It’s been another busy week in the world of customer experience and service, with Salesforce announcing an acquisition, Five9 securing a megadeal, troubles at Dubber, and a new chapter in the Marc Benioff-Microsoft saga.
Here are the extracts from some of our most popular news stories over the last seven days.
Salesforce Set to Boost Voice Capabilities with Tenyx Takeover
Salesforce has confirmed that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Tenyx.
The deal, set to close in 2025, will see Salesforce integrate Tenyx’s Voice AI technology to enhance its existing offering.
This will include leveraging Tenyx’s service-use-case-specific features to improve Salesforce’s autonomous agent capabilities for its Agentforce Service Agent and Service Cloud, as well as helping to advance the vendor’s overall AI-driven solutions.
Salesforce believes that the addition of Tenyx’s innovations will allow the company to “set new standards” in customer experience, and enable users to provide a more “intuitive” and “seamless” customer service.
In a statement released by Salesforce, the company praised Tenyx’s AI capabilities:
Salesforce’s acquisition of Tenyx underscores its commitment to revolutionizing customer service through AI, reflecting its dedication to delivering next-generation customer service solutions.
The vendor also confirmed that as part of the deal Tenyx’s Co-Founders, CEO Itamar Arel and CTO Adam Earle, along with their team, will join Salesforce once the acquisition is finalized (Read on…).
NICE Is Part of a $578MN Megadeal to Transform the Southern Hemisphere’s Largest Contact Center
Services Australia has signed a $578MN deal with Optus to deploy a CCaaS solution and related connectivity services.
That CCaaS solution is the Optus Cloud Contact platform, powered by NICE CXone.
NICE CXone is a market-leading CCaaS platform, according to the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant and Forrester Wave reports into the market.
Optus Cloud Contact leverages numerous of CXone’s enterprise-grade capabilities, including its various channels, workforce engagement management (WEM), AI solutions, and more.
In implementing the platform, Services Australia will transition from its Telstra-based service, which currently handles over 55 million calls and one billion online transactions a year.
According to the government agency, those numbers make its contact center the Southern Hemisphere’s largest service operation.
Services Australia hopes to go live with the solution from the start of 2026 and will continue with its Telstra-based contact center platform until the end of the year. That will give Optus enough time to deploy and familiarize the team with its tech.
The deployment is part of a big push by the agency to modernize its customer and employee experiences, having overhauled its telecoms in January for the first time in 12 years (Read on…).
Microsoft Fires Back, Rubbishes Benioff’s Copilot Criticism
Microsoft has responded to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s claim that “Microsoft has disappointed so many customers with AI.”
Benioff made the comments during his company’s latest earnings call, during which he specifically outlined Microsoft’s Copilot, taking aim at the solution for failing to deliver the “accuracy” and “response” that customers expected.
In a statement to CRN, Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President for AI at Work, rebutted the Salesforce CEO’s comments, claiming that the company had been receiving favorable feedback from its Copilot customers.
Every customer is at a different place in their journey, but overall we are hearing something quite different from our Copilot for Microsoft 365 customers.
“When I talk to chief information officers directly and if you look at recent third-party data, organizations are betting on Microsoft for their AI transformation,” Spataro said, rubbishing Benioff’s suggestions of “disappointed” customers.
Yet, despite Microsoft’s protestations, there have been rumblings of dissatisfaction from Copilot users (Read on…).
Dubber Assures Investors the Business Is Stable After Temporarily Ceasing Trading
Dubber has assured investors the business is stable despite ceasing trading for two days.
Indeed, the cloud-based call recording software provider asked the Australian Stock Exchange to halt trading on Wednesday, August 28, and commence again on Friday, August 30.
The vendor cited a pending announcement regarding “potential adjustments to its FY2023 financial statements” as its motivation.
Dubber has now restated its FY2023 statement alongside its FY2022 earnings after spotting several irregularities in its accounting – some dating back to 2017.
Sharing an example, Andrew Demery, Chief Financial Officer at Dubber, told investors during a webinar last week:
The major item we’ve identified is an under-provision for employment-related taxes, predominantly relating to 2022 and prior financial years.
Dubber must now pay this money back, with interest, as it aims to put a sordid chapter in its history behind it.
That chapter opened with the departure of Cofounder & CEO Steve McGovern in March after a $26.6MN blackhole came to light within its half-year 2023 earnings reports.
On the news, Dubber stock tanked and has not recovered since. Indeed, shares now cost just AUD 0.03 – down over 98 percent from their pandemic peak (Read on…).
