CX Today

CXToday.com

News and Insights for Today, and Tomorrow CX Today reports on the latest customer experience technology news and marketplace trends. Every day our tech journalists uncover the hottest topics and vendor innovations shaping the future of work.  Our coverage is fully digital offering our audience authentic news and insights on the channel of their choice. We offer daily news, weekly features, video conversations and authority content aligned to the needs of business leaders in today's world.For industry professionals, our weekly newsletter offers a range of popular stories hand-picked by our editorial team.  Subscribe to our weekly newsletter.If you're seeking editorial coverage, connect with our news desk.

  1. 8 hr ago

    Avaya’s AI Strategy Warning: CX Vendors Are Splitting Fast

    Enterprise CX leaders face a difficult question: which AI strategies will deliver measurable customer and operational value, and which are simply buying time? In this CX Today interview, Rhys Fisher speaks with Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, about how the customer experience AI market is beginning to separate into offensive and defensive camps. The conversation starts with Avaya, whose cautious approach to AI raises a bigger market question: can legacy vendors keep pace as competitors move faster on automation, agentic AI, and new commercial models? Kerravala argues that several vendors are now playing offense. NICE, he says, has made a significant move by acquiring Cognigy and strengthening the connection between workforce management, contact center as a service (CCaaS), and conversational AI. Talkdesk is taking a different route, positioning Customer Experience Automation (CXA) as the next phase beyond traditional CCaaS. Zoom is leaning into simplicity and user familiarity, while Amazon Connect continues to challenge established pricing models with consumption-based economics. The discussion also covers RingCentral’s practical AI push for smaller businesses, Webex’s focus on security and enterprise-grade compliance, and Salesforce’s growing ambitions in the contact center market. Kerravala notes that Salesforce’s ability to combine customer relationship management (CRM), voice data, and AI agents could be powerful, but only if it proves the technology can move beyond earlier AI setbacks. Governance emerges as one of the interview’s most important themes. As AI agents begin to work across platforms and communicate with other agents, enterprise buyers will need stronger guardrails, auditability, and trust. Kerravala suggests that legal and compliance risk will become a major factor in vendor selection. For buyers, the takeaway is clear, CX AI platforms need to deliver transparent pricing, open interoperability, and autonomous resolution, such as rebooking a flight, issuing a refund, or updating a policy. Kerravala also offers direct advice to Avaya customers: demand firm AI delivery milestones, assess whether the roadmap matches business needs, and build contractual options that protect the organization if promises are not met.

  2. 4 days ago

    Why AI-Only QA Still Leaves Support Leaders Doing the Heavy Lifting

    Support leaders are under pressure to improve customer experience, coach agents, manage technology, and keep operations moving. Yet quality assurance often becomes another task on an already overloaded list. In this CX Today interview, Rhys Fisher speaks with Ty Given, Founder and CEO at CX Collective, about why Quality as a Service could offer a more practical route for teams that need better QA insight without more admin. Given explains that running a support team can feel like running a small business. Leaders must move between people, process, and technology, often while trying to evaluate only a small sample of customer interactions. AI tools can help analyze conversations, but she argues they still struggle with nuance. That means a human must review context, identify coaching opportunities, and decide what really matters. That is where CX Collective’s Quality as a Service model comes in. Rather than asking teams to buy, learn, implement, and manage another QA platform, the company builds the quality program around the customer’s needs and delivers curated results. The goal is to give support leaders useful insight faster, while reducing the burden of administration. Given says the model is especially valuable for teams with five to 20 agents. These teams are often growing quickly, but they may lack the time, budget, or internal QA expertise to run a full quality program. CX Collective supports them with monthly calibration sessions, human-led review, agent dispute workflows, and coaching notes that help both leaders and agents take action. The interview also explores the relationship between QA and customer satisfaction scores. Given notes that agents can follow the right process and still receive poor CSAT when a customer dislikes a company policy. By adding quality scores into tickets, CX Collective aims to give leaders a more balanced view of performance. While many vendors are focused on AI reviewing 100 percent of interactions, Given believes human judgment remains essential. For her, Quality as a Service is about giving support leaders the equivalent of a QA team that does the heavy lifting, so they can focus on decisions, coaching, and improvement.

  3. 13 Aug

    Your Customer Journey Analytics Are Broken – And Buying More AI Won't Fix It

    In this CX Today interview, Rhys Fisher sits down with Ty Givens, Founder and CEO of CX Collective, and Simel Kara, CX Account Director for Digital Experience and Transformation at Effect Digital, to dig into why end-to-end journey visibility remains out of reach for most organizations — and why reaching for AI as the solution is likely making things worse. Simel frames the core issue around what he calls a missing "conductor" — organizations tend to have reasonable visibility within individual channels, but no shared memory connecting them. The handoffs are where everything unravels. Ty puts it in starker operational terms. Customers bouncing between a bot, a new channel, and a live agent are retelling their story every single time — because the underlying systems simply aren't integrated. And piling AI on top of that doesn't help. "If you don't have any of those things, what's going to happen is that those issues are actually going to be amplified because AI doesn't fix that."Both speakers land on the same closing advice: stop buying tools and start fixing the foundations. Assign clear ownership for AI oversight, document what success actually looks like, and treat journey analytics as a live operational discipline rather than a reporting exercise. As Ty puts it, someone needs to get off the dance floor and oversee the whole room. Right now, in most organizations, nobody is.

  4. 10 Aug

    The AI Race Has a Customer Experience Problem

    In this CX Today interview, Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, speaks with Muj Choudhury, CEO of RocketPhone.ai and former Salesforce Director, about the uncomfortable questions surrounding enterprise AI. As organizations race to deploy AI agents, Choudhury argues that bigger investments and flashier product names do not automatically produce better customer experiences. This is a candid conversation about data, workflow design, agent coaching, risk, and how to find AI use cases that improve service rather than simply chasing automation. AI may be everywhere in CX, but Choudhury says the industry needs to get far more honest about where it delivers value and where it creates new problems. Drawing on his Salesforce background and his work at RocketPhone.ai, Choudhury joins CX Today’s Rhys Fisher to unpack why enterprise AI success depends on more than an LLM, a chatbot, or an ambitious product launch. Why Salesforce’s acquisition-heavy history and changing AI strategy create a difficult integration challenge, especially as smaller, less encumbered competitors move quickly. Why customer data, including voice and contact center conversations, is the essential foundation for relevant AI experiences. A real-world field-service example showing how AI can help engineers arrive with the right part, reduce wasted visits, and improve the customer outcome. Why AI should support human coaching and risk management, not replace experienced managers or introduce unsafe, non-compliant service interactions. Choudhury’s message is clear: start with people and broken processes, then apply AI where it produces a measurable result. Watch the full interview, then assess your own AI roadmap: Is it solving a specific customer problem, using trustworthy data, and keeping human accountability where it matters? For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

  5. 6 Aug

    How Vonage Is Rebuilding Agent Experience for a Multi-CRM, AI-Driven Era

    Rob Wilkinson speaks with Rodney Hassard, Head of Product, Applications Group at Vonage, about how intelligent workspaces are reshaping the agent experience. Rodney explains why customer relationship management (CRM) fragmentation is becoming a major barrier for service teams, especially as organizations adopt more AI tools across the contact center. He explores how agents often become “human middleware,” switching between multiple CRMs, copying and pasting data, and trying to piece together customer context in real time. That friction affects confidence, consistency, handle time, first contact resolution, and customer trust. Rodney also discusses how the Vonage Intelligent Workspace creates a browser-based layer between engagement channels and CRM environments, connecting natively to 13 CRM platforms and giving agents a single pane of glass. He shares why real-time context is essential for AI to deliver accurate, useful recommendations, and why leaders should start with a workflow audit before investing in more technology. Watch the full interview to learn how CX leaders can reduce agent friction, improve AI outcomes, and create a more connected service experience.

  6. 4 Aug

    HubSpot Got the Blame, But Does the Whole Industry Have the Same Problem?

    The HubSpot data enrichment controversy generated plenty of heat. Alexi Hatch, CMO of Acoustic, is more interested in the light. Speaking with CX Today's Rhys Fisher, Hatch reframes the episode not as a one-company scandal but as a symptom of a wider industry habit she calls "signal debt" — the over-reliance on borrowed, static enrichment data that tells you what a contact's job title was last quarter but nothing about what they actually want today. "Piling on more enrichment and external data feels like deeper customer understanding, but it's just an illusion of intelligence," Hatch says. "The antidote to signal debt isn't borrowing more consumer signals, it's having the in-house capabilities to analyze better ones."The conversation covers where brands typically go wrong, with Hatch pointing to declining open rates and flat engagement as the clearest early signs that a CRM built on static data is running out of road. She also draws a hard line on consent — opt-in, she argues, is black and white, and brands that rely on "fuzzy" opt-ins are storing up a trust problem that no amount of enrichment will fix. The discussion then shifts to the activation gap: collecting behavioral data is one challenge, but acting on it fast enough to be relevant is another. If the insight and action layers of your tech stack can't talk to each other in real time, the window closes before the message lands. For CX and marketing leaders trying to make sense of where the industry goes from here, it's a grounded and practically useful conversation.

  7. 3 Aug

    AI Handoffs Are Breaking Trust, Concentrix Warns

    AI agents are handling more customer conversations than ever, but what happens when automation reaches its limit? In this CX Today interview, Nicole Willing speaks with Craig Cotton, Global VP of Product Management at Concentrix, about one of the most important moments in the modern customer journey, the handoff from AI to a human advisor. Cotton explains why brands risk damaging customer trust when customers have to repeat information after a failed bot interaction, and why even a small failure rate can create millions of poor experiences at scale. Cotton also explores the operational gaps behind broken handoffs, from telephony and CCaaS integrations to missing AI summaries, poor queue visibility, and a lack of ongoing quality assurance. The discussion covers what a well-executed handoff should look like, why AI agents need the same onboarding, coaching, QA and brand training as human advisors, and how real-time sentiment analysis can help companies recover a negative customer experience before it becomes a loyalty problem.

  8. 3 Aug

    AI Is Breaking Contact Center Security — Are You Ready?

    AI is making cyber attacks easier to scale, more personalized, and harder to spot, and that’s showing up directly in the contact center. In this CX Today panel, Nicole Willing is joined by Miguel Fornes, Information Security Manager at Surfshark, Randy Layman, CTO at AVOXI, and Ron Zayas, CEO at Ironwall by Incogni. Together, they unpack how attackers are using agentic AI to accelerate social engineering, exploit the vast amount of personal data online, and increase account takeover attempts through higher volume and higher accuracy tactics. The discussion also explores a fast-approaching shift: genuine customers using AI agents to contact support on their behalf, blurring the line between authorised and malicious automation. The panel argues that CX leaders need to rethink authentication as a risk-based continuum, not a binary pass or fail, with “graduated” security steps that increase as actions become more sensitive. The goal is to protect customers and frontline teams without turning every interaction into an obstacle course.  Packed with vivid analogies, the panel makes complex AI-driven cyber risk feel real, practical, and urgent. Watch the full video now to catch every takeaway.

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News and Insights for Today, and Tomorrow CX Today reports on the latest customer experience technology news and marketplace trends. Every day our tech journalists uncover the hottest topics and vendor innovations shaping the future of work.  Our coverage is fully digital offering our audience authentic news and insights on the channel of their choice. We offer daily news, weekly features, video conversations and authority content aligned to the needs of business leaders in today's world.For industry professionals, our weekly newsletter offers a range of popular stories hand-picked by our editorial team.  Subscribe to our weekly newsletter.If you're seeking editorial coverage, connect with our news desk.

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  • Creator
    CXToday.com
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    540
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Today Digital Ltd - CX Today
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    CX Today

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