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Technology providers yesterday said that companies are finally getting the necessary technologies and processes in place to enable true one-to-one strategies. Some executives shared the trends that they're seeing, and the common themes were around customer collaboration, using analytics to affect the customer experience, and understanding and connecting customer preferences across all touchpoints. Here are some of their thoughts:

"We're seeing companies using business intelligence to affect the customer experience. It's about how to create the sticky customer."-- Ralph Miller, CEO of Ivedix

"The customer experience has now become a lot more prevalent...We're doing a better job of managing the customer journey when we get them into the store."--Simon Brazier, vice president of Sales, for Lawrence, a Tensator Group Company

"Consumers are absolutely looking to leverage every dollar they possibly can. I see there are many people clamoring to provide truly targeted offers, but there's still a lot of gray." - Rod Witmond, SVP, product management and marketing, Cardlytics.

"Customers are walking around with phones. When they walk into a store, retailers have to be able to connect with customers any time during the buying cycle." -- Jeff Marker, SVP of the Retail Practice, Junction Solutionse.com.

"Expectations are higher now than ever before. The spoiled consumer of 2007 [today]has less patience with retailers who don't have a seamless customer experience." - John Stelzer, director of retail industry marketing, Sterling Commerce, an IBM Company.

"The new channel is mobile and the real challenge is working that channel into the store channel. If [retailers] have two channels that aren't integrated, it becomes painfully obvious. That 'channel within a channel' aspect will put a great deal of pressure on retailers to synchronize."-- John Stelzer, director of retail industry marketing, Sterling Commerce, an IBM Company.