Customer engagement

HubSpot’s Controversial New Customer Data Sharing Deal Didn’t Survive the Week

On 1 July, HubSpot rewrote its terms of service to let customer enrichment data flow into a shared pool other customers could draw on. By 5 July, the plan was dead. Chief Product and Technology Officer Duncan Lennox confirmed the...

Your Customer Experience News Roundup: The EU Takes Aim at AWS and Azure as Acquisitions Stack Up

This week in customer experience news, the European Commission moved to designate AWS and Azure as cloud gatekeepers, while the market added several notable acquisitions. Underneath it all, new data from Infobip punctured a flattering assumption: that because enterprises have...

What Is a Customer Loyalty Strategy in 2026? The Case Against Points-Chasing

The average shopper belongs to more than a dozen loyalty programmes. Ask them to name three they actually care about, and most will struggle. That gulf, between enrolment and affection, is the central problem facing every brand still treating customer...

Your Customer Experience News Roundup: Oracle’s SEC Filing Names AI in 21,000 Cuts and the Contact Centre Gets a Platform War

This week in customer experience news, Oracle became the first major tech company to attribute workforce reductions to AI in a regulatory filing, a quiet arms race over contact centre workforce management tools broke into the open with launches from...

8×8 Thinks Call Routing Has Been Broken for Decades. Its New AI Intelligent Routing Service Aims to Fix It

Skills-based call routing has been the backbone of contact centre operations for the better part of thirty years. An admin assigns skills to agents; those skills are periodically updated; incoming interactions are matched to the best available fit from the...

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...

CX Voices: Why the NHS Must Rethink How It Talks to Patients with Tom Boyle

For the first time in history, four generations share the same workforce. They are also sharing the same waiting rooms. Yet the NHS still defaults to the letter and the phone call. In the latest episode of CX Voices, Katie...

Your Customer Experience News Roundup: Anthropic’s Models Go Dark, Salesforce Has a Busy Week, and 79% of Your Customers Won’t Wait

This week in customer experience news, a US government export control directive pulled the most advanced AI models on the market from enterprise customers mid-deployment. Meanwhile, Salesforce acquired a colossal business, expanded a major data partnership, and shipped a general...

Pega Adds Agentic AI Marketing Layer to Its Decisioning Platform

Pegasystems has added a new layer to its Customer Decision Hub platform. Pega Customer Engagement Studio, announced this month at PegaWorld in Las Vegas, is an agentic AI workspace that pulls Pega’s own agents and outside tools together so a...

What Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos Drama Really Means for Customer Experience Leaders

Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models were suspended by the US government export control directive on 12 June 2026, following national security concerns. This was a first for any major AI lab. The shutdown has immediate implications for...

Digital Customer Engagement Essentials: The Strategy Layers that Customers Notice

The majority of brands think they’re doing a decent job with digital customer engagement. They’re embracing channels all over the place, jumping on social media, community forums, even things like RCS and WhatsApp. But for a lot of customers, the...

New 8×8 Capability Lets Contact Center Agents, Customers Speak Different Languages on the Same Call

When a customer phones a contact centre in a language the agent doesn’t speak, the usual outcomes are a transfer, a callback, or an abandoned call. 8×8 is endeavouring to cut that short, introducing live simultaneous voice translation to its...