Beyond the Call Center: Unifying CX, One Definition at a Time (Finally!)
Beginning of September 2025, the CRM Magazine published its 2025 CRM Industry Leader Awards on Destination CRM. This year, the awards nominate five outstanding companies across eleven categories. As in recent years, CRM Magazine asked some renowned analysts to chose Industry Leaders for 2025 using a simple question: “If you had to recommend a CRM solution—whether an enterprise suite, contact center infrastructure, or a customer data platform—to a client, what would they choose, and why?” And, of course, the analysts – being analysts – gave their answers. And good answers they are. But this is not the topic of this post. What is it then? Glad you asked … It is about the term “unified customer experience platform” and the corresponding award category. Looking at the winners and their corresponding descriptions, it turns out that there seems to be a clear dominance of customer service and contact center solutions in this area – with the exception of the honorary mention of Sprinklr, which has its origins in the social media sphere. This dominance suggests that customer experience is somehow made equivalent to customer service. This shows quite some success of the narratives that CCaaS and customer service vendors are telling. This is especially true if very renowned analysts, who are in part thought leaders as well, follow it. Which somewhat irks me. And it reminds me of how the term CRM got more and more appropriated by vendors of sales force automation, SFA, solutions, until CRM almost became synonymous to SFA, which it isn’t. And never was. Again, this is not about the winners. They are great and very...
The great CCaaS Meltdown: What It Means for Customers and CX
The past weeks showed quite some interesting activity on the mergers and acquisitions and the partnership frontiers. NiCE acquired the German conversational AI rock star Cognigy for $955M and a short time later announced that the company enhanced its partnership with Salesforce. At nearly the same time, Genesys received an additional funding of $1.5 bn from Salesforce and ServiceNow. Salesforce acquired Waii and Bluebird. VC company Thoma Bravo acquired the still leading CCaaS vendor Verint, to name but a few of the more interesting, and perhaps consequential ones. On top of all this, Avaya seems to have offered all employees a voluntary exit package. What all this shows is that there is significant consolidation going on in the AI-assisted (or should I say, driven?) CCaaS market and that various players are battling to provide – or at least be perceived to provide – the most comprehensive and valuable platform while others fight for survival. Yes, it’s nothing new, but can’t be repeated often enough. The CX market is and always was a high stakes platform game. The stakes got even higher with the advent, the promise and the necessary investments that generative AI and agentic AI require. While one can consider Salesforce’s acquisitions as tuck-ins that help rounding off its Agentforce platform, the other ones are a sign of something bigger going on in the CCaaS and customer service market segments. It is also notable that exactly these sectors get more and more referred to as CX market, whether this is a correct, or only good, attribution, or not. Hint: It isn’t. Not unexpectedly, Salesforce is in the thick...
Beyond the Hype: Unlocking GenAI ROI in the Enterprise
My past two column articles on CustomerThink dealt with how to determine the return of agentic investments and whether agentic AI delivers at all. The question of ability to deliver is particularly interesting for me, as I am researching measurable results other than cost savings in contained business areas for some months now, and regularly find a very strong focus on customer service and marketing, with customer service functions being best able to report measurable results. This is evidenced by the number of success stories I find, supported by the publication of a recent TEI of Zendesk customer service study. However, most of this is anecdotal evidence, or vendor sponsored/commissioned. And which vendor likes to speak about failures? Similar for buyers who understandably do not like to be in the spotlight with investments that turned out to be less than successful. There hasn’t been too much in depth research on whether generative and/or agentic AI deliver to promise or not. Luckily, there has been at least some research evaluating the capabilities of LLM based AI agents in business environments published this year. CRMArena-Pro by Salesforce Research naturally has a focus on CRM tasks across B2B and B2C scenarios. The authors identified nineteen tasks commonly executed in CRM systems and categorize these tasks in the four business skill categories database querying and numerical computation, information retrieval and reasoning, workflow execution, and policy compliance and includes a confidentiality awareness evaluation. TheAgentCompany on one hand covers a wider area along the business value chain but on the other hand has a narrower focus on software engineering companies. One other main difference between...