Another bumper week of CX news has seen Salesforce unveil the “world’s first” LLM benchmark for CRM, while Microsoft announced that it would be abandoning its Copilot Pro GPT Builder after just three months.
Elsewhere, BT penned a big contact center deal with ServiceNow.
Here are the extracts from some of our most popular news stories over the last seven days.
Salesforce Unveils a “World First” Innovation to Optimize GenAI Implementations
Salesforce has announced the “world’s first” LLM (large language model) Benchmark for CRM.
With the solution, Salesforce customers can rank LLM models on a leaderboard to select the best possible option for their chosen generative AI (GenAI) use case.
The LLM Benchmark enables this by leveraging a “comprehensive evaluation framework”, with criteria grouped into four categories: accuracy, speed, cost, and trust & safety.
With scores available across each category, Salesforce hopes businesses can make “smart decisions” when evaluating LLMs and utilize its open Einstein platform to leverage multiple models where they’re best fit.
So, for example, a service team may harness one LLM to draft customer replies and another to summarize customer conversations.
However, the LLM Benchmark will only be available across service and sales use cases on release – with Salesforce planning to expand the offering across its CRM apps thereafter.
The CRM leader also promises to continually advance its evaluation of LLMs and – eventually – to rank fine-tuned models alongside iterations of hallmark offerings like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Llama (Read on…).
Microsoft Culls Its Copilot Pro GPT Builder: A Warning for Enterprise GenAI Adopters?
In January, Microsoft announced Copilot Pro, a paid version of Microsoft Copilot.
Then, in mid-March, the tech giant extended the application by allowing users to create custom GPTs.
As with OpenAI’s GPT Store, users could hard-code those custom GPTs to perform particular tasks within various applications.
However, just three months later, Microsoft announced that it would remove that capability for consumers starting July 10, 2024.
In a surprise web post, the tech giant noted: “We are continuing to evaluate our strategy for consumer Copilot extensibility and are prioritizing core product experiences while remaining committed to developer opportunities.
To this end, we are shifting our focus on GPTs to Commercial and Enterprise scenarios and are stopping GPT efforts in consumer Copilot.
By making such a statement, Microsoft hints that it has not made enough money through its 365 subscriptions to account for the significant cloud computing costs that come with ChatGPT.
As such, its sales teams are shifting the focus to selling these capabilities to enterprises (Read on…).
BT Group Taps ServiceNow to Bring GenAI & Automation Into Its Contact Centers
BT Group has penned a multi-year agreement with ServiceNow to “improve customer and employee experiences”.
The agreement will see the telecoms giant extend its use of ServiceNow’s Service Management portfolio across “all BT Group units”.
In doing so, BT will utilize new capabilities within that portfolio. Interestingly, that includes ServiceNow’s Now Assist for Telecom Service Management (TSM) solution.
Now Assist for TSM leverages NVIDIA AI – which includes generative AI (GenAI) – to support telco customer service teams in summarizing customer conversations, case activities, and work notes.
In addition, the telecom-specific offering supports agents with next best actions.
Subsets of BT’s customer care team have already leveraged the summarization capability as part of a phase one pilot, with 300 contact center agents utilizing the solution.
So far, that pilot has enabled these BT teams to reduce their mean time to resolution by a third and cut the time agents take to generate case summaries by 55 percent (Read on…).
Contact Centers Are Turning to AI Filters to Protect Staff from Angry Customers
Handling angry customers is an unenviable task that every contact center must deal with.
Unfortunately, widespread issues such as short staffing, long wait times, and misfiring self-service deployments only exasperate the problem.
Last year, 43 percent of US customers admitted to yelling or raising their voices to express displeasure about their most serious problems, up from 35 percent in 2015.
As this problem perseveres, attracting staff into the space continues to be difficult, with AI not yet providing the silver bullet many expected.
Indeed, AI and generative AI (GenAI) are not proving as effective in stemming the aforementioned causes of customer anger.
Consider short-staffing. According to Gartner, 61 percent of customer service leaders expect headcount reductions of only five percent or less due to GenAI.
However, AI-driven self-service and workflow automations are not the only tools that could help to combat the causes of customer anger.
Now, contact centers are using AI-powered voice filters to tackle the problem head-on (Read on…).