Dive Brief:

• Forrester announced the acquisition of FeedbackNow, which makes physical buttons and monitoring software to measure and analyze customer experience (CX), and GlimpzIt, an artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning provider, per news provided to Marketing Dive. 
• The acquisitions are part of Forrester's strategy to build a real-time CX Cloud platform to help companies monitor and improve their customer experiences. The CX Cloud will incorporate instant customer feedback from physical devices, apps and embedded digital versions in websites and on mobile devices. It also aims to give companies the ability prioritize the most pressing feedback and provide a distribution network for relaying that feedback to operational sites in real time. 
• FeedbackNow can generate more than 200,000 pieces of feedback per day and will serve as a high-volume input source for the CX Cloud, per the release. GlimpzIt will be used to extend the analytics engine of the CX Cloud by allowing companies to analyze and correlate feedback and identify insights and actions that impact consumers. 

Dive Insight:

By bringing FeedbackNow and GlimpzIt onto its cloud platform, Forrester is looking to help its brand clients better address CX, an area where marketers, especially those in the U.S., often struggle — at least according to Forrester. Many U.S. brands remain "mediocre" when it comes to the quality of their CX, the researcher said in findings published in June, and even the better performers have remained largely stagnant year-on-year.

One of the pain points that marketers face when improving CX is sifting through increasingly high volumes of customer data and identifying the areas that need to be addressed the most urgently. The CX Cloud could potentially help companies analyze that customer feedback with greater efficiency. Forrester suggests that companies that offer superior customer experiences can drive revenue at double the rate of those that are rated poorly. 

Forrester's acquisitions and focus on a cloud-based platform highlight marketers' growing interest in marketing automation tools, including those powered by AI. Spending on cloud-based services and infrastructure is forecast to reach $266 billion in 2021, according to the International Data Corporation.