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. 1d ago

    Two Lanes, One Outcome: Designing Dual Paths for Humans and AI - TTEC Digital

    In this CX Today interview, Carrie Brough, Director of Strategy and Ops for TTEC Digital EMEA, argues that a single CX model is fast becoming a liability. Brough explains why AI-driven interactions need quick, decision-ready responses, while humans still need empathy, context, and brand nuance. Carrie breaks down the operational warning signs that your AI and human traffic are colliding, including repeat contacts, confused outcomes, and frontline teams being forced into a “clean-up” role. The conversation also covers when an interaction should move from the AI lane to a human agent, and why risk, not emotion, needs to drive escalation decisions.

    15 min

  2. 4d ago

    Supporting Human CX Agents In An AI Era

    What does great customer experience look like when artificial intelligence is handling half the calls? For Danny Wareham, Founder and Lead Psychologist at Firgun, the answer has less to do with the technology and everything to do with how leaders treat the humans left holding the line. In a wide-ranging conversation with CX Today, Wareham argues that too many organizations are approaching AI deployment from entirely the wrong direction. "Decision makers purchase AI tools because they feel that if they don't, their competitors are going to have some sort of lead on them," he says. The result is a wave of reactive, FOMO-driven implementations that fail to solve real operational problems, and leave frontline agents feeling like change is being done to them rather than with them. That psychological friction, Wareham explains, is rooted in self-determination theory. When agents feel their competence is threatened, their autonomy restricted, or their role uncertain, they revert to familiar behavior, bypassing new tools, creating workarounds, or simply disengaging. The organizations that beat this pattern, he says, are the ones that swap compulsion for curiosity. His go-to example is IKEA. When AI tools reduced the company's inbound call volume by 47 percent, the typical response would have been to cut headcount accordingly. Instead, IKEA asked why 53 percent of customers were still calling. The answer revealed an appetite for design advice. The company retrained its freed-up agents as amateur interior designers and generated an additional one billion dollars in revenue from the insight buried in their contact center data. "Your contact centers are the source for where that rubber meets the road," Wareham says. "If your CFO's mindset is around OPEX savings, you tend to miss all of the value that's potentially there." Wareham also introduces his Constellation leadership model, explored in depth in his book. Rather than confining people to rigid job descriptions, Constellation asks what individuals can contribute toward a shared goal, freeing teams to bring their full range of skills to complex, high-stakes situations. The model draws on military frameworks like mission command used by the British Army and the US Navy SEALs, where shared intent replaces hierarchy the moment situations become unpredictable. "Constellation is not leaderless," Wareham clarifies. "Culture and our behaviors become the leader." For CX leaders navigating the AI era, his message is clear: invest in understanding why your people are resisting change before trying to overcome that resistance, and start treating your contact center as a source of strategic value, not just operational cost.

    22 min

  3. May 21

    Openreach's Brutal Honesty About What it Really Took to Transform CX at National Scale with NiCE

    Upgrading 25 million homes to full fiber broadband is a logistical feat in itself. Doing it while delivering a consistently good customer experience – across 700 communications providers, each with their own messaging – is another challenge entirely. That was the reality facing Openreach before it deployed NiCE's proactive AI agents. Engineers were showing up to empty homes, customers were getting conflicting information depending on their provider, and the company's NPS sat below zero. In this video interview, CX Today's Rhys Fisher sits down with Chris Herbert, Director of Customer Service at Openreach, Eifion Lloyd, Senior Manager of Customer Enablement and Strategy, and Giles Bryan, General Manager of Proactive AI at NiCE. Together, they walk through how a proof of concept built on daily Excel uploads eventually scaled into a deployment spanning 15 million customer journeys – reducing missed appointments by a third, cutting inbound contact volumes by a similar margin, and pushing Openreach's Trustpilot score from 2.0 to 4.7 across 300,000 reviews. The conversation covers what it took to get internal and external buy-in, how NiCE's platform handles landline-only customers without a separate configuration, and a generative AI result that didn't make the press release: a 22% reduction in install cancellations from an ask-me-anything chatbot trialed late last year. On the lessons learned, Herbert is candid: "We could have stopped when it was a bit hard. But we knew by listening to our customers that this was worth pushing through."Check out the full interview to find out precisely how a CX vendor delivers an implementation of this scale.

    27 min

  4. May 13

    Not Building Trust Before AI Agents Is a Mistake

    Rob Wilkinson sits down with Amazon Connect Customer leaders, Tony Shen and Jeremy Puent, to unpack what slows real deployments down, where things go wrong, and why the biggest risk is not the mistake itself but failing to spot it in time. They explain why ambiguous documentation creates inconsistent outcomes, why bad experiences drive disloyalty faster than good experiences build loyalty, and what “visibility” really means when an AI agent makes decisions you need to defend. The discussion gets practical on non negotiables like guardrails, transparency, customer consent for critical actions, and clear escalation paths to humans. You will also hear why containment and deflection can undermine CX, and what metrics and operating habits matter more as AI becomes a production channel. Check out Amazon Connect Customer here.

    37 min

  5. May 11

    NiCE's $670M HMRC Megadeal – Is Enterprise CCaaS Now a Two-Horse Race?

    Blair Pleasant breaks down what this landmark contract really means for the CCaaS market, the hyperscaler threat, and why an eight-year contract is both bold and logical  Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, sits down with Blair Pleasant, President and Principal Analyst at COMMfusion, to dissect one of the biggest CCaaS deals ever announced.  With HMRC committing to a $670M, eight-year contract via Capgemini and NiCE, Blair cuts through the headline noise to explain what this deal reveals about enterprise procurement, vendor staying power, and whether the likes of AWS and Salesforce can ever truly compete at this level.  The HMRC megadeal has sent shockwaves through the CCaaS industry, but what does it actually tell us about the state of the market? Blair Pleasant brings over 30 years of analyst experience to unpack the real story behind the numbers.  Two-horse race or open field? Blair argues NiCE and Genesys dominated this deal due to specific procurement requirements around revenue thresholds and systems integration capability – but insists there's still room for others like Five9, Content Guru, and Sprinklr at enterprise level.  Why hyperscalers aren't landing deals like this... yet. Microsoft and Salesforce lack the CCaaS-specific expertise, track record, and dedicated revenue that HMRC demanded. AWS, however, is the one to watch.  The Capgemini factor. NiCE was the CCaaS engine, but Capgemini won the contract, and Blair is clear that the SI relationship, especially given Capgemini's existing ties to HMRC and UK government work, was critical to securing it.  Eight years is 80 years in this industry. Blair explains why the contract length signals HMRC's desire for stability over agility – and why NiCE's acquisition of Cognigy positions them to grow with that commitment.

    10 min

  6. May 11

    Keep Your Contact Center AI Stack Flexible Without Vendor Lock In - Content Guru

    Picking the wrong AI vendor today could set your contact center back for years. That’s the core message from Rhys Harris, Product Director of AI at Content Guru, who joined CX Today to break down why flexibility needs to be baked into every AI decision — not bolted on later. The conversation covers a lot of ground. Harris draws a direct parallel between the mistakes organizations made during the cloud migration era and the trap many are sleepwalking into now. Over-reliance on a single provider, opaque consumption pricing, and contracts that couldn’t accommodate change all created what he calls “cloud regret.” The same dynamics are already playing out in AI. On the question of what actually separates a genuinely multi-vendor strategy from one that’s just multi-vendor on paper, Harris is blunt: compliance and governance assurance, swappable AI models that can adapt to different languages and use cases, and vendor-agnostic orchestration. Organizations that treat these as checkbox features rather than real requirements will feel it. He also pushes back on the rush to deploy. Forbes data already shows 25% of tech leaders have invested in AI too quickly, and Harris argues the root cause is almost always the same. “A lot of organizations have just tunneled into taking a purely AI strategy without thinking about the outcomes. And I think the decisions that people will make is not about the technology but about the outcomes that they were looking to achieve first.”The bottom line: what works today won’t necessarily work tomorrow, and the vendors worth betting on are the ones who can move with you.

    20 min

  7. May 8

    Is Agentforce Contact Center the Fix for CX Fragmentation, or a New Risk Layer?

    Salesforce’s Agentforce Contact Center launch has split analyst opinion, and this CX Today debate gets straight to why. Host Rob Wilkinson is joined by Zeus Kerravala of ZK Research and Dave Michels of TalkingPointz to unpack what Agentforce actually is, what problem it is trying to solve, and what it could break. Kerravala frames Agentforce as a serious attempt to reduce “fragmentation hell” by converging CRM, customer interactions, and AI into a single platform layer, so agents stop being the “integration point” between disconnected tools. Michels pushes back hard, arguing the launch is a pivot driven by pressure on CRM’s long-standing model and relevance, especially as generative AI changes how businesses capture and use customer conversation data. Across the discussion, they dig into the operational impact on contact center leaders and frontline teams, including context switching, data quality, and what becomes the real “source of truth” when AI can surface answers directly from live conversations. The result is a grounded look at the stakes for customer service organizations weighing consolidation, reliability, and speed-to-value as AI moves from feature to foundation. For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

    40 min

  8. May 6

    Your Contact Center Could Be One Outage Away from Disaster – And You Probably Don't Know It

    Ty Givens, Rhona Bradshaw, and Mike Wehrs join CX Today's Rhys Fisher to examine why most contact centers are less resilient than their uptime metrics suggest – and why agentic AI is about to make that a lot harder to paper over. For years, five nines has been the number that kept boardrooms comfortable. It looked clean on a performance dashboard and gave technology leaders a ready answer when executives asked whether the contact center could be trusted. The problem, according to CX Consultant Rhona Bradshaw, is that it was never telling the whole story. “It acts more like a smoke screen with regards to what's actually going on," Bradshaw says in this CX Today Roundtable. The real damage, she argues, isn't the full outages that trigger incident reports; it's the persistent, low-grade degradation that chips away at customer trust without ever tripping a status page. Founder and CEO of the CX Collective, Ty Givens, cuts straight to what resilience actually means on the ground. “There are two questions. Can the customers get help? And can the agents do their job? Those are the two things that actually make an organization resilient.”Everything else, she argues, is a distraction. The shared dependency problem makes it worse. Givens describes organizations rolling out new platforms only to discover their redundancy was illusory all along, with multiple vendors sitting on the same underlying infrastructure, going down together the moment anything is tested. Mike Wehrs, COO of TieTechnology, brings the sharpest focus to where AI fits into all of this: “You can't fix stuff by throwing advanced solutions on top of sub-adequate infrastructure and sub-adequate data.”All three guests make the same point from different angles. AI doesn't necessarily introduce resilience problems into the contact center, but it does have the capacity to find the ones that were quietly there all along.

    55 min
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About

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
    415
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Today Digital Ltd - CX Today
  • Show Website
    CX Today

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