID, they are typically unable to leverage SMS for marketing. This is a significant obstacle preventing solopreneurs from expanding their reach and deepening their relationships with customers.

Telgorithm's proprietary 10-digit long code (10DLC) messaging technology solves this challenge by allowing sole proprietorships to send compliant bulk SMS messages without a federal EIN or tax ID. When combined with Constant Contact's powerful digital marketing platform, entrepreneurs who use Constant Contact can begin sending SMS campaigns to increase customer engagement, boost sales and grow. Constant Contact is currently the only omnichannel digital marketing platform to support SMS marketing for sole proprietorships.

"Our partnership with Telgorithm is a reflection of our commitment to helping all small businesses become better marketers, regardless of their size," said Russ Morton, Chief Product Officer at Constant Contact. "Consumers increasingly want to communicate with businesses via text, so we've collaborated with Telgorithm to develop an industry-first solution that enables sole proprietorships to tap into that channel to drive customer engagement, promote their products or services and grow their customer base. I am excited about what this means for Constant Contact's solopreneur customers, and we are grateful for Telgorithm's partnership."

In addition to these benefits, Telgorithm's messaging API also helps ensure that sole proprietorships remain compliant with carrier restrictions on message volumes for better deliverability. As the only SMS API provider to offer Smart Queueing, Telgorithm enables an industry-leading 99 percent deliverability rate and automatically prevents businesses from exceeding carrier message limits. This enables businesses to feel confident that text messages will reliably be delivered to their intended destination every time.

"Telgorithm prides itself on being a messaging API provider on the cutting edge of business text messaging," said Aaron Alter, CEO of Telgorithm. "We've built unique, patent-pending SMS API technology that software providers cannot get anywhere else in the industry, and it's enabled us to partner with companies like Constant Contact to achieve highly tailored outcomes. By solving for the biggest challenges in business texting, like crucial rate limit management, Constant Contact can offer its sole proprietorship customers seamless text conversations with near guaranteed deliverability."

• Only a third of LTK creators are confident they can still reach their community on social media, while 95% have felt their community is less engaged on social media in the past year.

• LTK is evolving to drive community building and engagement with the unveiling of a suite of updates, including Shopper Profiles, Subscribe and Comments to foster deeper connection

LTK, the platform that powers Creator Commerce™, is marking a significant evolution of the platform with the launch of a new suite of tools and features designed to deepen creator relationships with their communities. LTK is now built for community engagement, enabling LTK Creators and their followers to meaningfully connect.

Community has never been more important as the foundation of a creator's business, and as social platforms become increasingly less social, LTK Creators are looking for ways to maintain, nurture and strengthen communities. According to a recent survey, 92% of LTK Creators believe the ability to regularly engage their community is very important, but only about a third have confidence in reaching their community on social networks. 95% have felt their community less engaged on social media in the past year.

“The connection LTK Creators have with their community is vital and at the heart of everything they do. As social media platforms focus more on entertainment than community building, creators are looking for new ways to build trust. That is why LTK is evolving to focus on being a community engagement platform, fueling that essential connection with their community while empowering creators to grow their business,” said Kit Ulrich, General Manager of the Creator Shopping Platform at LTK.

LTK is evolving - focusing on community building to help creators grow their businesses. LTK is introducing the following new features to fuel that connection:

Getting to Know Your Community With Shopper Profiles

No longer a mystery, LTK is unveiling Shopper Profiles which lets shoppers create a personalized and unique username and profile picture on LTK for the first time. Shopper Profiles let users better express themselves to LTK Creators, fellow shoppers and the greater LTK community.

For LTK Creators, Shopper Profiles help them further build a sense of community, deepen their relationships with their followers and have more personalized interactions. The introduction of Shopper Profiles further enhances the Comments on the LTK platform letting creators know exactly who they’re engaging with and personalize their responses.

Deepening Creator-Shopper Relationships with Comments

Since launching Comments on LTK Creator posts, LTK has built an interactive space for creators and shoppers to connect and engage. In addition to Shopper Profiles, LTK is introducing the ability for creators to now share direct LTK product links within Comments on their posts, making it easier to answer questions and direct shoppers throughout their LTK Shop. These direct links will automatically be saved as a ‘Similar Product’ on that LTK post, saving both creators and shoppers time.

Keeping Your Followers Always in the Loop with Subscribe

LTK also launched a new Subscribe feature. By just tapping the bell icon at the top of a creator’s LTK Shop, shoppers can now subscribe to their favorite Creator’s content, notifying shoppers whenever that creator posts new looks, recommendations, sales and more.

Subscribe is another way for creators to deeply connect and engage with their community, ensuring their followers never miss out on one of their posts and giving them first access to all of their content.

The Goal of PXM to Optimize Every Digital Touchpoint is within Reach

Salsify, the Product Experience Management (PXM) platform empowering brand manufacturers, distributors, and retailers to win on the digital shelf, today released a new White Paper to define the next generation of PXM operations. The piece, titled “What Is the Next Gen PXM?: The Past, Present, and Future of Product Experience Management” and authored by Salsify co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer Rob Gonzalez, identifies substantial business shifts that expand the requirements for a PXM platform. A next-gen PXM platform will help brand manufacturers achieve the growth, operational efficiency, and tech stack consolidation that commerce success and profitability will require in this next decade.

The report states, “Product experience management (PXM) isn't just another industry acronym — it's the solution to a fundamental challenge in digital retail. From optimizing product visibility to harmonizing diverse digital touch points, PXM aims to revolutionize how brands engage with consumers online…The goal of PXM is to optimize every touch point on the digital shelf — everywhere.” According to Gonzalez, “classic PIM solutions are fundamentally mis-architected for the digital shelf…Modern PXM solutions compete for enterprise PIM solution deals, some are named leaders in the Forrester Wave report for PIM, and are displacing traditional PIM solutions as businesses invest in omnichannel and digital transformation…PXM is becoming a strategic category in manufacturing and retail. PXM is subsuming PIM as a category.”

A recent IDC report echoed these statements. In their 2023 SaaSPath study, IDC shared that “80% of commerce professionals surveyed indicated that they agree or strongly agree with the statement, ‘Does your company consider PIM to be part of a broader PXM platform?’ This is a big step in the evolution of PXM implying that vendors have truly created a new category of commerce software.”¹

The Salsify White Paper maintains that a PXM solution must enable its customers to:

• Centralize all product content into a trusted, central source of truth PIM that is unified with a syndication solution.
• Connect content to every PDP on every destination shoppers are at with conversion-driving product experiences that grow sales.
• Automate processes and reduce manual work with AI, workflows, and automation to drive efficiency in PXM operations.

Next-gen capabilities focused on these foundational pillars “will empower your entire organization to meet the challenges and opportunities of the next decade of the digital shelf,” the report affirms. The next decade will see a shift in focus from “growth at all costs” to “omnichannel profitability” with brand executives driving both top- and bottom-line growth with greater operational efficiency, aided by a consolidation of their tech stacks. Complete and accurate product data must be accessible by more teams than ever and the collaboration between those teams “must be as automated and aided by artificial intelligence (AI) as possible.”

“AI has taken the concept of the product record and transformed it from a basic store of data into the origin point for a nearly limitless array of personalized and audience-specific content,” says Adam Fairholm, VP, Product & Innovation, Sitation, LLC. “In the rapidly evolving landscape of AI, one constant is that personalized, AI-assisted content at scale isn’t possible without a foundation of complete and accurate product data.”

The White Paper follows Salsify’s release of PXM Advance, a new version of the Salsify platform that raises the business value customers can achieve from their product experience management operations. The release features product advancements across AI and automation, efficiency improvements in governance and syndication, premium below-the fold Enhanced Content capabilities to drive increased conversion rates, and the introduction of the Salsify PXM App Center, a central homebase for PXM innovation from Salsify and their global network of partners.

Leading global contextual advertising company pioneers the fusion of open-web interests and audiences with Connected TV content, prioritizing transparency, granularity, and effective delivery

Seedtag, the global leader in contextual advertising, announced today the launch of Contextual TV, a first-of-its-kind offering that harnesses AI-based network dynamics, rich insights and bespoke creative to enable advertisers to create more effective CTV strategies and drive high-performing, privacy-compliant advertising campaigns across the open web and advanced TV. Expanding into CTV was a natural step for Seedtag, demonstrating the company's dedication to supporting its clients across all screens and moving towards becoming omnichannel. 

"Advertisers encounter several challenges in the fragmented CTV market, including lack of standardized data signals, limited measurement capabilities, opaque reporting, creative limitations, and the inability to identify and understand the viewer behind the TV screen," said Kartal Goksel, Chief Technology Officer of Seedtag. "These factors make it difficult for advertisers to reach their target audience effectively and measure the performance of their advertising campaigns, which is why the market is ready for a solution like Contextual TV."

Seedtag's Contextual TV offers a comprehensive approach to addressing advertisers' challenges in the Connected TV (CTV) landscape by seamlessly bridging the gap between viewership and readership interests. Leveraging their expertise in indexing the open web contextually, they provide advertisers with a holistic solution to navigate the complexities of the CTV market. By integrating CTV signals such as automated content recognition (ACR) and ad exposure data with AI-driven contextual data from the open web, Seedtag empowers advertisers to precisely target audiences, tailor creative content, and optimize campaign performance. With Contextual TV, advertisers gain a deeper understanding of their audience across multiple devices, enabling them to deliver more relevant and impactful advertising experiences beyond genres and standard CTV audiences.

"Advertising on both CTV and the open web has a multiplier effect, reaching a larger audience with precision and increasing effectiveness compared to running campaigns in silos," said Mike Villalobos, VP of Strategy & Planning. "By leveraging both channels, you connect with individuals in different mindsets, which evokes different responses and improves engagement."

With Contextual TV, Seedtag ensures ad placements on trusted channels through its quality inventory, enhancing brand credibility and visibility. In addition, Seedtag is part of a comprehensive partner ecosystem to overcome any measurement challenge of reach, awareness, interest, and consideration.

"Seedtag is a partner that not only offers exceptional customer service, but also offers a solution that is future-ready for clients," said Victoria Gellatly, VP Media Director at Mediahub. "In a world where cookies are disappearing and consumption is fragmented, it's even more important for brands to understand where and what their audience is consuming. As we move away from cookie-led targeting, we are excited to elevate our partnership with Seedtag by leveraging a full-funnel contextual strategy that will incorporate its latest CTV capabilities. Implementing Seedtag's highly contextual targeting within CTV will allow us to increase visibility, eliminate waste, and target consumers who would be most interested in our brand."

"We are excited to continue our growing partnership with Seedtag as their contextual AI, Liz, promises to drive significant growth and redefine cookieless targeting capabilities in the CTV/OTT environment," said Amanda Marks, Director of Programmatic Strategy and Activation at Kinesso. "As the industry looks to evolve CTV targeting solutions, Seedtag's advanced technology enables advertisers to seamlessly implement a holistic contextual approach at scale, with precision and proven measurement."

• Webex by Cisco helps agents deliver exceptional experiences, enhanced by AI with Cisco AI Assistant.

• Webex delivers a turnkey solution at a lower price to empower customer-facing employees outside the contact center with Webex Customer Experience Essentials. 

• Webex Contact Center customers will see even more value with core quality management functionality and out-of-the-box CRM integrations included in the seat price.

Cisco at Enterprise Connect today announced new offerings within its Webex cloud customer experience solutions. Efficiently delivering a standout, connected customer experience across all channels and interactions is a business imperative, and organizations are increasingly looking to solutions that enable them to modernize the customer experience without disrupting their business.

In today's competitive, customer-obsessed climate, organizations must support every customer facing employee and every contact center agent as they seek guidance and support to resolve issues quickly. Today, they lack the right tools at the right price point to enable this. To address this, Cisco is unveiling general availability of the all-new Webex Customer Experience Essentials for customer-facing employees who are not traditional contact center agents. Cisco is also announcing new innovations in the Cisco AI Assistant for Webex Contact Center, quality management functionality and CRM integrations.

"Our Webex Customer Experience business continues to see rapid growth," said Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President & General Manager, Security & Collaboration "Organizations of all sizes are working with Cisco to empower contact center agents, reduce turnover and protect their brands. We offer them value at a price that's best in class."

Some customers are already benefitting from Cisco AI Assistant for Webex Contact Center capabilities in beta. These capabilities include conversation summaries for dropped calls and virtual agent interactions; agent burnout detection; automatically generated customer satisfaction scores; and topic analytics capabilities that help improve business outcomes. Early feedback from a customer using AI Assistant for Webex Contact Center saw a 4x improvement in time spent handling customer inquiries and have reported last mile improvements in customer satisfaction scores from 4.8 to 4.9 on a 1-5 scale – all within a two-month period.

"As First Horizon continues to find ways to improve our clients' experiences, we also look at the agent experience. Happy agents lead to better engagement with our clients. To that end, we have started testing Cisco AI Assistant's call drop summaries," Jason O'Dell, Vice President, Voice Services Manager at First Horizon Bank. "The summaries are concise, providing the important context of a customer's earlier interaction during repeat calls. These can be leveraged by our virtual bankers to avoid repeat conversations and improve customer experience. We are excited to be a part of AI Assistant's beta group and see positive results. We will continue to work closely with the Cisco team to fine tune the solution further to cater to specific banking use cases."

The self-learning, AI-powered Webex Contact Center enables businesses to connect customer experiences across all the ways customers want to engage—proactive messaging, self-service and human-assisted engagement—and ensures that agents have context and intelligence across the entire customer journey. Webex Customer Experience Essentials provides core agent and supervisor functionality, including analytics and reporting. The solution is priced to support customer-facing employees and teams, powering organizations with teams as small as 10 employees up to 50,000.

Cisco is also announcing core quality management features from its Webex Workforce Optimization solution that will be part of the new Webex Contact Center license. Additionally, as part of Webex's focus on delivering a steady stream of innovation to customers, new, deeper integrations with leading CRM providers will be available in the summer of 2024. These integrations with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and ServiceNow will seamlessly enable agents to process customer information without delay and manage advanced call related tasks directly from an integrated desktop. This ultimately simplifies workflows and improves overall efficiency.

New Agreement Provides Access to Unfiltered Consumer Conversations Through Reddit's Full Data Stream 

Cision, the leader in consumer and media intelligence solutions, and Reddit, home to hundreds of thousands of online communities, endless conversation, and authentic human connection, today announced an expanded partnership deal. Through this collaboration, Cision and Brandwatch customers gain broader access to the Reddit Data API, unlocking real-time, in-depth insights that fuel smarter marketing and communication strategies.

With over 73 million daily active users globally, Reddit offers a unique platform where passionate communities engage in organic discussions about brands, products, and industry trends. These discussions have the power to drive the news cycle, shape public opinion, and influence markets. By integrating Reddit's data into the Cision suite of products, customers will be fully equipped with the most complete understanding of real-time consumer behavior, conversations, and preferences available.

"Cision is one of a select group of partners accessing the full power of data on Reddit," says Jonathan Flesher,VP, Business Development and Partnerships at Reddit. "Expanded access to authentic public conversations enables Cision to equip its customers with a more comprehensive picture of online sentiment and trends."

This collaboration unlocks richer audience insights for brands now, while also fueling a pipeline of future innovations. By harnessing the Reddit Data API, Cision plans to supercharge the development of its proprietary AI-powered brand reputation and audience analysis technologies across its entire product suite. This will ensure PR professionals, marketers, and researchers can capitalize on the latest market advancements to gain a competitive edge.

"We are thrilled to expand our valued partnership with Reddit and further empower our customers with the intelligence they need to make strategic decisions at the speed of social," says Cali Tran, CEO at Cision. "Reddit's authentic, brand level conversations strengthen Cision's commitment to offering the most comprehensive consumer and media intelligence platforms on the market today."

Leverages Deep, Robust Integrations Across Adobe Experience Cloud Products

Stensul, the Marketing Creation Platform^™, is highlighting the synergy between its solution and Adobe GenStudio at Adobe Summit 2024. For businesses seeking to optimize creative production workflows, combining these two solutions accelerates and simplifies the content supply chain. 

The combination empowers businesses to:

• Leverage Stensul's intuitive interface, brand guardrails, and collaborative features to streamline creating and approving emails and landing pages, enabling seamless teamwork among all stakeholders, especially non-technical and non-design teammates.
• Capitalize on Adobe GenStudio, a new GenAI-first application that lets marketing teams accelerate the end-to-end content lifecycle to create and deliver on-brand marketing assets on a self-service basis.

The tight integration and alignment between Stensul and Adobe GenStudio unlocks a multitude of benefits for businesses, including:

• Increased efficiency to eliminate wasted time in every step of the content supply chain.
• Enhanced collaboration to foster seamless communication and feedback loops between requesters, specialists, approvers, and other stakeholders.
• Improved brand continuity to maintain brand compliance via Stensul's robust guardrails functionality.
• Scalability to effortlessly manage and reuse increasing volumes of creative content as business demands and campaign sophistication grow.

"Stensul provides significant additional benefits to businesses that will use Adobe GenStudio," said Noah Dinkin, Stensul's Founder and CEO. "GenStudio brings together select Adobe products to speed up a lengthy and costly content creation process. In concert, Stensul provides businesses wanting to democratize critical pieces of content creation and activation with a safe platform to do so, leveraging our easy-to-use interface and robust guardrails to ensure adherence to brand, technical, compliance, and channel requirements."

Strong Results Across Enterprises
The Stensul Marketing Creation Platform has increased performance while reducing email and landing page creation time by as much as 10x for organizations using Adobe products in their content supply chain. The robust guardrails of the Stensul platform allow leaders to let stakeholders within the business create production-ready assets rather than limiting those people to only make requests.

Stensul's recently launched Scripted Dynamic Content Authoring for Adobe capabilities create even more value. For businesses using Adobe Campaign and Adobe Journey Optimizer, this new functionality lets technical and non-technical marketing teams efficiently create personalized emails at scale, leveraging Stensul's intuitive design and Adobe-compatible scripting support. The new feature joins Stensul's Dynamic Content Authoring for Marketo, introduced late last year to expand the company's personalization capabilities further and build on a commitment to providing efficient and scalable creation cycles.

Adobe Experience Integrations Provide Great Value
Creating emails in the Stensul platform is simpler and more streamlined than any other method, in part because of deep integrations and support for several critical Adobe applications involved in the content supply chain. These include Adobe Workfront, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Campaign Classic, Adobe Experience Manager Assets, Adobe Journey Optimizer, and Adobe Marketo Engage.