AI Promised Faster Marketing. Now Campaigns Requires More People Than Ever

AI was sold to marketers as a way to do more with less. Yet most marketing leaders now say a single campaign pulls in 10 or more people, and for many that figure runs past 20, according to research from...

New Voice AI Agents From Five9 Aim to Retire the Scripted Phone Bot

Voice has long been the hardest and most costly customer service channel to automate. Calls are full of interruptions, background noise and questions that change halfway through, which is why many companies still rely on scripted bots and old Interactive...

What’s the Difference Between Compassion and Empathy in Customer Experience?

There’s something weird about the language executives use when they’re talking about improving customer experience these days. Everyone seems obsessed with concepts like “customer delight” or “wow moments”, as if consumers are desperate to be dazzled at every turn. More often,...

Customers Confess to AI What They Would Never Tell Your Team

Why would anyone tell a chatbot something they would hide from a person? It runs against every instinct about trust, and yet researchers keep finding it. People questioned by a machine own up to things they soften, dodge or bury...

Agent Factory Is Verint’s Bid to Move AI From Demo to Production

Verint wants to close the distance between AI that works in a demo and AI that works in daily operations. At its Engage 2026 event, the company introduced Verint Agent Factory, an orchestration environment for building, running and managing teams...

Calculating and Reducing Customer Effort Score: The New Hottest Metric in CX

For years, we’ve all followed the same guidelines when it comes to measuring customer experience. We assume if agents are answering a lot of calls every day, completing them fast enough, and not actively annoying anyone, we’re doing well. The focus...

RingCentral Wires AI Agents Into the Bones of RingCX

A patient cancels an appointment, and within seconds an AI agent works the waitlist, offers the open slot to the next person in line, and books it, no human prompt required. That kind of self-starting outreach is now part of...

Parloa Study: Speed Is the Name of the CX Game in 2026

Customers will give an automated service system only a few minutes to prove itself before they give up, and the brands that lose that race are losing customers to faster rivals, according to the inaugural Parloa Consumer Patience Index, a...

Capturing Voice of the Customer: How to Listen to your Audience (and Why it Actually Helps)

Remember when everyone just guessed what customers were feeling? That’s what fuelled a world where most teams don’t realise they’ve lost a customer until the renewal doesn’t come in or the basket just disappears. On paper, everything looks fine. Average...

Fake Returns Are Costing Retailers £29 Million

Online returns have become a normal part of shopping and a quiet drain on the retailers who handle them. New research suggests that a meaningful share of what comes back is not what it claims to be, and that most...

Bad Messaging Is Sending Customers Running and AI Is Not Saving the Day

Send a customer one badly worded message too many and they will not stick around to read the next one. Poor communications now drive most people to walk away from their providers, and the AI meant to smooth things over...

Alvaria Embeds Parloa AI Agents into Compliant Outbound Outreach

Alvaria and Parloa have integrated their platforms to give enterprises in regulated sectors a way to run multilingual AI voice and chat agents across outbound outreach without loosening compliance controls. Alvaria has embedded Parloa’s agentic AI into the Alvaria Intelligence...