aheadCRM

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 ...

This will be a rant, but a rant with roots in the belief that employee experience fosters customer experience. As it should be well-known by now, Microsoft fired around 9,000 employees in July, after doing some smaller layoff rounds already in 2025, totaling more than 15,000 employees according to the TechCrunch comprehensive list of 2025 tech layoffs . This continues a trend from 2023 and 2024 . Now, I get it. Companies need to be and stay profitable, reorganize and, if needed, lay off employees. As such, there is nothing wrong with this. Where things start to get wrong is when at the same time two other things can be observed: strong and successful growth in revenues as well as profits, and very generous payments to the C-suite. Microsoft is immensely successful. For a long time now, we see record revenue and profits every quarter, which means strong growth. Looking at the most recent Q4/25 numbers , this is poised to continue and made Microsoft the second $4 trillion company after ...