aheadCRM

The past weeks showed quite some interesting activity on the mergers and acquisitions and the partnership frontiers. NiCE acquired the German conversational AI rock star Cognigy for $955M and a short time later announced that the company enhanced its partnership with Salesforce . At nearly the same time, Genesys received an additional funding of $1.5 bn from Salesforce and ServiceNow. Salesforce acquired Waii and Bluebird . VC company Thoma Bravo acquired the still leading CCaaS vendor Verint , to name but a few of the more interesting, and perhaps consequential ones. On top of all this, Avaya seems to have offered all employees a voluntary exit package . What all this shows is that there is significant consolidation going on in the AI-assisted (or should I say, driven?) CCaaS market and that various players are battling to provide – or at least be perceived to provide – the most comprehensive and valuable platform while others fight for survival.  Yes, it’s nothing new, but c...

My past two column articles on CustomerThink dealt with how to determine the return of agentic investments and whether agentic AI delivers at all . The question of ability to deliver is particularly interesting for me, as I am researching measurable results other than cost savings in contained business areas for some months now, and regularly find a very strong focus on customer service and marketing, with customer service functions being best able to report measurable results. This is evidenced by the number of success stories I find, supported by the publication of a recent TEI of Zendesk customer service study.  However, most of this is anecdotal evidence, or vendor sponsored/commissioned. And which vendor likes to speak about failures? Similar for buyers who understandably do not like to be in the spotlight with investments that turned out to be less than successful. There hasn’t been too much in depth research on whether generative and/or agentic AI deliver to promise or not....

The other day, I got robbed. Not literally, but figuratively. Now, you might wonder what this has to do with the main theme of this blog, which is about CRM and customer experience. It has, believe me. Some of you might know that I just relocated from the Seattle area to the Charleston area, so pretty much once across the country. Moving house is a big endeavor, but not necessarily a complicated one. In its simplest terms it involves packing stuff, potentially storing stuff, transporting stuff, and unpacking stuff. As a family of five tends to have a lot of stuff, it is a good idea to hire the services of a moving company to take care of all the logistics. Moving companies take care of most of the work, normally minus the considerable effort of unpacking a few hundred boxes. But usually, their base services cover the disassembly, packing, and normally also the reassembly of furniture, minus some possible exclusions that normally are explicitly mentioned. There are roughly two types of ...