From committing support for legacy systems to more layoffs within the CX industry, here are some extracts from our most popular news stories over the last seven days.
Salesforce Layoffs Continue as It Grapples with Its Family Values
“Ohana” is a Hawaiian word that means family and support system. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, has repeatedly used the term to define the CRM vendor’s culture.
Yet, the bleak layoff stories swirling the Silicon Valley stalwart have hit that reputation hard.
After mass exits in January, Salesforce has cut 258 more jobs. According to SFGATE – a San Francisco news website – these will impact staff in “sales and customer service,” “technology and product,” and “general administration.”
The news comes as activist investors make their presence felt, perhaps forcing Salesforce’s hand.
Much of their focus seems to be in shifting Slack from the forefront of Salesforce’s messaging. Indeed, the UC platform is picking up most of the – well – slack.
For instance, prior to this latest round of layoffs, The Register reported: “There’s no more Slack left to cut.”
The news is unfortunate, particularly as Slack is well placed within Salesforce’s portfolio. It overlays its CRM solutions and Contact Center Genie, with Einstien AI running between the stack. That is a potentially powerful enterprise communications proposition.
Yet, its formation appears to have come too late. After all, many businesses already switched to Microsoft Teams during the pandemic – largely due to the familiarity everyone has with Office – leaving little room in the UC space for Slack to exploit.
Indeed, Teams has cemented itself as the UC market leader, with 280MN users. Such a sizeable lead in a mature market is likely difficult to claw back, and the $28BN price tag on slack now seems overegged, to put it delicately.
The good news for Salesforce is that it remains the most dominant player in the CRM market – with IDC noting that it outsells Microsoft – its closest rival – by four to one in the space.
Cisco Commits to Supporting Its Legacy Contact Center Customers
Many rising trends are making CCaaS migrations more attractive.
Indeed, CCaaS players are adding new cloud capabilities at a rate of knots. AI’s potential to drive ROI is rising. And the need for rapid innovation is growing as the strategic value of CX heightens.
These are all excellent examples. Nevertheless, many contact centers have held their ground, causing some legacy vendors to take new steps in pushing their customers to the cloud.
This trend has not escaped the attention of Sheila McGee-Smith, President & Principal Analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics. She noted:
Brands came out and said: “I’m not going to put any innovation on this [legacy solution]. I’m going to kill this very soon, or – as a business – I’m going to implode.”
Genesys is perhaps the most prominent example, recently announcing the end of its legacy innovation and culling its hybrid cloud platform.
Thankfully, Cisco has proven resilient.
Leveraging its extensive global resources, Cisco’s business model allows it to innovate across three separate contact center offerings. These are:
- Cisco’s On-Premises Contact Center – Bundling legacy hardware and software, this option allows businesses to deploy, manage, and customize an enterprise-grade contact center.
- Cisco Webex Contact Center Enterprise – Here, Cisco wraps its legacy Unified Contact Center Enterprise solution with new microservices. It also adds Webex Connect, allowing its customers to use CPaaS tools to innovate quickly. Customers can do this while keeping much of their data on-premise.
- Cisco Webex Contact Center – Powered by the Webex Platform, the public cloud solution allows businesses to converge their UCaaS and CCaaS platforms. It also contains CPaaS on the back end for speedy innovation, possesses many native capabilities – including AI, analytics, and WFO tools – and boasts a booming ecosystem of third-party business systems.
In pushing forwards with this portfolio, Cisco enables its customers to operate completely on premise, entirely in the cloud, or to utilize the best elements of both.
8×8 Rues Lost Opportunities to Drive CCaaS Growth With Its UC Base
8×8 has not “done a great job” of using its UC customer base to cross-sell its contact center offering, according to Samuel Wilson, 8×8’s Interim CEO.
Seeing significant opportunities in the CCaaS market, Wilson stated:
The first and most important thing, and we have not done a great job of this yet, is cross-selling our contact centre into that UC base.
The admission was made by Wilson during the company’s third-quarter fiscal 2023 earnings call, where it was revealed that 8×8’s service revenue and total revenue had increased 18 per cent year-over-year.
During Q3, 8×8 also saw its cash flow from operations increase 72 percent year-over-year to $15.5 million.
Wilson took the opportunity during the call to state that 8×8 will focus on driving CCaaS innovation as a priority to further its already prominent market position.
He commented: “While UCaaS migration continues to create revenue and profit opportunities for efficient providers like 8×8, I believe the opportunities to differentiate based on stand-alone UCaaS are becoming increasingly rare.
Our XCaaS platform, which delivers the high availability, scalability and security of a unified cloud native solution and a lower TCO is highly differentiated.
CX Today’s Charlie Mitchell somewhat predicted that CCaaS would become more of a priority for 8×8 following the termination of employment for the company’s former CEO, David Sipes, in November 2022.
Contact Center Agents Are Avoiding New Tech – Gartner
45 percent of contact center agents are avoiding adopting new technologies, according to a new Gartner study.
The online survey of 850+ agents and support specialists discovered that people avoid new technology by relying on legacy systems and tools.
Gartner states that agents who have consistent access to outdated tools tend to use them 20 percent more frequently than reps who have less access to them.
Half of the people surveyed reported that they still have access to legacy systems and tools seven to 12 months after a new technology rollout.
Melissa Fletcher, Sr Principal, Research in the Gartner Customer Service and Support Practice, said: “Many leaders believe that certain groups are less likely to adopt new technologies, such as reps who are older or work from home.
However, the survey shows that these groups are not more likely to resist new technology, and what matters instead is reps’ access to legacy systems and tools.
“Shutting down old systems is the single most impactful action that a leader can take to encourage rep adoption of new technologies, but it shouldn’t happen all at once.”
Shutting Down Legacy Systems
It is clear that to get employees to embrace the introduction of new technologies, organizations need to implement shutdown strategies to phase out legacy systems and tools.
Despite Gartner stating that legacy systems are getting in the way of new technology, many businesses are still standing by their on-premise systems.
Indeed, during an earnings call in February 2022, NICE CEO Barak Eilam estimated that “85 percent of the market is still on-prem.”
As a result, some vendors appear to be forcing the hand of customers, with Genesys recently announcing the end of its legacy innovation.
