Customer Experience

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...

BPO Viewpoint – The Agentic AI Jobs Truth Vendors Won’t Tell You

At CCW Las Vegas, the vendors sold one story: humans and machines, side by side, nobody worse off. The outsourcers who actually run the agents told a sharper, more divided, and more honest one. CXM reports the BPO view from...

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...

Salesforce Wants to Run Your Entire Contact Centre From One Screen With New Workforce Engagement Management Offering

Contact centre workforce engagement management has a new competitor. Three months after launching Agentforce Contact Center at Enterprise Connect, Salesforce has returned to the stage, this time at Customer Contact Week in Las Vegas, to fill in what was feasibly...