This week in CX has seen a change in leadership at NICE, a new messaging app from Zendesk and Meta, and a financial milestone for Five9.
Elsewhere, US President Joe Biden has announced a number of actions planned at addressing customer service pain points.
Here are the extracts from some of our most popular news stories over the last seven days.
NICE Names Scott Russell as New CEO, Posts Strong Q2 Numbers
NICE has confirmed that its Board of Directors has named Scott Russell as the company’s new Chief Executive Officer.
Russell will take up his new position on January 1, 2025, when he will succeed Barak Eilam.
Having spent over 14 years at SAP, most recently as Global Chief Revenue Officer of the company’s Executive Board, Russell joins NICE with significant experience in the customer service and enterprise software sector.
As Global Chief Revenue Officer, he was responsible for overseeing customer success, global sales, partnerships, and customer engagement, managing $31 billion in revenue and driving the shift to cloud services.
In discussing the announcement, David Kostman, Chairman of the Board of Directors at NICE, stated that he was “thrilled to welcome Scott as the new CEO of NICE.
His extensive enterprise software experience in adjacent markets and leadership at global scale will be instrumental as he leads NICE through its next phase of growth.
In a busy day for the company, it also posted its Q2 earnings, with impressive performances for cloud revenue and cash flow.
NICE experienced 14 percent year-over-year revenue growth, due in part to the “industry-leading” Cloud department, which jumped by 26 percent to $481.7 million (Read on…).
Zendesk Teams with Meta to Launch Customer Messaging App
Zendesk has announced an expansion of its partnership with Meta to launch a new outbound customer messaging app, Relay.
Available via the Zendesk Marketplace, the solution will provide users with “proactive messaging” capabilities for their WhatsApp and SMS channels.
The company claims that Relay’s outbound messaging features will allow businesses to proactively connect with customers at scale, while being able to access and manage all customer interactions natively in Zendesk.
In utilizing these enhanced outbound communications capabilities, Zendesk believes that companies can deliver more personalized messaging and improve their overall customer experience offerings.
Indeed, the benefits of Relay were discussed by Mike Keohane, RVP of Business Development at Zendesk, who commented:
Relay will allow companies using Zendesk to proactively contact their customers through WhatsApp, to provide important updates that they might not be aware of.
So, let’s take a closer look at some of the features of Zendesk’s new messaging app (Read on…).
Five9 Hits $1bn in Annual Revenue Run Rate, AI & Automation Key to Success
Five9 has revealed that the company has surpassed $1 billion in annual revenue run rate.
Announced during the organization’s Q2 2024 earnings call, CEO and Chairman Mike Burland confirmed that Enterprise subscriptions were the key driver behind the milestone, having grown 21 percent year-over-year.
Within the Enterprise sector, Barry Zwarenstein, Chief Financial Officer, singled out Five9’s AI and automation portfolio as the “fastest growing category,” with it currently accounting for eight percent of all Enterprise subscription revenue.
In particular, the performance of Five9’s AI Agent Assist received praise for its impressive 111% year-over-year growth, making it the second biggest AI product after RVA.
The Intelligence platform enhances customer experiences by personalizing interactions with contextual data.
By integrating AI across their platform, Mike Burkland believes Five9 is able to provide practical solutions that deliver real business value, as well as helping customers to use AI responsibly.
The CEO and Chairman also highlighted the company’s engine-agnostic approach, which allows clients to benefit from rapid AI advancements (Read on…).
President Biden Announces New Customer Service Actions, Targets Subscriptions and ‘Doom Loops’
President Joe Biden has announced a string of proposals aimed at easing customer service pain points.
The “Time is Money” initiative will include rules and possible regulations aimed at tackling the “general aggravation” caused by substandard customer service offerings.
At the heart of the US President’s plan is a draft rule, introduced by the Federal Trade Commission in March of last year, that will force companies to simplify their subscription and membership cancellation processes.
An example of how this would work in practice is by requiring companies to allow customers to make cancellations through the same platform and number of steps that it took them to originally sign up for their subscription/membership.
Indeed, this concept was mentioned by White House Domestic Policy Adviser Neera Tanden when discussing the new initiative:
For example, you want to cancel your gym membership or subscription service to a newspaper. It took one or two clicks to sign up, but now to end your subscription or cancel the membership, you have to go in person or wait on hold for 20 minutes.
In a thread posted on X (formerly Twitter), President Biden wrote that he was “tired of seeing hardworking Americans get played for suckers,” and was looking to remove the “hassle” that certain customer service areas were causing (Read on…).
