Happy Friday! ‘This week in CX’ brings you the latest roundup of industry news.
This week, we’ve been looking at how we need to think in order to change CX for the better, unifying customer and employee experiences, and are customers aware of their encounters with generative AI when shopping online.
We’re also discussing new updates from Spotify, the Web Summit, and more!
Key news
- Demand for workers with green skills in the UK grew by 46% last year, LinkedIn’s 2024 Green Skills Report reveals. Globally, there aren’t enough workers with the right skills and LinkedIn data scientists say the pool of green talent must – at a minimum – double by 2050 to keep apace with projected demand. In the UK, the hiring rate for green talent is 72% higher than the overall hiring rate, with energy auditor, environmental engineer and solar technician the fastest-growing green titles in the past year.
- There was a relatively new term being thrown around at this year’s Web Summit: “sovereign” artificial intelligence, or sovereign AI. Tech giants are investing heavily in the development of so-called sovereign AI as European politicians and regulators continue to express concerns about where citizens’ data is being stored and processed, CNBC reports. Many of the world’s most popular AI tools, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, currently use data centres in the US to handle requests from European users. The sovereign AI push is being led by private companies, with Google, Amazon and Microsoft (LinkedIn’s parent company) all announcing substantial investments in European data centres this year.
- Music streaming giant Spotify has launched a major push into longform video as it looks to muscle in on what has traditionally been YouTube’s territory. The Swedish firm, which has expanded into podcasts and audiobooks in recent years, announced a host of changes to its platform that are designed to help creators grow their audience and better monetise their video podcasts while also providing fans with a more seamless viewing experience. Under the new changes announced at the Now Playing event in LA, Spotify plans to pay video creators for videos based on how much users engage with them. Ads in videos will also be removed for paid subscribers.
CXM news stories
Here’s the full news stories that CXM have reported on in the past week. Learn all about the latest research about employee wellbeing, latest concerns in retail and how to change the way you think about CX.
ServiceNow and Five9 Expand Partnership with Turnkey AI-powered Solution for Unified Employee and Customer Experiences
ServiceNow, the AI platform for business transformation, and Five9, provider of the Intelligent CX Platform, today announced an expanded partnership to deliver a turnkey AI-powered solution for unified end-to-end employee and customer experiences.
By combining the strengths of ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM) and the Five9 platform, the solution will create more streamlined self-service and assisted service operations and unify customer support processes to reduce operational costs, increase agent efficiency, improve customer satisfaction, and simplify contact center operations.
“Organizations know they need to deliver seamless customer experiences. But most CRM solutions only focus on capturing customer requests, not fulfilling or resolving them. As a result, human middleware ties manual processes and siloed technologies together. ServiceNow Customer Service Management is different. We focus on driving great customer service experiences with workflows, automation, and GenAI that enable seamless self-service and assisted service across voice and digital channels. Our expanded partnership with Five9 takes this even further, combining the best of both platforms to streamline and unify contact center operations with a turnkey solution that’s fast to deploy and delivers fast ROI.” said John Ball, senior vice president, Customer and Industry Workflows at ServiceNow.
“Five9’s longstanding partnership with ServiceNow has been rooted in the joint mission to create seamless and powerful end-to-end customer experiences. This next phase of our partnership transforms the approach to customer experience management, alleviating a lot of the frustrations that come with using multiple systems to address customer needs. We’ve taken a big step forward to empower customers with our joint AI capabilities and improved interface functionality, easing the day-to-day challenges of customer-facing service.” ,” said Callan Schebella, executive vice president, product management, Five9.
The ServiceNow and Five9 integrated capabilities are expected to be available to select customers in the first half of 2025.