Sitecore releases XM Cloud, Startup AI21 Labs Raises $64M, GraphCMS Sees Rebranding, More News
Leading the customer experience news train this week is Medallia’s acquisition of Mindful and Sitecore’s XM Cloud release.
Medallia, a customer and employee experience solutions provider, announced that it signed a definitive agreement to acquire Mindful from Alpine Investors, a private equity firm. Mindful, formerly known as VHT, provides callback automation.
“Consumers often want or need to talk to a live person, but no consumer ever wants to sit on hold,” Leslie Stretch, CEO of Medallia, said in a statement. “Mindful combined with Medallia’s signals-to-action platform will enable organizations to deliver a modern customer experience while reducing the high cost and friction of the conventional contact center approach. At the same time, contact centers will be able to use their staff much more efficiently by shifting call volumes to the most efficient times, routing calls to the most relevant queues and resolving issues without wasting either customers’ or agents’ time.”
Mindful’s patented technology helps users schedule calls, automates intelligent callbacks, transitions customers to other channels and provides automated call initiation based on signals from various channels.
“We are delighted to be joining forces with the customer experience leader,” Matt DiMaria, CEO of Mindful, said in a statement. “Our approach to customer interactions will be greatly enhanced through integration with Medallia’s award-winning Experience Cloud and category-leading Text Analytics engine. Our joint customers know what a great customer journey should be and making their customers’ interactions easier and more productive is a home run.”
In other customer experience and digital marketing software news…
Sitecore Experience Manager Cloud (XM Cloud) Now Available
Sitecore, a digital experience software provider, has announced the official release of Sitecore Experience Manager (XM) Cloud.
Sitecore XM Cloud allows marketers to manage omnichannel experiences with a SaaS CMS. It supports multi-brand architectures and site security. It includes a WYSIWIG authoring experience, embedded testing and personalization and integrated visitor analytics. Developers can use it with headless development techniques.
“Consumer behavior has changed rapidly over the past two years,” Dave O’Flanagan, chief product officer for Sitecore, said in a statement. “Audiences have become very digitally savvy and have an expectation from brands to deliver highly personalized customer experiences. This puts marketers in the unenviable position of trying to meet this expectation, but with tools and solutions that don’t deliver, and in some cases hamstring, the needed agility to meet demand. Sitecore XM Cloud provides marketers with a truly end-to-end, SaaS-based solution that not only helps brands meet consumer expectations but also delivers a best-of-class omnichannel customer experience.”
Sitecore XM Cloud includes:
- New features and capabilities will be automatically delivered and integrated
- Elastic scaling
- Composability, with the ability to purchase all of Sitecore’s platform solutions independently, fitting in a best-of-breed marketing technology stack
- Multi-channel content management
- Customized builds with modern frameworks
Related Article: What’s Behind Sitecore’s New Cloud-Native CMS Launch?
AI21 Labs Raises $64 Million
AI21 Labs, an Israeli startup that competes with OpenAI, has announced today the completion of its $64 million series B funding round, bringing the company’s valuation to $664 million. The round was led by Ahren, with participation from existing investors, including Prof. Amnon Shashua, Walden Catalyst, Pitango, TPY Capital and Mark Leslie.
AI21 has now raised $118 million.
AI21 Labs specializes in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and has built AI21 Studio, an NLP-as-a-Service developer platform where developers can purchase pre-trained and custom language models to build text-based applications.
“We completed this round during a period of market uncertainty, which highlights the confidence our investors have in AI21’s vision to change the way people consume and produce information,” Ori Goshen, co-founder and co-CEO of AI21 Labs, said in a statement. “The funding will allow us to accelerate the company’s global growth, while continuing to develop advanced technology in the field of natural language processing. We are looking forward to growing our team and our offerings.”
CallRail Partners With ActiveCampaign
Intelligence platform CallRail has announced an integration partnership with ActiveCampaign, which provides Customer Experience Automation (CXA). Customers will be able to optimize and automate their marketing efforts and streamline their omnichannel engagement with insights from inbound phone calls, according to company officials.
ActiveCampaign customers can now access CallRail’s real-time lead intelligence.
“CallRail is thrilled to join forces with ActiveCampaign to deliver the power of lead intelligence to thousands of SMBs across the nation,” Ryan Johnson, SVP of product development at CallRail, said in a statement. “We’re dedicated to integrating and building with partners that help our customers achieve their business goals, and this integration represents two leading solution-oriented businesses aligning to help SMBs achieve the ideal customer experience.”
The App Growth Accelerator program is a group of app partners that are built to work with ActiveCampaign customers.
Related Article: Qualtrics Finds Marketers Like the Metaverse, Konnecto Raises $21M, More News
GraphCMS Is Now Hygraph
GraphCMS has changed its name to Hygraph.
Company officials said the refreshed identity and new look “reinforce the commitment we have made toward enabling outstanding digital experiences on day one.”
The company also introduced Content Federation, a new set of features enabling users to unify all their backend services into one universal content API and serve third-party or programmatically created content alongside editorial content. With the new Content Federation capability, users bring content from other systems and sources to the Hygraph API.
The Hygraph Content Federation architecture consists of the following components:
- Remote source: a system or product that holds content that needs to be combined with content in Hygraph and which can be queried through a RESTful or GraphQL API.
- Custom type: a GraphQL type that is used for content coming from a remote source.
- Remote field: a field inside a Hygraph model that connects specific remote data to an entry of that model.
- Configurable cache: a TTL-based caching layer that guarantees optimal API performance for remote content.
