From estimated revenue slumps to new contact center innovations, here are some extracts from our most popular news stories over the last seven days.
Zoom Releases Salesforce App for Zoom Team Chat
Zoom customers can now download a Salesforce App for Zoom Team Chat.
It follows an announcement during Zoomtopia 2022, where the company doubled down on its mission to make various apps natively available on Team Chat.
David Ball, Product Marketing Manager, Zoom Meetings and Chat, commented: “Collaborating in Zoom Team Chat is so much more than just a series of messages or chat conversations.
“It’s about getting work done and working with others in a way that is easy, enjoyable, and efficient.
As Team Chat continues to transform into a hub of collaboration, we know that integrating apps into your Team Chat experience is critical.
“Last month at Zoomtopia, we officially announced the introduction of Apps for Team Chat, which allow you to bring everyday work tasks into the space where conversations and decisions are happening.
“Building on the recent releases of the Jira App and ServiceNow Virtual Agent, we are thrilled to announce that the Salesforce App for Zoom Team Chat, one of our most requested applications, is now available for you to use.”
According to Zoom, incorporating Salesforce into Team Chat enables users to access and update key customer data without having to switch applications, thereby enhancing productivity.
Salesforce Genie Is Now Natively Available on Tableau
Salesforce has launched a native integration between Tableau and its new Genie Customer Data Cloud platform.
The integration allows Salesforce users to extract further insight from its Genie platform and action much of the data it organizes.
To get to grips with how, it’s essential to understand how Genie works.
It takes real-time data from multiple sources and brings it together in a single source of truth. There, the Genie aims to make “customer magic” out of it all.
Embedded into the Salesforce platform, it supports connectors to all Salesforce Clouds, plus external data sources. These include Google Cloud storage, data streamed from the web, mobile sources, and MuleSoft, with the latter seeping data from legacy platforms.
By bringing all these sources together, brands can build unified customer profiles.
This is where Tableau takes over, visualizing data from these profiles, lifting insights, and helping business act on these, often through process automation.
Google Teases New Contact Center Innovations for ChromeOS
When remote working came to the fore in 2020, many contact centers – particularly in the U.S. – started to give employees Chromebooks to work from.
Why? Because a Chromebook has many advantages for contact centers, including price, speed to deployment, and built-in security.
Here, Chrome sensed an opportunity. As Matt Bottomley, Partner Sales Engineer at Google, told us:
Because of the web-based nature of it all, there is no update period time. Applications are always compatible with the version of OS you run. That means we never have downtime or unproductive periods, and that has really resonated in contact center environments, where every minute counts.
Having this leg-up, Chrome considered how it could drive extra value for its contact center customers – beyond what their vendors offer.
As such, Chrome set up an entire team dedicated to building contact center-specific functionality within the OS – targeting value-add opportunities.
Now, it is starting to release innovations that catch the eye.
Avaya Estimates a 36.8 Percent YoY Revenue Slump in Q4
Avaya has released details of its projected Q4 earnings, with its quarterly GAAP revenue set to fall to $480MN at best.
At worst, this figure could sink to $460MN.
In Q4 of 2021, Avaya’s revenues reached $760MN. As such, these figures represent a 36.8 percent revenue slump – in the best-case scenario.
Such a decline is much steeper than the 13 percent the vendor recorded in Q3.
Unfortunately, Avaya has yet to hold an earnings call with more precise figures, despite NASDAQ estimating that the vendor would do so on December 12.
The vendor also failed to announce an upcoming earnings call date.
Instead, Avaya released a 108-page business update, with a financial overview and earnings estimates, from which these figures stem.
