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...
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...