This week in CX has seen a worrying customer service claim from Microsoft, acquisitions from ServiceNow and Verint, and agentic AI news from Cisco.
Here are the extracts from some of our most popular news stories over the last seven days.
Microsoft Claims Customer Service Is “Broken”, Offers a Free Trial of Its Contact Center Platform
Microsoft has released a report highlighting systemic problems in UK contact centers.
Its conclusion? “For many consumers, and indeed contact center staff, the service experience is broken.”
While some may disagree, UK customer service teams are under more pressure than ever.
Indeed, Microsoft’s “Modernising UK Contact Centres with the Cloud and AI” study reveals that 87 percent of staff agree that the volume of service queries they handle has increased.
Moreover, 56 percent of contact center agents reportedly feel close to burnout.
Meanwhile, long queues have become an unfortunate reality. Citing a previous study, Microsoft noted that wait times range from an average of two minutes in telecommunications to 35 minutes across the energy sector.
To put the latter into more context, that’s like listening to Bohemian Rhapsody 14 times (Read on...).
ServiceNow Acquires Cuein, the “Copilot for Customer Experience Teams”
ServiceNow has agreed on a deal to purchase Cuein, a customer service AI provider.
Describing itself as a “co-pilot for customer experience teams,” Cuein’s tech centralizes support data and leverages generative AI (GenAI) to allow customer service teams to answer “any kind of question.”
With the acquisition expected to be finalized at some point in Q1 2025, ServiceNow believes that Cuein’s capabilities will enable the company to boost its agentic AI proposition.
How? By equipping customers with more tools to analyze and transform siloed customer interaction data from various channels. ServiceNow’s agentic AI may then turn those insights into actions.
According to ServiceNow, the acquisition solidifies its position as a leading AI platform for business transformation.
This point was reiterated by Dorit Zilbershot, Group Vice President of AI Experiences and Innovation at ServiceNow, who said:
ServiceNow is at the forefront of the agentic AI revolution, redefining what human‑centered AI can achieve across the enterprise, and the acquisition of Cuein is essential to our vision of creating more integrated, intelligent systems that connect AI agents, data, and workflows.
Key to the deal is Cuein’s ability to handle structured and unstructured data (Read on...).
Cisco Outlines Its “Internet of Agents” Vision
During December’s AWS re:Invent, a senior Cisco exec introduced the vendor’s vision for an “Internet of Agents”.
But what exactly is an “Internet of Agents”?
