Jarvis ML, a platform offering an AI-powered personalization engine to brands selling products, services and experiences, today announced that it raised $16 million in a seed round led by Dell Technologies Capital. In an interview with TechCrunch, CEO Rakesh Yadav said that the new capital will be used to grow Jarvis ML's R&D and sales and marketing teams to "accelerate product development and market penetration." As the pandemic spurred brands to spruce up -- or create from scratch -- online presences, the value of personalization came into acute focus. Accustomed to Netflix- and Amazon-like tailored product recommendations, customers began to demand the same from companies of all sizes. According to McKinsey, 71% of shoppers now expect businesses to deliver personalized interactions while 76% get frustrated when this doesn't happen. Some research -- particularly from customer analytics vendors, unsurprisingly -- suggests that personalization is a worthwhile investment.

As companies strive toward a frictionless digital experience, they must find ways to improve customer loyalty and trust. How will digital customer experience evolve in the coming year? The pandemic-induced explosion of ecommerce and the acceleration of digital transformation means that most companies will re-examine and revamp their customer experience strategies and capabilities in the coming year. With customer loyalty increasingly difficult to gain and sustain, pioneering, data-powered technologies will improve the seamlessness of these digital experiences and deliver better brand engagement. A dozen leaders in the customer experience (CX) space spanning a range of industries – including healthcare, travel, insurance, and banking – met to discuss challenges and solutions, and debate the direction of travel in the coming year.

Mega-conference Mobile World Congress is happening this week in Barcelona, Spain, and I've been on-the-scene running some cool, live brand engagements (huge thanks to Ericsson for making this work possible!!). I was here conducting interviews and capturing video content that showcases 5 fabulous IoT use cases in telecom. In this video I speak with Ulrika Jagare, the Director of Analytics and Machine Intelligence at Ericsson. Ulrika is a data-driven, powerhouse of an analytics strategist at Ericsson. You're seriously not gonna want to miss this, folks!!

Chatbots are the future of brand engagement. Engaged customers are likely to proceed to the bottom of your sales funnel. The key to increase sales and customer loyalty is by improving your customer's experience. Customers are smarter today than they were five years ago and they expect you to be adept at your communications with them. Gartner predicts that by 2020, a customer will manage 85 per cent of the relationship with a business without interacting with humans and hence, the increased demand and adoption of self-help service.

Since we started building bots at KeyReply more than two years ago, the industry has seen massive interest and change. This makes it hard for companies and customers to figure out what's really happening -- so we hope to throw some light on this industry by creating a landscape of chatbot-related businesses. There's no way to put everyone into this landscape, so we have selected examples that give readers an overview of the industry, such as notable or dominant providers and tools widely used to develop bots. To put everything into a coherent structure, we arranged companies along the axes according to the functions of their bots and how they built them. On the horizontal axis, the "marketing" function refers to a bot's ability to drive exposure, reach, and interaction with the brand or product for potential and current customers.

Earlier this year, a survey from Nuance Communications into consumer preferences and expectations around customer self-service revealed that a significant number (89%) prefer, and even expect, to have conversational interaction. In fact, for 87%, a positive interaction with a company determines whether or not they will continue their relationship. Of particular interest is Nuance's finding that 89% of consumers "want to engage with virtual assistants to quickly find information instead of searching through Web pages or a mobile phone app on their own". Nearly three-quarters (73%) said they want their conversations with customer service to be personalized and 64% want customer service to be proactive and include suggestions and reminders. New research from the Direct Marketing Association (UK) reflects Nuance's findings in terms of brand engagement.