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.
