CX Today

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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.

  1. 2d ago

    Retailers Are Moving to WhatsApp. Can They Avoid Turning It into Spam?

    In this CX Today interview, Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, speaks with Kim Johal, Retail Specialist at Infobip, about WhatsApp’s growing role in UK retail customer engagement.  Infobip’s research points to a shift away from one-way notifications and toward richer conversations across service, shopping, loyalty, and returns. Johal explains why the next challenge for retailers is not sending more messages, but making every interaction feel relevant enough to deserve a place in a customer’s inbox.  WhatsApp is already in shoppers’ pockets. Retailers are now racing to make it part of the customer journey.  But there is a fine line between a useful conversation and another message a customer wants to mute.  Johal discusses why WhatsApp is gaining traction across UK retail, and how AI, customer data, and rich messaging channels could reshape everything from product discovery to returns.  They cover:  • Why consumers are moving away from phone calls and toward conversational channels that support text, images, updates, and real-time service.  • Why personalization needs to go beyond “Hi, first name,” using consented behavioral data to make a message timely and useful.  • How agentic AI can support product availability, sizing questions, store locations, returns, and purchase decisions without forcing customers through a rigid chatbot flow.  • Why future retail engagement may be driven by customer preference across WhatsApp, Apple Business Messenger, and RCS, rather than a brand deciding where the conversation happens.  Johal also explains why returns are becoming an important AI use case. Better sizing, product guidance, and purchase support can help customers make more confident choices before they buy.  For retail and CX leaders, start by identifying where customers already ask for help, then connect those moments across service, commerce, and loyalty.

  2. 6d ago

    Stop Sampling Calls. Start Listening to What Customers Actually Say

    In this CX Today interview, Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, speaks with Russell White, Transformation Lead at Bluecrest, and Reece Harper, Account Executive at NiCE. Bluecrest has moved from reviewing a sample of calls to analyzing every customer interaction through NiCE CXone. The conversation explores what happens when contact centers stop relying on assumptions and start using customer intent, real conversation data, and human-reviewed AI summaries to guide decisions. Contact centers have recorded calls for years. The problem is that most businesses only listen to a fraction of them. White and Harper discuss how 100% interaction analysis is changing the way Bluecrest understands customer intent, tests internal assumptions, and identifies where service journeys need work. They cover: 🔴 Why call dispositions can show an outcome without explaining why a customer got in touch, and how full interaction analysis revealed the gap between internal assumptions and customer reality. 🔴 How Bluecrest’s self-service rescheduling launch did not reduce call demand as expected, but showed customers wanted more flexibility to change appointments. 🔴 How analytics uncovered that a new Health Monitor product was being mentioned in fewer than 10% of relevant calls, leading to targeted training and a rise to around 60–70%. 🔴 Why human review of AI-generated call summaries remains essential in healthcare, where records must be accurate, consistent, and compliant. As White puts it: “The first thing you find is that the anecdote and reality are two different things.” For contact center leaders, start by asking which decisions are still based on sampled calls, dispositions, or internal opinion. Then use real interaction data to test those assumptions before automating the journey around them. For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

  3. Oct 2

    AI Could Steal Your Customer Before They Reach Your Site

    In this CX Today interview, Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, speaks with Christina Augustine, COO of Bloomreach, about the growing impact of AI on product discovery, personalization, and retailer loyalty. With shoppers increasingly asking ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude where to buy, the conversation unpacks whether brands deliver the same depth, confidence, and relevance once customers arrive on their own sites? AI is quickly becoming the first stop in the shopping journey. But if customers discover a product through an AI assistant, what happens when they land on a retailer’s website and the experience feels like it has been left behind? Augustine reflects on the findings from Bloomreach’s latest consumer research and discusses what retailers need to do next. In this interview, they cover: 🔴 Why AI is helping shoppers at the two hardest points in the journey: knowing where to start and feeling confident enough to buy. 🔴 Why retailers should treat conversational queries as valuable first-party customer signals, not a future experiment. 🔴 How richer product data, from boot weight to gift-buying context, can prevent customers from bouncing elsewhere. 🔴 Why useful AI should give customers more agency, rather than push urgency tactics that can damage trust. One quote sums up the shift: “Before I was looking at pixel clicks, right? Like, and reading the tea leaves… Now you don’t have to guess.” Retail, ecommerce, and CX leaders must review where customers are forced to infer product information, test conversational discovery around high-consideration purchases, and make sure the experience does not break when a shopper moves from an AI answer engine to your site. For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

  4. Sep 28

    Zendesk: AI Is Taking the Easy Calls, but Voice Support Is Getting Harder

    In this CX Today interview, Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, speaks with Hannah Deveney, Senior Director of Product Management at Zendesk, about the changing role of voice in AI-powered customer service.  As AI agents handle more routine requests, live calls are increasingly reserved for urgent, sensitive, and complicated issues. Deveney explains why Zendesk is bringing real-time, two-way translation into its contact center, and why the technology needs strong guardrails before it reaches high-risk customer journeys.  Voice was supposed to be fading from customer service. Instead, it is becoming the channel customers choose when the stakes are highest.  Deveney discusses Zendesk’s Real-Time Voice Translation, a new capability designed to help customers and agents communicate naturally across languages during live calls.  In this interview, Deveney covers:  🔴 Why voice still accounts for around 40% of contact center contacts among Zendesk customers, and why calls are becoming more complex as AI agents resolve routine issues.  🔴 How language-specific queues can force a trade-off between speaking to an agent in your own language and reaching the person with the right expertise.  🔴 Why preserving customer context through every transfer, channel, and language is critical for fraud, billing, healthcare, and other high-stakes conversations.  🔴 How contact centers should roll out voice translation carefully, starting with lower-risk use cases, retaining audit trails, and keeping human oversight in place.  As Deveney puts it, “When a call is escalated to a human, it’s usually a more complex issue or it’s more sensitive.” For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

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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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