Customer service

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,...

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...

Big Tech is Increasingly Moving Beyond ‘Human in the Loop’: Can Agentic AI Oversee Its Own Governance?

The human reviewer at the end of your AI pipeline may be less useful than you think. That, at least, is the argument being made by one of Amazon’s most senior security engineers. The rest of Big Tech appears to...

Meet Your New CX Editor

Every time you chase a missing parcel, extensively argue with an automated phone menu, or receive a follow-up email so perfectly timed it’s uncanny, you are living and breathing inside someone’s customer experience strategy. CX is not a vertical. It...

Airbnb Claims “Best AI Self-Solve in All of Travel” After AI Resolves 40% of Customer Issues

Airbnb’s AI assistant now resolves over 40% of customer issues without a human agent, up from roughly a third in Q4 2025. During the company’s Q1 2026 earnings call, CEO Brian Chesky described the tool as “by far the best AI...

Ocado’s AI Service Bet Delivers Faster Support With the Human Touch  

For years, customer service leaders have faced a familiar trade-off: improve service quality, or reduce cost. Doing both at once has proved far harder. In a recent webinar, I welcomed Dan Elton, Chief Customer Officer, Ocado and Suveer Kothari, Head of...

Banking on AI: HSBC Weighs 20,000 Job Cuts as It Installs First AI Chief

Three signals in the space of a month tell a consistent story about where HSBC is heading. Last week, Bloomberg reported the bank is weighing cuts of around 20,000 roles, with AI cited as a factor reshaping its workforce needs....

DeepBrain AI Brings Conversational Avatars to Customer Service

Palo Alto-based DeepBrain AI has officially launched its B2B AI Video Agents for real-time, two-way enterprise interactions across customer service and internal operations. According to DeepBrain, the launch “signals a paradigm shift in how businesses communicate, moving beyond static video...

‘Customer Service is the Most Valuable AI Use Case’, Infosys Research Finds

Customer service is generating the most business value from AI in banking, according to new research from Infosys. The sixth edition of its Bank Tech Index, a semi-annual survey of 400 of the world’s largest banks by total assets, places...

Booking.com Parent Company Reveals Real AI Savings in Customer Service

Booking Holdings, the parent company behind Booking.com, Agoda, Priceline, and Kayak, reported a concrete result that most companies are still chasing: its customer service costs fell in absolute terms last year, even as gross bookings grew by roughly 10%. The...

Level AI’s New Platform Challenges the Human vs. AI Debate in Customer Service

Level AI has announced a major expansion of its AI Virtual Agent platform, making the case that businesses have been asking the wrong question. Human agents or AI agents, it should never have been a choice. The company is taking direct...

Tealium and Diabolocom Partner to Provide Context-Aware CCaaS

Customer expectations are rising fast. People want quicker answers, more personalised service and smoother experiences across every channel. In response, technology providers are increasingly joining forces to close gaps in their offerings. The latest example comes from Tealium and Diabolocom,...