Beyond the Box: How Moving Companies Fail at Customer Experience
The other day, I got robbed. Not literally, but figuratively. Now, you might wonder what this has to do with the main theme of this blog, which is about CRM and customer experience. It has, believe me. Some of you might know that I just relocated from the Seattle area to the Charleston area, so pretty much once across the country. Moving house is a big endeavor, but not necessarily a complicated one. In its simplest terms it involves packing stuff, potentially storing stuff, transporting stuff, and unpacking stuff. As a family of five tends to have a lot of stuff, it is a good idea to hire the services of a moving company to take care of all the logistics. Moving companies take care of most of the work, normally minus the considerable effort of unpacking a few hundred boxes. But usually, their base services cover the disassembly, packing, and normally also the reassembly of furniture, minus some possible exclusions that normally are explicitly mentioned. There are roughly two types of moving companies, brokers that act as a main contractor and subcontract the job to third parties, and those who have own operations, either directly or via a network of companies. Regularly used terms of payment are half at packaging and half on delivery, sometimes combined with a more or less substantial downpayment at the time of signing the contract. As it is with all businesses, it also pays off to do some research. Which we did, settling on one of the companies with the best reputation. After all, we have done several intercontinental moves before, the last...
Microsoft Layoffs: Profits, CEOs, and a Culture of Fear?
This will be a rant, but a rant with roots in the belief that employee experience fosters customer experience. As it should be well-known by now, Microsoft fired around 9,000 employees in July, after doing some smaller layoff rounds already in 2025, totaling more than 15,000 employees according to the TechCrunch comprehensive list of 2025 tech layoffs. This continues a trend from 2023 and 2024. Now, I get it. Companies need to be and stay profitable, reorganize and, if needed, lay off employees. As such, there is nothing wrong with this. Where things start to get wrong is when at the same time two other things can be observed: strong and successful growth in revenues as well as profits, and very generous payments to the C-suite. Microsoft is immensely successful. For a long time now, we see record revenue and profits every quarter, which means strong growth. Looking at the most recent Q4/25 numbers, this is poised to continue and made Microsoft the second $4 trillion company after Nvidia. Consequently, Satya Nadella as the company CEO, receives an enormous total compensation ($ 79.1M in 2024). To compare this number, the average total compensation of a Microsoft employee is $220k with a median compensation of around $192k. This is a factor of 400. And no, this is not me being jealous. Microsoft’s written down corporate values are respect, integrity, and accountability. What triggered this text is the dissonance between all this that is also evident in Satya Nadella’s mail to the employees titled “Recommitting to our why, what, and how” that got published on the corporate blog on July...
Zoho goes all in with AI – bold or inevitable?
The news On July 17, 2025 Zoho launched Zia LLM and deepened its AI portfolio with agents, an agent builder, MCP support and an agent marketplace. Key announcements from the press release include: In-House LLM: Zoho has developed its own large language model, Zia LLM, which comes in three sizes (1.3B, 2.6B, and 7B parameters) to optimize for different business use cases. This allows customers to leverage AI while keeping their data within Zoho’s ecosystem, ensuring privacy. The three models allow Zoho to always optimize the right model for the right user context, striking the proper balance between power and resource management. This focus on right-sizing the model is an ongoing development strategy for Zoho. Speech-to-Text Models: The company also unveiled two proprietary Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for English and Hindi, with plans to support more languages in the future. Prebuilt AI Agents: To facilitate immediate adoption, Zoho has introduced a range of AI agents that are integrated directly into its products. These agents are designed to automate tasks for various business roles such as sales development, customer support, and account management. Global and Private Cloud Deployment: The new Zia LLM will be deployed across Zoho’s data centers in the US, India, and Europe. Continued Support for Other Models: While promoting its own AI, Zoho will continue to support integrations with other popular large language models like ChatGPT, Llama, and DeepSeek. Zoho will continue to scale Zia LLM’s mode sizes. A2A capabilities are on the roadmap. The bigger picture Enterprise software has been a platform game for a long time. AI, in particular generative and agentic AI, have...