Big CX News from Avaya, Sprinklr, Genesys, and Google

Popular stories from the last week that you may have missed.

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Published: May 10, 2024

Rhys Fisher

This week in CX sees acquisition news from Avaya and Google, Sprinklr’s “digital twins”, and a unified CCaaS and CSM platform from Genesys and ServiceNow.

Here are the extracts from some of our most popular news stories over the last seven days.

Avaya Acquires Edify, Continues Its Innovation Without Disruption Story

Avaya has snapped up Edify, a CCaaS, CPaaS, and UCaaS platform provider.

In addition, Edify offers AI-driven self-service solutions.

However, it’s best known for its Edify CX platform, which gels its CCaaS and CPaaS platforms.

That offering allows service leaders to define the contact center journeys they would like to create. Then, it provides a no-code engine to orchestrate those journeys.

The approach is divergent. After all, most CCaaS vendors give customers a boxed platform of settings, which they configure to try and piece together their ideal journeys.

With Edify, service leaders can compose those journeys themselves.

That’s evident in Edify’s mantra:

We don’t tell you what to do, we simply give you all the tools to do it.

That proved an extremely attractive prospect for Avaya. After all, many of its large enterprise customers will have significant journey and process customization needs (Read on…).

Sprinklr Develops “Digital Twins” to Spread Conversational AI Across the Enterprise

Sprinklr has announced a new conversational AI offering: Sprinklr Digital Twin.

The platform allows businesses to build an AI “twin” for the different layers of an organization.

For example, service, sales, and marketing – alongside other non-customer-facing departments – may create their own twin.

Each twin helps automate customer conversations. But, departments may also leverage the platform to create a copilot for employees.

Indeed, Sprinklr offers departments a canvas to develop their own ways of assisting employees.

Yet, instead of building out trees and dialogs, the developer first defines a specific action. Then, they provide the twin with access to data, knowledge, and the relevant systems via APIs.

From there, the twin performs the action autonomously.

Other conversational AI leaders have designed similar conversational AI platform offerings. But, Sprinklr’s stands out for a couple of critical reasons (Read on…).

Genesys & ServiceNow Pledge to Deliver a Unified Platform for CCaaS & CSM

Genesys and ServiceNow have announced that their two hallmark customer experience platforms will soon become one.

Indeed, the two companies will integrate the Genesys Cloud and ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM) platforms.

By doing so, they will develop a single solution: Unified Experience from Genesys and ServiceNow.

That solution will pull Genesys’s contact center, journey orchestration, and workforce engagement management (WEM) capabilities into ServiceNow CSM.

Moreover, it promises to unify customer service teams through one workspace, centralize routing, and break down silos within the agent experience.

It won’t take long for that promise to become reality, either, as the Unified Experience from Genesys and ServiceNow offering becomes available later this year.

Celebrating the news during ServiceNow’s annual Knowledge 2024 event, Olivier Jouve, Chief Product Officer at Genesys, stated:

Earning customer loyalty requires organizations to scale personalized, end-to-end experiences. This is possible with an AI-powered solution that connects data, systems, employees, and communication channels to create a 360-degree view of the customer experience.

To break down those silos, agents will have access to one shared workspace within ServiceNow CSM (Read on…).

Google Parent Alphabet Talks Acquisition Terms with HubSpot, Sources

Alphabet – Google’s parent company – has engaged in talks with HubSpot to acquire the CRM giant, according to Bloomberg sources.

The development – shared by “people familiar with the matter” – follows reports that Alphabet drafted in advisers last month to mull over an offer.

It also comes at a time when Google is assessing additional growth engines – as it faces new competition in its traditional search business.

Alphabet has the free funds to invest heavily in such growth engines, boasting a cash pile of $110.9BN as of January 1, 2024.

With these funds, it could snap up an enterprise tech juggernaut like HubSpot – which has a market cap of $30.0BN (as of April 9, 2024) – three times over.

Yet, prominent CX analysts have cited the increased regulatory scrutiny of big tech in the US as a perhaps critical blocker to the deal.

Indeed, Liz Miller, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, told CX Today: “Given Google’s dominant position in the advertising industry and the current legal challenges it faces, the acquisition could raise significant antitrust concerns.

If Google were to control both the search engine that drives traffic and the CRM that manages customer relationships, it could create a potentially anti-competitive environment.

Beyond the regulation, Google must consider where HubSpot fits within its broader CX stack – which includes CCaaS, virtual agent, conversation intelligence, and other platforms (Read on…).

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