Customer Experience

You Can Now Deploy Zoom’s AI Virtual Receptionist Across Your Telephony Stack

Zoom has announced a standalone version of its Virtual Agent (ZVA) Receptionist, its AI tool that answers, greets and routes inbound calls. The collaboration and contact centre titan has detached ZVA Receptionist from Zoom Phone entirely. Where it once only worked...

Voice Deepfakes Have Broken the Contact Centre’s Oldest Trust Test: Here’s How You Can Safeguard Against Them

For as long as contact centres have existed, agents have made one sure bet. Namely, that a voice is a fingerprint. Sound right, and you are who you say you are. According to the people who build and test today’s...

Slackbot Can Now Run Your CRM Thanks to New Salesforce MCP Servers

Salesforce has switched on a set of dedicated Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that connect Slackbot, its AI agent built into every Slack workspace, directly to CRM records, Tableau analytics, Data 360 customer profiles and Agentforce agents. Users can now ask...

Microsoft’s AI Sales and Service Agents Leave the Lab and Clock In With General Availability

Microsoft has taken the wraps off its new Sales Agent and Service Agent solutions, confirming general availability across Microsoft 365 Copilot and Dynamics 365. Both tools have been circling in preview for months. The pitch, in Corporate Vice President of Dynamics...

The CX Framework Playbook: Popular Strategies and How to Build a Framework of Your Own

Every customer will tell you it cares about customers. It’s basically a reflex at this stage. We’ve all had the importance of a “great customer experience” drilled into us to the point that some teams are sick of hearing about...

The Benefits of Customer Advocacy: The Business Case for Loyal Customers Who Influence Others

It’s odd how many companies still look at advocacy like a nice bonus. They know referrals and positive reviews can potentially bring in extra business. They might even know that advocates spend an average of two times more than the...

Ofcom Fines Virgin Media £28m for Deterring Customers from Cancelling

Ofcom has fined Virgin Media £28 million after finding the company made it far too hard for customers to cancel their contracts and move to a rival. The regulator said millions of calls were likely mishandled over almost three years,...

Vercel’s CEO Just Declared the Single AI Vendor Model Dead

Single-vendor AI contracts are falling out of favour, according to the lead of one of the infrastructure companies best placed to witness it. Guillermo Rauch, CEO of cloud platform Vercel, told TechCrunch this week that businesses have largely stopped picking...

Agentic AI Drives Salesforce’s $1 Billion Investment in Switzerland

Salesforce will spend $1 billion in Switzerland over the next five years to speed up the country’s move to agentic AI. The company’s Chair and CEO Marc Benioff revealed the plan during a visit to Switzerland, a day before the...

SAP Confirms Dremio Acquisition, Powering AI Agents With Its Data Lakehouse Platform

SAP confirmed this week that it has closed its acquisition of Dremio, the data lakehouse specialist it first agreed to buy back in May. Terms weren’t disclosed, and the transaction had been sitting through regulatory review since. The logic behind...

Conversational AI ROI: Why the Numbers Keep Lying to You

Ask ten vendors about conversational AI ROI, and you will get ten different answers, most of them suspiciously generous. Ask ten CX leaders who actually run these deployments, and the picture gets much murkier. PwC’s 2026 Global CEO Survey found...

New Klaviyo Tool Turns Social Engagement Into Customer Data

Klaviyo has launched Klaviyo Social Marketing, a product that connects social media engagement to the omnichannel marketing systems consumer brands use to understand and convert customers. The autonomous B2C CRM says the tool brings signals from comments, direct messages, mentions,...