Happy Friday! ‘This week in CX’ brings you the latest roundup of industry news.

This week, we’re looking at the newest AI-powered tools in the business – including advancements within the CRM field, and SalesForce’s newest take with ChatGPT. MaxContact have also released new research on the financial and emotional impacts of bad CX, and we’re seeing the four HR investment trends for this year.

Key news

  • Acxiom has extended its Salesforce practice to support brands in achieving their unique business goals with Salesforce Data Cloud. The Salesforce Data Cloud uses real-time data to deliver highly personalised customer experiences across sales, service, marketing, and commerce that continuously adapt to changing customer information and needs in real time.
  • The 2023 NICE Actimize Fraud Insights Report has shared that from 2021 to 2022, attempted fraud transactions skyrocketed by 92% and attempted fraud amounts have soared by 146%. The rise of banking fraud is a growing concern for Financial Institutions (FIs) and consumers alike. Fraudsters are becoming increasingly sophisticated, shifting their tactics from traditional account takeover and unauthorised fraud to more complex scams.
  • Qualtrics and Twilio are expanding their partnership. They are introducing a new no-code connector that allows real-time data sharing and integration between the Twilio Segment customer data platform (CDP) and Qualtrics’ Experience iD (XiD). The combined view of operational engagement data like content engagement, purchases, user logins and cart abandonments in Twilio Segment with qualitative data like customer satisfaction and effort scores in XiD creates richer customer profiles and more actionable insights. 
  • M-Cube have finalised the acquisition of the Dutch company Notice Group, with headquarters in the Netherlands and offices in Spain. Announced recently by M-Cube Group founder and President Manlio Romanelli, the purchase was finalised after a successful 2022, marked by an organic growth of more than 25%.

Commentary share

This week, we celebrated International Women’s Day on Wednesday 8th March – a huge event and forever important piece of news! Here’s some commentary from Angie Garland, Escalations Engineer at Content Guru:

“As with other areas of technology, the customer experience (CX) solutions industry is traditionally male-dominated. Achieving greater diversity is vital to obtaining better outcomes, and I’ve seen the positive impact this can have. […] The tech and CX industries desperately need more women to improve diversity in the workforce and to work towards a better diversity of ideas – which can help achieve better, more efficient solutions.“To help achieve greater diversity of thought, try to get people who contribute less to discuss their opinion and bring their voices to the forefront of the conversation. Often the best ideas are the ones no one has considered yet.”

How did you celebrate the day? Let us know! 4 of the 5 members at CXM are women – come and meet us on our LinkedIn post from #IWD2023.

New data into the effect of bad CX on customer finance & wellbeing

MaxContact have recently audited 50 of the UK’s top online companies and surveyed 2,000 customers. There’s plenty of stand-out information as insights to protecting your customers. 

Almost a fifth of customers have said that they’d abandoned a purchase or switched to another brand because they couldn’t get an answer quickly. But there is a huge opportunity for those that get it right. 85% of customers are more likely to shop again with a company who made it easy to contact them.

In line with inflation rising to record-high 17.1%, 40% of customers have had to cut back on spending because they struggled to contact an online-only company. 72% of online-only companies don’t have a phone number on their website. Almost half (45%) don’t even have a ‘contact us’ link on the homepage. Two fifths have even had to cut back on daily essentials. This includes food and toiletries (41%) and energy use (38%). 

38% of consumers surveyed said that poor service had caused them anxiety or serious stress. This, of course, isn’t helped by the lack of contact with companies or ease of access to contact.

“There’s no one size fits all solution. Sometimes a phone call is absolutely the right way to best help customers – especially when dealing with complex or sensitive cases such as a refund dispute or financial problem. A helpful and knowledgeable agent will reassure customers that their issue is in good hands. But for simple, quick queries, phone calls can be laborious, and customers prefer webchat or email to get quick answers to a question without waiting on hold.  

“Having an omnichannel customer engagement platform supporting staff also helps make query resolution more efficient and drives down costs at a difficult time, as well as delivering for customers. The key is understanding your unique customer base to get the balance right.” 

-Ben Booth, CEO at MaxContact

In light of this research coming out, companies could stand to improve their contact options for customers. Especially in times of crisis and uncertainty, it’s becoming widely believed that proactive service is the way forward. Here’s a few resources we have on the topic to aid your understanding:

HubSpot CRM have launched two new AI powered tools

HubSpot have launched two new tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) – content assistant and ChatSpot.ai. These have been designed to help its customers save time while creating better connections with their audiences.

HubSpot have been investing in AI for a while with these two tools being just the latest for them. Powered by industry-leading artificial intelligence systems from OpenAI, content assistant and ChatSpot.ai create efficiencies for marketing, sales, and customer service professionals. 

Content Assistant has been launched this week in private beta. It helps marketing and sales teams ideate, create, and share quality content quickly. Among many options, content assistant can:

  • Suggest blog titles related to a product or service, then generate a complete blog post outline for that title
  • Write content in a flash for blog posts, landing pages, website pages, sales and marketing emails, and knowledge base articles
  • Streamline content marketing workflows into one place, saving teams time and energy. 

ChatSpot.ai launched this week in public alpha. It helps HubSpot customers complete a variety of tasks using a natural language chat-based user experience. The tool helps users:

  • Add contacts and companies to the HubSpot CRM
  • Create custom reports related to marketing, sales and customer service
  • Draft professional, effective sales emails personalised to the recipient.

Gartner identifies top four HR investment trends for 2023  

Nearly half of HR leaders cited HR technology as their top investment priority, according to a survey by Gartner, Inc. An October 2022 Gartner survey of 118 HR leaders revealed the other top investment areas for HR leaders in 2023 are: 

  • staffing and recruiting
  • total rewards
  • learning and development 

Technology was ranked as the leading HR investment priority for the second year in a row as HR leaders expect technology-related initiatives to hold the biggest HR function efficiency potential.

Specifically, HR technology can trigger cost savings in HR administration, which has seen a drastic uptick in cost due to pandemic-related tasks.

“Our research shows yearly spend on HR administration increased from $155 per employee in 2021 to $194 per employee in 2022. This is alarming considering HR functions have been trying to reduce the burden of administrative tasks through the use of technology.”

–  Seyda Berger-Böcker, director in the Gartner HR practice.

L&D offerings are not keeping up with the pace of change. Gartner research shows less than half (45%) of employees agree the learning their organisation provides is relevant to them.

To deliver on employee expectations, HR leaders must shift their L&D investments towards whole career growth. This is rather than focusing solely on current or future roles, thinking more broadly about growth that helps employees develop as people.

Einstein GPT – the world’s first Generative AI for CRM  

Salesforce is combining OpenAI’s enterprise-grade ChatGPT technology with Salesforce’s private AI models to deliver relevant and trusted AI-generated content. Einstein GPT will deliver AI-created content across every sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT interaction, at hyperscale. With Einstein GPT, Salesforce will transform every CX with generative AI.

Einstein GPT is currently programmed to do the following:

  • generate personalised emails for salespeople to send to customers
  • generate specific responses for customer service professionals to more quickly answer customer questions
  • generate targeted content for marketers to increase campaign response rates
  • auto-generate code for developers.

Einstein GPT is the next generation of Einstein – Salesforce’s AI technology that currently delivers more than 200 billion AI-powered predictions per day across the Customer 360. By combining proprietary Einstein AI models with ChatGPT or other leading large language models, customers can use natural-language prompts on CRM data. This can trigger powerful, time-saving automations, and create personalised, AI-generated content. Einstein GPT is currently in closed pilot.

In addition, Salesforce and OpenAI have announced ChatGPT can be downloaded to Slack. The new app provides new AI-powered conversation summaries, research tools to learn about any topic, and writing assistance to quickly draft messages.

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

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