From one CX giant battling with the implications of its own AI to another reimagining the future of CCaaS-CRM integrations, here are extracts from some of our most popular news stories over the past seven days.
Salesforce Hopes to Shift Half of Its 9,000 Customer Support Agents Into New Roles
Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, has confirmed that his company is considering how to reutilize its contact center team.
The news comes after the CRM leader revealed that Agentforce now resolves 85 percent of its customer contacts.
That seemed to create a labor overload, with the CEO previously suggesting that Salesforce is “reducing headcount” in the contact center.
However, in a new interview, Benioff stressed that he hopes to retain much of that talent and support them in transitioning between roles at the company.
“I oversee about 9,000 support agents at Salesforce out of our 75,000 employees,” said Benioff during an appearance on the TECHtalk podcast.
I believe about half of those agents will be able to transition into other roles — revenue positions like SDRs (Sales Development Representatives) and BDRs (Business Development Representatives) — because we’ve already shifted half a million conversations to the agentic layer.
Notably, Salesforce customer Gucci took a similar approach after implementing Agentforce.
Instead of cutting staff, it reskilled live service agents as sales reps. Since then, the fashion house has boosted its contact center revenue by 30 percent. (Read on…).
OpenAI Rolls Out Shopping in ChatGPT Following Rumors of a Big Shopify Partnership
ChatGPT is letting users shop directly from their search results, OpenAI announced today.
The news comes as search is becoming increasingly popular through ChatGPT, with over one billion searches last week alone.
Now, as OpenAI explained in a LinkedIn post, it wants to make “shopping simpler” and it “faster to find, compare, and buy products in ChatGPT.”
To do so, it has first improved its product search results, with visuals of product details, pricing, and reviews.
It has also included direct links to buy, as evident in the video demo below.
The new shopping experience rollout has already begun, and – within days – Plus, Pro, Free, and logged-out users may try out the new shopping experience.
OpenAI stipulates that its product search results are chosen independently and are not ads, for now at least.
This announcement has fanned the flames of rumors surrounding an integration between OpenAI and Shopify. (Read on…).
NICE Outlines Its Vision to Be a “System of Interaction”, Challenges New CCaaS-CRM Integrations
Over the past 18 months, many cloud contact center vendors have hit the headlines for embedding their voice and digital channels, call controls, and routing engines into CRM platforms.
AWS, Five9, and Genesys have all done so with Salesforce Service Cloud.
The latter two followed suit with ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM).
Meanwhile, Cisco Webex and Talkdesk embedded their channels into Epic Cheers, a popular CRM in the healthcare space.
In making these moves, the CCaaS providers promised to streamline agent experiences, centralize customer service data, and reduce management burden.
Yet, there’s one notable absentee from these headlines: NICE, the Gartner Magic Quadrant and Forrester Wave CCaaS leader.
According to Barry Cooper, President of the CX Division at NICE, there’s good reason for that.
“We want to do it the right way. We don’t think the right way is to simply embed a commodity, like a voice or chat channel, into a CRM,” he told CX Today. (Read on…).
Five9 and Salesforce Announce a Unified CCaaS-CRM Offering
Five9 has strengthened its partnership with Salesforce to unify CCaaS and CRM software.
In doing so, the two customer experience technology stalwarts released a coordinated offering: Five9 Fusion for Salesforce.
The offering will see Five9 plug its core voice channel, routing engine, and real-time transcription solutions into Salesforce Service Cloud.
Five9 also plans to embed its digital channels into the CRM platform later, joining Salesforce’s new Bring Your Own Channel (BYOC) for CCaaS program.
This will allow businesses that have already built out channel configurations in Five9 to insert those directly into their Salesforce CRM.
Five9 Fusion for Salesforce represents the second such unified CCaaS-CRM solution Five9 has brought to market, following a similar announcement with ServiceNow in November 2024.
By collaborating with these two prominent CRM players, Five9 hopes to help many customers converge their customer support tech stack. (Read on…).
