It’s been another week filled with big news from across the CX space. NICE is on the hunt for a new CEO, Genesys has released an agent copilot, Avaya has beefed up its Experience Platform, and Vonage is looking to Salesforce to enhance its Service Cloud Voice solution.
Here are the extracts from some of our most popular news stories over the last seven days.
Change at the Top of NICE! CEO Barak Eilam to Step Down
Barak Eilam has announced that he will step down as NICE CEO, effective December 31, 2024.
Until then, he – and the NICE board – will search for a successor to the hot seat he has held for more than ten years, considering internal and external candidates.
Whoever that successor may be has big boots to fill, with Eilam guiding NICE from a company most well-known for workforce optimization (WFO) software to the top of the CCaaS mountain.
Indeed, NICE CXone is one of only two CCaaS platforms to reportedly have over one million users.
That platform stems from its 2016 roll-up of inContact, which Eilam led. Many regard that acquisition as one of the most successful business deals in the history of CX.
After all, CXone soon became NICE’s core offering, enabled significant new business, and – ultimately – drove substantial gains in its market cap.
In 2014, when Eilam took charge, that market cap stood at $2.37BN. As of today, it sits at $14.38BN.
Meanwhile, since the inContact acquisition, the vendor has routinely led analyst studies into the CCaaS space – including the Gartner Magic Quadrant and Forrester Wave reports (Read on…).
Genesys Releases an Agent Copilot, Teases a Next-Gen Virtual Agent
Genesys has announced a wave of new CCaaS capabilities during its Xperience 2024 event in Denver.
First, it has become the latest vendor to announce the general availability of a generative AI (GenAI) fuelled virtual assistant.
The “Genesys Agent Copilot” groups its existing agent-assist capabilities with exciting use cases that leverage the AI technology that everyone is still talking about.
Auto-summarizations are an excellent example, which Genesys built into its platform last year.
However, Agent Copilot has now also added the capability to customize scripts in real-time to simplify and accelerate agent responses.
Combine such features with the vendor’s existing Agent Assist portfolio – which includes tools to spotlight data insights and knowledge articles in real-time – and Genesys brings a comprehensive Agent Copilot to market.
Unsurprisingly, AI features heavily in many of the features, and Olivier Jouve, Chief Product Officer at Genesys, celebrated this.
“Organizations need to strike the right balance between using AI and automation to drive efficiency while keeping their customers and employees engaged,” he said (Read on…).
Avaya Adds “Significant” Enhancements to its Experience Platform – Staking its Claim for the Enterprise CX Throne
Avaya has announced a slew of fresh capabilities for its customer experience platform, as the company looks to cement its position as a “leader” in the Enterprise CX space.
Unveiled at Avaya Engage – the organization’s premier CX event – the Avaya Experience Platform (AXP) will benefit from several AI-powered enhancements, including a new “Bring Your Own Bots” framework that enables businesses to select and integrate their chosen digital assistant, ensuring intelligent engagement with consumers across digital channels.
AXP users will also be able to access Avaya Agent Assist as a packaged solution – allowing them to accelerate their AI adoption and implement tools that Avaya claims will reduce agent stress and improve customer interactions.
Moreover, the enhanced CX platform will now include Avaya Ada, the company’s generative AI (GenAI) customer care solution. The virtual assistant is “trained on all things Avaya” and will provide customers and partners with a superior level of support.
Additional features include a simplification of data and analytics management to sophisticate customer journey orchestration, and integrations with Calabrio and Verint to improve AXP’s workforce engagement capabilities.
Soren Abildgaard, EVP and CTO of Avaya, outlined the significance of the company’s fresh capabilities:
The new enhancements to the Avaya Experience Platform reflect a pivotal leap forward in customer and employee experience.
While these new enhancements are the latest major announcement from Avaya’s Engage Event, there has also been recent news concerning acquisitions and partnerships (Read on…).
Vonage Leverages Salesforce Einstein to Boost its Service Cloud Voice Solution
Vonage has announced that its Premier for Service Cloud Voice solution will now include Salesforce Einstein Conversation Insights integration.
The increased capabilities of Vonage’s tool will make the company one of the few contact centers providers to offer full integration with AI-powered Einstein Conversation Analytics, trends, and data.
As well as enhancing customer engagement, Vonage claims that the AI-powered advancements will help boost agent and customer experience by providing “intelligent, global calling capabilities.”
One of the key features of the integration is Salesforce’s Einstein Conversation Insights tool, which will allow Vonage Premier for Service Cloud Voice sales and service customers to access real-time conversational data, such as voice transcripts and caller sentiment.
This feature enables post-call analysis, where agents and supervisors can review and identify keywords and areas of interest, leading to improved coaching and follow-up actions.
The solution will also enable customers to listen to recorded conversations and uncover mentions of competitors, products, custom keywords, and discussions about pricing (Read on…).
