Note: You've landed on some older release notes from our early days. Learn about current BlueConic features and CDP use cases in the BlueConic Knowledge Base.
Most recent BlueConic product updates
For current BlueConic product updates, visit the BlueConic Release Notes section.
Another month, another product update! Before we dive into the updates, let's highlight two topics:
- As said before (but we keep repeating it because the more people join, the better), check out both our Slack account and LinkedIn. We post sneak previews of upcoming features, interesting news, and inspiring use cases from customers. You can also chat with other customers to ask each other questions and share ideas.
- We hosted a webinar, ‘A dozen cool things to do with a CDP’, with Ali Paradiso (BlueConic Customer Success Manager). Check it out if you missed it!
Firehose connections beta
As announced in January, we will start the firehose beta program in the coming weeks. When enabled for your tenant, you will get three new firehose connections: Amazon Web Services Kinesis, Google Cloud Pub/Sub and Microsoft Azure Event Hub. Using these connections, you can select segments and a target stream. Profiles in the selected segments will be sent to the target stream two minutes after the last change to the profile. This makes it easy to send profile data to, for example, Amazon RedShift and Google BigQuery. BlueConic customers also use big cloud vendors’ firehose technologies to send data to:
- BI tools
- Data lakes
- Data warehouses
By implementing the new BlueConic firehose connections, customers can pass all of their relevant profiles to these tools and environments. Exciting stuff! Email martijn at blueconic.com and let us know if you also want to join our beta program!
New security model for support
Security is crucial when working with customer data, and BlueConic ensures that you (the customer), and only you, determine who has access to your data. This is not only relevant for security, but also for the upcoming GDPR regulation. In December, we introduced a new security model for BlueConic support employees, and in this February release, we fine-tuned it. On the Settings > General tab, you can now choose what access you want to give to BlueConic support employees:
- No access: None of the BlueConic support employees can access your environment.
- Only access for named accounts: Select specific BlueConic employees (for example, your Customer Success Manager) to have access to your environment.
- Access for all: The BlueConic Customer Success Managers and support team will all have access to your environment.
By giving BlueConic support employees access to your environment you give them access to your data and also allow them to provide the highest quality of support with speedy resolutions.
Connections
February brings a lot of Connection updates – big and small:
- Last October, we introduced our Acxiom partnership, and now we have a connection that imports Acxiom data into BlueConic to:
- Enhance your BlueConic profiles with missing profile properties, particularly offline attributes, and other demographic attributes
- De-duplicate multiple email addresses, phone #, or other profile properties associated with a single customer
- Activate your omnichannel customer data
- To complement our existing ESP WhatCounts connection, we’ve added a new Hosted WhatCounts connection.
- We are also introducing drag-and-drop simplicity for property mappings in SFTP and S3 export goals, so you can now easily change the order of the mappings to be exactly like your Excel file columns.
All the little (identifier) things
We made several tweaks for identifiable profile properties and merging:
- From now on, merge rules are not automatically created when installing a plugin with a ‘unique identifier’ profile property. This prevents unexpected profile merges.
- You can now search for profiles that have multiple identifiers stored in a single profile property! Happy hunting!
- To prevent unwanted profile merges, BlueConic will create a new profile if the value of a unique identifier changes. This only happens if the existing value is replaced by another value. BlueConic will not create a new profile if another value is added to an existing value. In the previous release, BlueConic would create a new profile in both situations. The creation of the new profile is only done if the newly added option “Create new profile when identifier changes” is checked on the profile property.
A sneak peek at features to come
- We are still working hard on more GDPR features, including consent management, consent request examples, and a privacy center. More details to come in March!
- More connections in the works: Mixpanel, Experian Marketing Suite, Slack, HubSpot, Knowledge Marketing and more!
Check out our new ebook on Customer Data Proficiency and find examples of how to use a CDP to get the most value for your company.