Segment 1: Talking to Akhilesh Tiwari, Global Head, Enterprise Application Services, Tata Consultancy ServicesThis week, in our quest to get more diverse voices to talk about their view of Customer Experience (CX), we talk to Akhilesh Tiwari from TCS about the practicalities of aligning technology, data and creatives to deliver CX. Here are the questions Akhilesh raises for marketers:Do your backend systems support the marketing vision for CX? Are you forgetting the impact of back-end functionalities and alignments in the quest for cool front-end CX elements?What role can a CMO play in bridging these gaps? What does it mean to build a data-driven creative approach to CX? Are the KPIs around customer interactions aligned with the KPIs of the rest of the organizational functions? Are you personalizing to an individual or to each transaction of the individual, wherein she may bring a different persona and context to each transaction? Data and tech are critical, but as humans, we respond to stories and imagery – not to technology or data. How can data-driven martech help with creating engaging stories and experiences?Segment 2: Big Tech CDP announcement and 1 big reportLast week, Salesforce, Adobe and Oracle all made customer-data related announcements. And Forrester released its first-ever B2B CDP wave report* where it names Lattice Engines and Leadspace as the leaders. We have a lively debate around the relative challenges and opportunities that would come with placing a CDP within Salesforce or any all-in marketing cloud ‘ecosystem’, especially in the context of data flow and integration. (*Editor’s note: The reason we link to the Leadspace site is because they have licensed the report for non-Forrester customers to be able to access it.)Also, you can listen in as Bobby Jania, VP, Product Marketing at Salesforce, tells Brent Leary about the addition of a CDP and the role of Einstein AI in the process, at Salesforce Connections recently.Calling out the need for ‘data freedom’ in a comment to MarTech Advisor, Jeff Lunsford, CEO of Tealium says, “As specialized enterprise software propagates throughout the enterprise, companies are also using an increasing number of software applications. Even companies that select an all-in-one suite for customer experience or marketing purposes will typically have ten more or more very critical systems outside that suite that they want to share data with. This challenge leads to the logical evolution of a vendor-agnostic, neutral data layer within the enterprise, which sits underneath and orchestrates data flows between these various suites and solutions. The neutral data layer helps enterprises overcome classic data silo issues and allows data to flow freely across the organization. Enterprises that want to future-proof their tech stack and maximize the insights they can gain from their data would be wise to select a solution that enables data freedom and empowers them to quickly adapt to evolving customer needs.”Segment 3: News of the Week: Facebook announced new digital currencyListeners can read an assessment of the announcement and what it might mean to marketers in this feature by MTA Editor Merilyn Pereira – but out panelists are quite clear that there is many a slip between announcement and reality.