This week in martech

Narrative partners with Experian for consumer insights

Narrative, the data streaming vendor, yesterday announced a partnership with consumer data giant Experian. The partnership will open up data from Experian’s ConsumerView database to clients using Narrative’s data streaming platform.

The aim is to give Narrative platform users access to consumer data across such verticals as

Financial services, automotive, retail and CPG. It will be possible to build audiences in Narrative, based on the actionable insights from Experian ConsumerView, and execute on those audiences in The Trade Desk, Google and Adobe.

Why we care.  Raw data is just that: raw data. Through this partnership, Narrative users should have the ability to convert that data into targetable audiences.

Deliveroo partners with Button

Deliveroo, the international food delivery service serving markets in Europe, Asia and Australia, has adopted Evolution, a product suite offered by Button, the mobile commerce intelligence vendor. 

Button aims to support business growth for brands and publishers, while providing an enjoyable mobile commerce experience for consumers. Deliveroo plans to use the Evolution suite to measure the effectiveness of affiliate marketing, and the impact of specific offers and discounts. This should aid better management of budgets for affiliate marketing, and a better understanding of ROAS.

Deliveroo also expects a better understanding of the effectiveness of partnerships with individual publishers.

Why we care. This is an example of a business which should thrive, based on the way consumer behavior changed last year, and it’s interesting to see how it’s raising its digital game.

2021 predictions: Customer service

Pega CRM, part of Pegasystems’ enterprise software portfolio, has greeted the new year with predictions for customer service, including the significance of XR: extended reality. Here are the highlights:

• This will be the year of autonomous service, with younger customers preferring to interact digitally rather than with live agents. Businesses at the cutting edge of this trend are offering customer service journeys rather than channel-based service, using hyper-automation, AI, virtual assistants and robotic process automation.
• Agents will continue to be physically distributed, meaning savings on office space, but investment in a digital collaboration infrastructure.
• The pandemic saw a surge in customer service cases which caught many businesses by surprise. Having learned that lesson, smart businesses will be future-proofing against disruption.
• Forget AR and VR in a customer service context: more than 50% of global business leaders are looking at XR — an umbrella term for a combination all immersive experiences (including real world) — as a differentiator in the next five years thanks to its “ability to simulate physical states of being” for remotely located employees and customers.

Why we care. Customer service is a critical element of the customer experience, and shouldn’t be siloed from marketing and sales. It’s also a business function which faces special challenges when teams work remotely: it deserves attention in 2021. Even so, we’re not placing big bets on XR yet.

About The Author

Kim Davis

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech Today. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.