Customer Experience

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...

The Bill You Can’t Budget: How AI Is Rewriting the Rules of CX Procurement

The seat-based SaaS model was, whatever its limitations, legible. A contact centre bought licences, counted users, and planned around headcount. Procurement teams knew the unit. Finance could model it. Vendors and buyers, however unequal their footing, at least shared a...

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...

Pegasystems CEO: Vendors Releasing Unpredictable AI Agents Shows a ‘Philosophy of Madness’

The CX and enterprise tech space more broadly is currently gripped by an obsession with scale. Major vendors are envisioning a future populated by tens of thousands of autonomous digital workers. Yet behind the promotional push for independent AI agents,...

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...

Four Organisations That Prove You Can’t Fix Customer Experience Without Fixing Work Design 

Customer experience programmes obsess over what the customer sees, but the experience is shaped upstream by how work is designed. Perry Timms and Kirsten Buck of People and Transformational HR (PTHR) make the case for polymorphic work design, drawing on...

Why Customer Satisfaction with Brand Communications Is Falling and How to Fix the Strategy, With Scott Draeger

A strong customer communications strategy requires three things: consistency across channels, clean data governance, and a governance model that treats regulation as a floor rather than a ceiling. Smart Communications’ Scott Draeger argues that most organisations are failing on all...

Oracle Cut 21,000 Jobs Last Year. Its Own Filing Says AI Is a Big Part of Why

On the morning of 31 March 2026, thousands of Oracle employees opened their email to find a message from “Oracle Leadership” confirming their role had been cut, effective immediately. For the vast majority, there was no prior conversation and no...

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...

Microsoft Folds Workforce Management Into Dynamics 365, Gifting One Less Tool for Contact Centre Leaders to Juggle

Workforce engagement management (WEM) is now embedded directly in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Contact Center. It will reach general availability on 30 June 2026. The announcement brings demand forecasting, shift scheduling, quality monitoring, and real-time coaching into the same...