From a CCaaS acquisition to more tech layoffs here are some extracts from our most popular news stories over the last seven days.
Genesys to Roll Up Radarr Technologies and “Unify CX Like Never Before”
Genesys has agreed to acquire Radarr Technologies, the “social and consumer intelligence platform” provider.
The platform applies AI and analytics to social and digital conversations, utilizing data visualization, dashboards, and insights reporting.
Its tagline? “Never miss a signal with Radarr.”
As this suggests, Radarr will also support contact centers in fueling Genesys’ AI with more data.
Nevertheless, the primary objective of the acquisition is seemingly to extend the Genesys Cloud experience orchestration offering to social media.
In doing so, Genesys claims it will have “the most comprehensive coverage of consumer touchpoints in the industry.”
Tony Bates, CEO and Chairman of Genesys, doubled down on this point. He stated: “As consumers increasingly turn to social media platforms to connect with brands for support, these channels become a crucial and largely untapped opportunity for organizations to engage with customers and glean valuable business insights.
Once the capabilities of Radarr Technologies are integrated into Genesys Cloud, Genesys can accelerate its transformation of the CX industry by helping organizations further connect every touchpoint into the end-to-end customer experience.
Businesses often lack such a connection between social touchpoints, relying on point solutions that silo service, sales, and marketing’s social media strategies.
Radarr helps to remove these siloes by providing a unified social inbox that unites the customer-facing teams. (Read on…).
Salesforce Reportedly Set to Lay Off 700 Employees
Salesforce is reportedly set to lay off 700 employees, around one percent of its global staff.
The Wall Street Journal reported the news late this week as the latest in the dispiriting pattern of tech layoffs in 2024. It also follows Salesforce laying off over 10 percent of its staff last year.
The Journal cited an anonymous source who said the layoffs are supposed to support the company’s ambition to focus its spending.
The Wall Street Journal highlighted that Salesforce was still advertising for roughly 1,000 new jobs, indicating the layoffs could be facilitated by a regular headcount adjustment rather than a reactive response to ongoing economic uncertainty.
Salesforce isn’t the only tech giant carrying out layoffs in 2024. Google has already let 1,000 employees go, while The Verge has reported that Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai has told staff to expect further layoffs as 2024 progresses.
Meanwhile, Microsoft let go 1,900 workers from its gaming branches this week and Amazon began the month announcing it would cut 18,000 jobs from across its businesses. (Read on…).
Meet Buddy. Pega’s New Generative AI Assistant
Pegasystems has announced a generative AI-powered assistant: the Pega GenAI Knowledge Buddy.
“Buddy” takes content – scattered across enterprise knowledge bases – and synthesizes it to answer employee and customer queries.
In this sense, it’s similar to many copilot solutions offered by several other big-name CX brands.
Yet, Pega notes that many of these offerings are consumer-grade and “too brittle” to cope with the flux of an enterprise content library.
It puts forward an alternative that delivers “specific, accurate, audited, and concise responses” – clearly citing the source material.
Moreover, users can leverage Buddy to generate new content – such as emails and documents – based on their knowledge libraries.
The following post – and funny promo – dives deeper.
Pega also offers security guarantees, highlighting features that provide control over user access rights and transparency into where Buddy leverages its information.
With these, Buddy will help to securely “unlock” the value from their knowledge bases, supporting agents and customers across “any channel” – alongside the broader enterprise team.
Excited to share the news, Kerim Akgonul, Chief Product Officer at Pega, said: “Organizations want to use AI to improve experiences and increase efficiency, but many existing solutions aren’t meant for the intricate inner workings and complex needs of large organizations.
“Pega Knowledge Buddy will unlock new levels of productivity with enterprise-grade generative AI capabilities that seamlessly and securely integrate into these content libraries. (Read on…).
DPD’s GenAI Chatbot Swears and Writes a Poem About How “Useless” It Is
There’s nothing quite like the frustration of getting caught in a conversation loop with an ineffective chatbot.
Time and time again, you try similar – but different – prompts, attempting to squeeze out some sort of useful information.
On Thursday, musician Ashley Beauchamp endured a similar experience when engaging with the parcel delivery firm DPD’s chatbot “Ruby”.
Only Beauchamp became a little more creative than most of us and started to test the boundaries of the bot.
Incredibly, he provoked the bot into swearing and writing a poem about “how terrible they are as a company” – as shown below.
Parcel delivery firm DPD have replaced their customer service chat with an AI robot thing. It’s utterly useless at answering any queries, and when asked, it happily produced a poem about how terrible they are as a company. It also swore at me. pic.twitter.com/vjWlrIP3wn
— Ashley Beauchamp (@ashbeauchamp) January 18, 2024
As the screenshots suggest, that poem includes verses such as:
“One day, DPD was finally shut down,
And everyone rejoiced.
Finally, they could get the help they needed,
From a real person who knows what they were doing.”
Recalling the experience, Beauchamp told Sky News:
It couldn’t give me any information about the parcel, it couldn’t pass me on to a human, and it couldn’t give me the number of their call center. It didn’t seem to be able to do anything useful.
From there, he started experimenting, only for the “chaos” to ensue from just a few prompts. (Read on…).
