This week in CX: Reputation, Salesforce, and Qualtrics  

Happy Friday! We’re bringing you the latest roundup of industry news. This Friday, we’re looking at new Gartner research, the upcoming launch of Starbucks Odyssey, latest updates by Reputation, and what to expect from the partnership between Sprout Social and Salesforce.  

Key news  

• Reputation, the global leader in reputation experience management, announced the appointment of a new Chief Financial Officer to guide the company to its next phase of growth. Marc Linden has more than 30 years of finance, business strategy, and general management experience. As Reputation’s new CFO, Marc will oversee the company’s financial and administrative departments. 

• NICE has been recognized as a leader in Everest Group’s 2022 Task Mining Products PEAK Matrix® Assessment. Furthermore, NICE was also recognized for holding the highest share in the large buyer segment, in hi-tech and telecom, and in the UK. 

• Starbucks Coffee Company has announced the upcoming launch of Starbucks Odyssey, a branded web3 experience. 

• Sinch launches its AskFrank question-answering search engine to improve chatbots. We asked for an exclusive commentary by Adam Dorfman, VP, Product at Reputation. Keep reading to learn more about this topic.

• Sprout Social and Salesforce extend partnership with New Service Cloud Integration to provide brands with a 360-degree view of their customer interactions. 

• Six trends are driving the use of metaverse technologies today and will continue to drive its use over the next three to five years, according to Gartner.  

• Qualtrics announced new Benchmark products including new Customer Support and Agent Performance Benchmarks. Data from the new benchmark shows that leaving a customer unsure whether their issue has been resolved created a 26% drop in CSAT. 

Starbucks announced a new web3 experience, ‘Starbucks Odyssey’ 

On Tuesday, September 12^th, Starbucks unveiled Starbucks Odyssey, a new experience powered by Web3 technology that will offer Starbucks Rewards members and Starbucks employees in the United States the opportunity to earn and purchase digital collectable assets that will unlock access to new benefits and immersive coffee experiences.  

Starbucks is one of the first companies to integrate non-fungible tokens (NFTs) with an industry-leading loyalty program at scale while creating a digital community that will enable new ways for Starbucks to engage with its members and its partners. 

Customers and partners can already join the waitlist for a chance to be among the first to receive access to the Starbucks Odyssey experience, which will launch later this year.  

“Our vision is to create a place where our digital community can come together over coffee, engage in immersive experiences, and celebrate the heritage and future of Starbucks,” said Brady Brewer, Starbucks executive vice president and chief marketing officer. 

To read more about the product overview, visit the official Starbucks webpage. 

Sinch launches its AskFrank question-answering search engine to improve chatbots  

Sinch, a global leader in cloud communications and mobile customer engagement, this week announced the launch of AskFrank, its AI-enabled intelligent question-answering search engine.  

AskFrank integrates with a business’s existing customer engagement chatbots. Using AI to search content, it adds value to chatbots as an extension which provides answers to questions that are not available in a chatbot’s database by expanding its information access. By periodically analysing content from Confluence, Sharepoint, FAQ pages and other knowledge bases, AskFrank can make vast quantities of data searchable by indexing it within its database.  

However, a new report from the Institute of Customer Service revealed that AI chatbots have become a rather unsatisfying experience for many customers. It is critical to have a data-driven way to analyse all feedback and unsolicited data available to a brand and respond to customers quickly and efficiently. 

The report found that if chatbots are poorly tested, they can damage customer experiences and business operations. It also noted that the failure of the AI tech could affect customers’ trust and satisfaction in using chatbots overall, whilst at the same time damaging the businesses’ profitability. According to the report, a staggering 42% avoid chatbots when making a complex inquiry and 15% lack confidence in using technology to contact organisations. 

We asked Adam Dorfman, VP, Product at Reputation to comment on these findings and this is what he shared with us:

“I believe chatbots can be even more valuable when enterprises use a unified inbox to handle all their messaging and unite different sources and channels of customer interactions. Having all messages come into a single inbox makes it simpler to manage customer feedback at scale and improve the customer experience. A business can respond quicker, handle a larger volume of inbound inquiries, and resolve customer problems much faster. This is where a product such as AskFrank can help by providing customers with answers to questions that go beyond billing or checking the status of an order.”

Sprout Social and Salesforce extend partnership with New Service Cloud integration 

This week, Sprout Social announced a new integration with Salesforce Service Cloud to provide brands with a 360-degree view of their customer interactions.

Earlier this year, Sprout Social and Salesforce launched a global partnership which made Sprout the preferred social media management solution for Salesforce customers. Building upon that partnership, the new Service Cloud integration ensures Salesforce customers can manage all of their social customer care requests directly from within Service Cloud.  

In addition to the Service Cloud functionality, Sprout will also integrate Marketing Cloud Intelligence—Salesforce’s marketing analytics solution—into its platform to provide an automated method for bringing social data and insights into overall marketing dashboards.  

“Salesforce has been an incredible partner in rethinking the future of customer care as consumer behavior and expectations continue to evolve. The past few years have brought about the centralization of the entire customer journey onto social and the functionality we deliver through this partnership will ensure brands are empowered to deliver an amazing omni-channel experience,” said Ryan Barretto, President of Sprout Social. 

Brands with poor customer experience will be cut first as ‘skimpflation’ rises   

79 % of consumers plan to cancel subscriptions, move to lower-cost providers or renegotiate existing contracts to combat inflation, according to new data released this week by UJET, Inc.   

The research, which is based on data from 1,600 consumers, reveals a major shift in buyer behaviour due to rising prices and ‘skimpflation’ – where companies skimp on the goods and/or services they provide to help combat rising costs. Key findings include:  

• 73% of consumers said they’ll first cut providers and subscriptions with the worst CX or user experience, app or platform.

• 66% of consumers experienced customer service skimplation in the past six months – with 87% reporting they will spend less or stop spending money altogether at brands who skimp on customer service.

• The top areas consumers are experiencing CX skimplation are quality of service (60%), wait times (58%) and expertise and helpfulness (54%). 

“Rising inflation – along with predictions of a looming recession – have fundamentally changed consumer confidence and purchasing power for the worse. Households are thinking twice about how they spend and are looking to quickly make cuts,” said Vasili Triant, COO of ujet.cx.  

Although some businesses are combating rising prices, labour shortages, and ongoing global disruptions with CX skimpflation, UJET’s new research shows that customer service should be one of the last areas brands cut back, if ever, to stay afloat. 

Gartner outlines six trends driving near-term adoption of metaverse technologies 

Six trends are driving the use of metaverse technologies today and will continue to drive its use over the next three to five years, according to Gartner, Inc. 

Marty Resnick, VP analyst at Gartner said that while widescale adoption of metaverse technologies is more than 10 years away, there are practical ways organizations are harnessing them now, for example, in employee onboarding, sales enablement, higher education, medical and military training and immersive shopping experiences. 

Gartner defines a metaverse as “the next level of interaction in the virtual and physical worlds.” Metaverse technologies allow people to replicate or enhance their physical activities, by transporting or extending physical activities to a virtual world, or by transforming the physical one. 

Despite the hype, the adoption of metaverse technologies is nascent and fragmented. Gartner recommends caution when investing in a specific metaverse, as it is too early to determine which investments will be viable in the long term, and the ethical, financial and reputational risks of early investments are not fully known. 

“Use this time for learning, exploring and preparing for a metaverse with limited implementation,” Resnick said. “Review these six trends for opportunities that could benefit your organization.” 

1. Gaming – Gartner predicts that by 2025, the serious games market will grow by 25% due to the impact of metaverse technologies. 

2. Digital humans – Digital humans are interactive, AI-driven representations that have some of the characteristics, personality, knowledge and mindset of a human. Organizations are already planning on using digital humans to act as identified digital agents within metaverse environments for customer service, support, sales and other interactions with current and potential customers. By 2027, a majority of B2C enterprise CMOs will have a dedicated budget for digital humans in metaverse experiences.  

3. Virtual spaces – Gartner predicts that by 2025, 10% of workers will regularly use virtual spaces (in activities such as sales, onboarding, and remote teams), up from 1% in 2022. 

4. Shared experiences – By 2028, 10% of public events (such as sports and performing arts) will offer participation in the metaverse, fuelling the rapid buildout of commercial metaverse shared experiences, according to Gartner. 

5. Tokenized assets – Tokenized assets offer new business models for content creators. In metaverse experiences, most tokenized assets will use non-fungible token technologies (NFTs). Gartner predicts that by 2027, 25% of retail organizations with an e-commerce presence will have completed at least one proof of concept for tokenized assets using metaverse technologies. 

6. Spatial computing – Spatial computing combines physical and digital objects to digitally enhance physical spaces. This allows organizations to get more out of physical and digital assets by surfacing related, “unseen” digital information and content anchored to people, places and things. By 2026, the second and third iterations of spatial computing glasses will arrive, creating a more pervasive metaverse experience connected to the physical world, predicts Gartner.  

On October 4th, Customer Experience Magazine will host a panel discussion on designing a human-centred metaverse experience. Keep an eye on our LinkedIn page and join us for this exciting discussion with some of the leading CX experts in the industry. 

Thanks for tuning into CXM’s weekly roundup of industry news. Check back next Friday for the latest updates of the week!