From the launch of a new WEM platform to a game-changing acquisition, here are some extracts from our most popular news stories over the last seven days.
Zoom Debuts a Workforce Engagement Management Suite
Zoom has launched a quality management (QM) solution, now generally available to its contact center customers.
The solution couples up with its recently released Workforce Management (WFM) platform to form Zoom’s Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) suite.
The suite fully integrates with the Zoom Contact Center, with the vendor promising an “easy-to-use, intuitive, and reliable” platform.
Doubling down on this, Kentis Gopalla, Head of Workforce Engagement Management and Product Ecosystem for Zoom Contact Center, stated:
Zoom Workforce Engagement Management suite removes the need for multiple vendors to help customer experience and support leaders streamline contact center operations and transform their customer experience, all on one platform.
That WFM solution provides a selection of tools that cover the four cornerstones of contact center resource planning: forecasting, scheduling, intraday management, and review.
The QM solution is equally well-rounded. Indeed, it offers the foundational scorecard building, reporting, and calibration functionality.
AI then overlays those core elements to bring new, more eye-catching capabilities to life. (Read on…).
Cisco Snaps Up Splunk for $28BN in Major Data, Observability, and Security Play
Cisco has agreed to acquire Splunk for $157 per share in cash, which represents approximately $28BN in equity value.
Splunk offers an extensible data platform that processes data from any cloud, data center, and third-party tool at scale.
In doing so, it powers purpose-built solutions for security and observability.
According to Cisco, the move will accelerate its mission to “securely connect everything to make anything possible.”
In addition, Cisco may support its customers in bolstering resilience and extending their security strategies – as Chuck Robbins, Chair and CEO of Cisco, emphasized.
“Our combined capabilities will drive the next generation of AI-enabled security and observability,” he said.
From threat detection and response to threat prediction and prevention, we will help make organizations of all sizes more secure and resilient.
Indeed, with Splunk, teams can share data, assess these threats, and work together to solve and prevent future problems.
For instance, if the business’s website goes down, teams can collaborate to see if it’s due to a security attack or a peak in demand.
Yet, its platform goes far beyond that, with the provider hosting 2,400 applications on its marketplace. Meanwhile, clients may also build custom applications on Splunk. (Read on…).
Oracle Bets Big On Contact Center Generative AI, Releases a Slew of New Features
Oracle has announced six new GenAI-powered tools for its Oracle Fusion Service solution.
The enterprise tech giant made the announcement during this week’s Oracle CloudWorld.
Fusion Service is a CRM for contact center teams. It makes up one-fourth of Oracle’s Fusion Cloud Customer Experience offering – alongside its Sales, Marketing, and Commerce CRMs.
Already, it contains many of the solutions that contact centers need to engage with customers, solve their queries, and gather vital experience data.
Yet, it is seizing the generative AI wave to launch many more features that’ll bolster the offering for its contact center customers.
Some mirror features already offered by rival contact center and CRM vendors – such as assisted agent responses.
Yet, there are also more novel innovations, including an assisted guidance solution, which uncovers the essential steps to answering particular customer queries.
Giving an overview of the six new contact center GenAI features, Rob Tarkoff, EVP and GM of Oracle Cloud CX, stated:
The new capabilities in Oracle Cloud CX will help organizations resolve customer service issues quicker and more efficiently by increasing service agent and field technician productivity, optimizing self-service, and automating traditional tasks that are manual and time-consuming.
Moreover, Oracle notes that it has built each capability on its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) platform, which hosts many pre-built and custom LLM models.
As such, the vendor will likely have handpicked the best-placed model for each use case, not necessarily relying on one LLM – like ChatGPT, Bard, or Anthropic – for all its CRM innovation. (Read on…).
Salesforce Makes Layoff U-Turn, Intends to Hire 3,300 New Employees
Salesforce has announced its intention to hire 3,300 new employees.
The new recruits will work across its sales, engineering, and data cloud product departments.
That news marks a significant shift in Salesforce’s thinking, considering the company has laid off 8,000 employees since the turn of the year.
Layoffs were continuing even last month, with the total redundancy figure crossing the ten percent mark initially touted in January.
Yet, in the past couple of weeks, Salesforce’s CEO, Marc Benioff, has looked to draw a line under the sand. During the business’s latest earnings call, he stated:
We’re not planning any other major restructuring efforts in the company today like what we saw earlier this year. We hope that that is one and done and behind us.
Now, Salesforce’s CEO, Marc Benioff, told Bloomberg:
Our job is to grow the company and to continue to achieve great margins. We know we have to hire thousands of people.
This includes bringing back former employees, with the CEO stating how former employees were being welcomed back. (Read on…).
