It’s been another busy week in the world of customer experience and service.
While Avaya’s CEO is stepping aside in a surprise announcement, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff teased a new “Agentforce Platform.”
Elsewhere, Vonage saw its market value drop significantly, and Gartner released fresh research on how customers really feel about AI.
Here are the extracts from some of our most popular news stories over the last seven days.
Avaya CEO Transition: Alan Masarek to Retire, Patrick Dennis Steps Up
Alan Masarek, President & CEO of Avaya, has announced that he will retire at the end of the calendar year.
He will relinquish the CEO role even sooner, with Patrick Dennis set to take the mantle from September 1.
Masarek – who also enjoyed a successful stint as Vonage CEO – joined Avaya in July 2022 and has presided over a significant restructuring of the company.
Yet, after a tumultuous couple of years – which included a bankruptcy – Masarek believes the Avaya ship is pointing in the right direction. Now, it’s full steam ahead for Dennis & co.
That will likely involve driving further engagement from Avaya’s existing enterprise base – which includes approximately 90 of the Fortune 100 – with its “innovation without disruption” vision.
Indeed, that aligns with Dennis’s experience in both on-premise contact centers and CCaaS as the former CEO of Aspect Software (now Alvaria).
Since then, he has held the CEO spot at Venafi and ExtraHop, which are prominent names in the cybersecurity space (Read on…).
Salesforce Teases a New “Agentforce Platform” for Customer Support
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has teased the launch of a new AI & automation platform for customer support.
Ahead of September’s Dreamforce event, Benioff took to X to offer a sneak peek of the platform and its customer-facing “Einstein Service Agent”.
In a post shared on X, the CEO highlighted the virtual agent’s essential features and how it will blend digital and human-assisted support for faster case resolution.
To achieve this blended experience, the virtual agent appears to build off the technology Salesforce rolled up after its 2023 acquisition of Airkit.ai.
Indeed, Airkit offers a low-/no-code bot-building platform that provides businesses with the building blocks to orchestrate AI-driven, conversational experiences.
Customer support teams typically leverage Airkit for service automation use cases. However, the solution allows firms to compose and automate cross-platform processes (Read on…).
Vonage’s Market Value Drops By $4BN: What Went Wrong?
Last week, Ericsson announced a Vonage impairment charge of $1.1BN. That follows a $2.92BN charge in November 2023.
Impairment accounting estimates an investment’s market value. So, when a company reports an impairment charge on an investment, it means that its value has dropped by the specific amount in the charge.
As such, by totaling the two charges, Vonage’s value has dropped by $4.02BN.
In addition, given that Ericsson acquired Vonage for $6.2BN, the networking giant appears to have lost almost 65 percent of its original investment.
The news comes after Vonage announced a five percent decline in overall revenue year-over-year (YoY) in April and reduced its operations “in some countries.”
At the time, Borje Ekholm, CEO of Ericsson, stated:
The group (Vonage) is trending well behind your and our initial expectations.
So, what has gone wrong, and what comes next? (Read on…).
Customers Reject AI for Customer Service, Still Crave a Human Touch
A recent study has revealed that the majority of customers do not want companies to use AI in their customer service offerings.
Conducted by Gartner, the findings are based on a survey of almost 6,000 customers across four continents. The results outline a clear disconnect between companies and customers regarding the use of AI.
The advancement of generative AI (GenAI) in recent times has led to internal expectations for customer service and experience leaders to deploy the technology, with Gartner reporting that 60 percent of leaders are “under pressure from other leaders in their enterprise to adopt GenAI.”
Yet, despite companies focusing heavily on leveraging AI to enhance CX, customers are actually rejecting the ubiquitous tech.
Of those surveyed, 88 percent admitted to having “major concerns” about AI, while 64 percent stated that they would prefer companies to not use AI for customer service.
Moreover, the survey’s findings suggest that this dislike of AI may start to impact companies’ bottom lines, with over half of respondents stating that they would consider switching to a competitor if they discovered a company was using AI for customer service (Read on…).
The findings were discussed by Keith McIntosh, Senior Principal of Research at Gartner Customer Service and Support Practice:
Sixty percent of customer service and support leaders are under pressure to adopt AI in their function. But they can’t ignore concerns about AI use, especially when it could mean losing customers.
But why are customers so wary of AI? And what can companies do to alleviate their concerns? (Read on…).
