This episode starred Nicole France. Nicole is VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. She focuses on digital marketing, sales effectiveness and customer experience.

We planned to talk with her about platforms and their role in the ecosystem; eventually we got there after talking shop about the larger challenge of enabling and embracing customer experience. How can a customer have an experience? What does it take for companies? Are they properly set up to deliver? What is the role of culture? We covered lots of questions before even going into technology, which is a good thing, as customer experience first of all is about people with technology only being an enabler. Only then questions like: Why have platforms become important (again)? What is necessary to make them a success? Are there winning players? What is the role of a CDP in this, if any? Is there a difference between a suite and a platform, and which (hint: there is)? become important.

How to make sense of the buzzword bingo between CDP, personalization, Real Time Interaction Management and Customer Journey Orchestration. There are lots of questions, and even more answers, which depend on which vendor one asks.

Also, we asked about her opinions on trends for 2021, how the vendors managed COVID-19 so far and where she saw innovations and "spectacular" things to talk about - with an interesting result.

But watch and listen for yourself!