Copyright TechTarget - All rights reserved Customer experience management (CEM) requires technology and strategy to enable excellent customer experience (CX). On this site, CX leaders can read about tech innovations, news and the latest best practices successful brands employ to create cutting edge digital experiences. https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html Techtarget Feed Generator en Tue, 21 Jul 2026 10:32:05 GMT https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience editor@techtarget.com <p>The environmental impact of e-commerce is substantial and growing faster than most organizations can measure.</p> <p>As global e-commerce sales continue to grow, behind that growth sits an <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/tip/How-to-secure-the-data-centers-expanding-attack-surface">expanding physical and digital infrastructure</a>: data centers processing billions of transactions, fulfillment networks moving packages around the world and delivery fleets flooding city streets. But the footprint extends well beyond delivery vans.</p> <p>Data centers consumed roughly 415 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024, about 1.5% of global supply, according to the International Energy Agency. <a target="_blank" href="https://www.iea.org/news/data-centre-electricity-use-surged-in-2025-even-with-tightening-bottlenecks-driving-a-scramble-for-solutions" rel="noopener">IEA found</a> it increased 17% in 2025, and expects the 2024 figure to more than double by 2030. Packaging waste, product returns and warehouse operations add further layers of emissions that rarely appear on a balance sheet.</p> <p>All this activity is evident, so naturally, regulators have noticed. The EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive now requires large companies to disclose material <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/sustainability/feature/Scope-1-2-and-3-emissions-Differences-with-examples">Scope 3 emissions</a>, the indirect value-chain emissions that typically account for 70% to 90% of a company's total carbon footprint. Investors and enterprise buyers increasingly demand the same transparency, regardless of jurisdiction.</p> <p>This convergence makes e-commerce sustainability a technology leadership problem, not just a logistics one. The systems that power online retail -- hosting infrastructure, order management, routing software and forecasting models -- are also the most effective levers for reducing its carbon footprint.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="E-commerce's full environmental footprint"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i><a name="_bcnuebjm4re3"></a>E-commerce's full environmental footprint</h2> <p>The digital layer is the least visible contributor but among the fastest growing. Every product search, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/recommendation-engine">recommendation engine</a> query, payment authorization and inventory sync runs through data centers. As retailers embed AI across personalization, search and customer service, compute demand climbs accordingly, along with the energy required to support it.</p> <p>Transportation remains the largest single source of e-commerce's environmental impact. The last mile is the most carbon-intensive segment of the journey because it involves low package density, frequent stops and failed delivery attempts.</p> <p>Combined with delivery, packaging compounds the problem, as online orders generate more packaging than brick-and-mortar purchases -- much of it single-use plastic and cardboard sized for individual shipments rather than palletized freight.</p> <p>Yet, returns may be e-commerce's most distinctive liability, as the return rate for online purchases is higher than for in-store purchases. Each return triggers reverse logistics, repackaging and often disposal, as many returned items are never resold.</p> <p>The comparison with physical retail is more nuanced than it appears, though. While <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searcherp/feature/Top-7-ways-to-improve-last-mile-delivery">last-mile delivery significantly affects emissions</a>, that same delivery van serving dozens of households produces fewer emissions per item than each customer driving to a store.</p> <p>E-commerce also avoids the energy demands of lighting, heating and cooling retail floors. But that efficiency advantage erodes quickly with expedited shipping, split shipments and high return rates. Neither model is inherently better; the outcome depends on how the underlying systems are designed and operated.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Technology decisions that matter"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i><a name="_u8a3b5lmkbtb"></a>Technology decisions that matter</h2> <p>Infrastructure choices determine a large share of an e-commerce operation's footprint. The following decisions carry the most weight:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li><b>Renewable energy-powered data centers.</b> Selecting a hosting and cloud provider is the biggest decision for the digital footprint. Major providers have made commitments: Google <a target="_blank" href="https://sustainability.google/reports/247-carbon-free-energy/" rel="noopener">targets</a> 24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030, and Microsoft <a target="_blank" href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/sustainability" rel="noopener">reports</a> 100% renewable energy matching across its data centers. However, commitments vary widely, and annual renewable matching is not the same as around-the-clock clean power. On-site generation, including solar-powered facilities at fulfillment centers and warehouses, extends the same principle to physical operations.</li> <li><b>Energy-efficient server management.</b> Virtualization, container orchestration and workload right-sizing reduce idle compute capacity, while <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/tip/Data-center-cooling-systems-and-technologies-and-how-they-work">modern cooling approaches</a>, such as liquid immersion, can substantially reduce facility power consumption. Overprovisioned infrastructure burns energy without delivering business value.</li> <li><b>Energy monitoring and carbon-aware computing.</b> Organizations cannot reduce what they do not measure. Monitoring platforms that track power usage effectiveness (PUE), workload-level energy consumption and grid carbon intensity let teams shift flexible workloads, such as batch processing, model training and analytics, to times and regions where electricity is cleanest.</li> <li><b>AI-driven route planning.</b> Routing optimization delivers some of the best-documented returns in sustainable supply chain technology. For example, UPS's Orion system <a target="_blank" href="https://www.bsr.org/en/case-studies/center-for-technology-and-sustainability-orion-technology-ups" rel="noopener">eliminates</a> about 100 million driving miles and 100,000 metric tons of CO2 annually by optimizing delivery routes across its fleet.</li> <li><b>AI-powered demand forecasting.</b> Overstock becomes markdown, liquidation or landfill. Forecasting models that align inventory with actual demand reduce waste at the source. Better product data, sizing tools and recommendation accuracy also reduce the chance of returns.</li> </ul> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Actionable recommendations for IT leaders"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i><a name="_4gx4ks9ox6hq"></a>Actionable recommendations for IT leaders</h2> <p>Carbon footprint reduction in e-commerce follows the same logic as any technology transformation: Quick wins build credibility and data, while structural changes deliver durable results.</p> <h3><a name="_r3avm6if24fl"></a>Actions to take now</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li><b>Audit current hosting providers for renewable energy usage.</b> Request providers' energy sourcing data, PUE figures and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/sustainability/feature/Carbon-reporting-tools-address-CSRD-challenges">emissions reporting</a>. Treat vague sustainability claims as a red flag.</li> <li><b>Migrate to green hosting platforms where feasible.</b> Prioritize providers with verified renewable power purchase agreements and transparent reporting rather than offset-heavy marketing.</li> <li><b>Integrate sustainability metrics into existing systems.</b> Emissions data belongs in the same dashboards as uptime and cost. Connecting energy and logistics data to existing BI platforms makes carbon a managed operational metric.</li> <li><b>Establish a Scope 3 baseline.</b> Disclosure requirements reward organizations that already have a consistent methodology and supplier data. Starting now turns a future compliance scramble into routine reporting.</li> </ul> <h3><a name="_jy526287zji"></a>Long-term strategy</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li><b>Build circular economy capabilities into the platform.</b> Resale, refurbishment and trade-in programs <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/sustainability/feature/Real-world-examples-of-the-circular-economy">convert returns from waste into revenue</a>. Platform support for product lifecycle tracking and secondary listings positions retailers to capture it.</li> <li><b>Invest in AI-powered demand forecasting.</b> Treat forecasting accuracy as a sustainability investment with a direct profit-and-loss return through reduced overstocking, markdowns and reverse logistics.</li> <li><b>Partner with sustainable logistics providers.</b> Carrier selection criteria should include electric fleet adoption, consolidated delivery options and emissions transparency at the shipment level.</li> <li><b>Make sustainability a standing vendor requirement.</b> Energy sourcing, reporting capabilities and circular design should carry weight in every infrastructure and software procurement decision.</li> </ul> <p>E-commerce growth is not slowing, and neither is scrutiny of its environmental cost. The organizations best positioned for both are those whose technology leaders treat emissions as an engineering problem: measurable, optimizable and owned.</p> <p><em>Griffin LaFleur is a RevOps and GTM Engineering leader at Granite GTM, where he works with B2B technology companies on go-to-market strategy, systems architecture, and revenue operations.</em></p> </section> E-commerce's emissions have grown due to data centers, transportation and packaging waste. To combat this growth, focus sustainability efforts on technology and renewable energy. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/iot_g1206800961.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/sustainability/tip/The-environmental-impact-of-e-commerce Thu, 16 Jul 2026 11:00:00 GMT <p>A critical component of customer experience is ensuring that&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/feature/The-ultimate-guide-to-contact-center-modernization">customer calls are answered in a timely manner</a>. If the customer service line is down or if agents aren't available, customers become disappointed and dissatisfied. Even a few minutes of downtime can cost organizations money, such as lost sales and recovery expenses.</p> <p>Although cloud-based unified communications (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchunifiedcommunications/definition/unified-communications">UC</a>) systems offer more contact center redundancy and resiliency, they are not free from operational and technological glitches.</p> <p>Organizations migrate to cloud-based UC to reduce their server footprint and outsource support and management to the UC provider. Contact center organizations can also&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/feature/Benefits-of-a-modern-contact-center">integrate with the new cloud-based phone system</a>.</p> <p>Microsoft Teams, for example,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchunifiedcommunications/answer/How-do-you-enable-a-Teams-contact-center-integration">integrates with contact centers</a>&nbsp;to provide capabilities, such as call routing, voice analytics, speech recognition, mobility and call scripting. Disaster recovery is another desirable capability as Microsoft invests more in redundancy and reliability for Teams. However, organizations must prepare their contact centers for other failures that could result in a phone system outage.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="1. Connectivity redundancy"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>1. Connectivity redundancy</h2> <p>The greatest single point of failure for any organization hosting its calling platform in the cloud is its network and internet connection. IT leaders must ensure redundant networking and internet connectivity -- but not just for corporate headquarters. Remote users and offices must also be provided with&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchnetworking/tip/Working-from-home-could-expand-SD-WAN-edge-to-residences">multiple connectivity options</a>. Consider deploying connectivity services from separate providers or using software-defined WAN services.</p> <p>Additionally, service-level agreements for cloud-based phone systems provide reliability guarantees; a 99.999% SLA allows only five minutes of downtime per year, while a 99.99% SLA allows 53 minutes of downtime per year.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="2. Security"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>2. Security</h2> <p>Hosted systems can be vulnerable to cyberattacks fueled by something as simple as a leaked administrative credential. To ensure administrative systems are well protected, IT leaders must implement strict password policies and require users to use&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/multifactor-authentication-MFA">multifactor authentication</a>&nbsp;before accessing a contact center's administrative console.</p> <p>AI-powered threat detection can provide security monitoring that identifies and responds to threats in real time, such as traffic anomalies, data leaks and deepfakes.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="3. Quality and performance monitoring"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>3. Quality and performance monitoring</h2> <p>For organizations relying on hosted phone platforms, the right&nbsp;bandwidth&nbsp;makes a huge difference in call quality. System health and quality must be continually monitored to ensure the network has enough bandwidth to meet performance objectives.</p> <p>Predictive analytics can <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchnetworking/tip/How-does-predictive-analytics-help-network-operations">proactively identify network issues</a>, such as signal degradation or latency, and proactively trigger failover processes without disrupting service. This supports contact center redundancy by reducing downtime and optimizing bandwidth.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="4. Patch and update management"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>4. Patch and update management</h2> <p>Just like any cloud-based UC platform, Microsoft continuously updates Teams, and it's important that employees use the latest version of the software. Doing so helps keep operations secure and reduces the chance that a bug or an outage disrupts the user or client experience.</p> <p>By following some of these recommendations, IT administrators can help ensure their phone system supports contact center redundancy. Even if Microsoft or another cloud provider itself suffers from an&nbsp;<a target="_blank" href="https://www.silvertech.com/blog/what-happens-when-your-cloud-provider-goes-down" rel="noopener">outage</a>, these suggestions reduce client-side risks associated with configurations or system failures that could cause a system outage.</p> <p><em>Reda Chouffani runs a consulting practice he co-founded, Biz Technology Solutions Inc., and is CTO at New Charter Technologies. He is a technology consultant with a focus on healthcare and manufacturing, cloud expert and business intelligence architect who helps enterprises make the best use of technology.</em></p> </section> Cloud-based phone systems offer contact centers more reliability, but that doesn't mean they're immune to system failures. Learn how to safeguard your contact centers. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/customer_service03.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchunifiedcommunications/tip/Ways-to-support-contact-center-calling-redundancy Wed, 15 Jul 2026 15:30:00 GMT <p>In contact centers, AI job replacement will not be evenly distributed.</p> <p>Two recent reports examine how AI is affecting customer service amid a massive disruption caused by the technology. Customers are making their expectations of AI service bots known, and they are not showing much patience for incorrect or off-target AI responses -- so they leave and try competing products.</p> <p>Meanwhile, several national, state and city governments are mulling over different regulatory approaches to slow AI's replacement of humans.</p> <p>Looking at the next two to five years, AI will transform the contact center workforce by eliminating some jobs while <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/AI-creating-new-contact-center-jobs-for-agents">creating new</a><em> -- </em>albeit fewer -- roles for specialists to monitor, update and manage AI agents, predicted Forrester Research in a report released July 1 titled "The Quantitative Employment Impact Of AI On Customer Service Jobs."</p> <p>Highly skilled and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Empathy-in-customer-experience-drives-company-success">empathetic human agents</a> will always be needed to tackle complex cases that AI can't solve, said co-author and analyst Kate Leggett.</p> <p>What's more, different verticals will reshape their contact center workforces differently, depending on the complexity of the work and the human touch those industries require to maintain quality service and customer loyalty.</p> <p>Industries such as retail, hospitality and food service -- especially companies with large, high-volume contact centers -- will likely lose more jobs to AI automation than utilities, manufacturing, construction, banking and insurance.</p> <p>Employees at those companies, which require more specialized agent knowledge, are not only less vulnerable to <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/feature/Is-AI-replacing-jobs-How-17-job-types-feel-the-effects">AI replacements</a>, but they also typically command higher salaries.</p> <p>"Some jobs in industries like retail and food services, arts and entertainment, your customer service reps are paid pretty poorly -- barely a living wage," Leggett said. "Those jobs are getting replaced by AI because they tend to the simpler questions [such as]: 'Where's my order?' 'Does this dress come in blue instead of green?' 'How do I do returns, exchanges, refunds?'</p> <div class="youtube-iframe-container"> <iframe id="ytplayer-0" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2KW7uzvxPxo?autoplay=0&amp;modestbranding=1&amp;rel=0&amp;widget_referrer=null&amp;enablejsapi=1&amp;origin=https://www.techtarget.com" type="text/html" height="360" width="640" frameborder="0"></iframe> </div> <p>"In industries like utilities, mining, manufacturing -- where salaries are much higher, and where you're working on harder [cases] -- there's less pressure to get rid of jobs, because they're more complicated and harder to automate."</p> <p>But the adoption of AI also presents contact center leaders with several workforce issues to solve. One is <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Best-practices-for-call-center-agent-training-programs">onboarding and training</a> new contact center hires when all the entry-level jobs are gone. Another is deploying technically skilled workers on the front lines to keep AI agents updated and on point, especially when an issue -- for example, a newly discovered product defect -- causes a surge in calls and management sets return policies on the fly.</p> <p>One solution may be customer service teams, or pods, consisting of a couple of agents, a manager and an AI specialist within the contact center ranks, Leggett said. Such a model would also allow entry-level workers to apprentice alongside more seasoned veterans, learning to solve thorny customer issues. <span data-teams="true">Regardless of how contact centers change their staffing models</span>, she sees apprenticeship as an important component of AI transformations.</p> <p>Also, AI is unlikely to take over every contact center at once.</p> <p>"Not all contact centers are going to agentify their operations in two years or five years," Leggett said. "There's a lot of entry-level work that still exists. Some contact centers will never be able to get to the automation rates that we project because they're just not set up for it -- they're not technology-forward, they haven't cleaned up their data, they haven't cleaned up their processes. So, there are jobs that will be out there."</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Replacing humans with AI: Illegal?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Replacing humans with AI: Illegal?</h2> <p>Truth be told, AI has not precipitated significant job cuts in the economy overall, though there are some notable exceptions, specifically in customer service. Salesforce, for example, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/opinion/The-human-touch-A-CIOs-wake-up-call-on-customer-service-AI">laid off 4,000</a> customer support staff in 2025.</p> <p>This is probably in part why regulators have only begun to examine the idea of <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/opinion/Bans-on-AI-layoffs-Current-laws-and-what-might-come-next">regulations that restrict employers' ability</a> to replace humans with AI agents.</p> <p>That said, efforts are underway globally to address the issue. In China, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.fisherphillips.com/en/insights/insights/chinese-court-rules-employer-cant-fire-worker-because-ai-took-his-job" rel="noopener">courts have limited</a> companies' ability to reduce head count due to AI. The <a target="_blank" href="https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/" rel="noopener">European Union's AI Act</a> has telegraphed possible future intent to limit AI layoffs.</p> <p>In the U.S, New York has a disclosure law on the books that requires companies to notify when AI precipitates layoffs -- which no company has done yet -- and a <a target="_blank" href="https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260sb951" rel="noopener">proposed bill</a> in the California Senate would require employers to give employees 60 days' notice for "technological displacement."</p> <p>Separately in California, last May, Governor Gavin Newsom <a target="_blank" href="https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/05/21/governor-newsom-signs-first-of-its-kind-executive-order-to-prepare-workers-and-businesses-for-potential-ai-disruption/" rel="noopener">signed an executive order</a> exploring new policies for severance standards, employment insurance and support for workers displaced by "AI transition." Some U.S. attorney groups are <a target="_blank" href="https://lawreview.uchicago.edu/online-archive/nlra-protections-ai-driven-layoffs" rel="noopener">considering novel uses</a> of federal National Labor Relations Act protections to give unions negotiating power in the face of AI layoffs. The National Labor Relations Board has yet to issue an opinion on it.</p> <p>The upshot of all this? Regulations may eventually come, but right now, regulators and courts are in what developers might call early <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsoftwarequality/definition/alpha-testing">alpha testing</a>.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Customers getting testy with AI service"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Customers getting testy with AI service</h2> <p>Contact centers, as they grapple with the math of AI layoffs and upskilling the humans who are left, have another challenge: The majority of customers are growing increasingly impatient, expect AI to deliver better service than humans, and would literally rather do anything than contact customer service.</p> <p>Even CX leaders indicated <i>they</i> don't want to deal with customer service in their personal lives.</p> <p>That's according to the "2026 State of Customer Experience Report” of 5,800 consumers of all ages, across 20 countries -- and 1,500 CX leaders across numerous verticals, including telecommunications, automotive, manufacturing, airlines and retail, to name a few -- conducted by CX vendor Genesys. The <a target="_blank" href="https://www.genesys.com/resources/state-of-cx" rel="noopener">comprehensive survey</a> took place last March and April.</p> <p>Yet only 24% of CX leaders globally believe their service organizations are minimizing the effort required for consumers to resolve their issues, even as they hand off work to a hybrid human-AI agent workforce. Challenges to reducing customer friction in contact centers include a lack of data readiness, aging infrastructure and systems that still require customers to repeat their information -- or contents of a chatbot conversation -- to a human after an AI agent hands them off.</p> <p>But they're running out of time: 95% of consumers expect that they won't have to repeat these things to a human contact center agent. On top of that, 85% of consumers said they either spent less with a brand or stopped using it altogether because of poor customer service.</p> <p>"Poor customer service" in the context of AI means the agent has three attempts to resolve a customer query. That's it, said 84% of consumers. They've thrown down the gauntlet and given CX leaders more information to feed into their algorithms, calculating what they will lose if they mismanage AI layoffs and hand over too much to the bots.</p> <p><em>Don Fluckinger is a seasoned B2B technology journalist with more than 30 years of experience specializing in enterprise IT, digital experience and content management. As a senior news writer at Informa TechTarget, he delivers award-winning analysis that helps IT and business leaders navigate complex technologies to enhance customer and employee experiences. Got a tip?</em>&nbsp;<em><a href="mailto:don.fluckinger@informatechtarget.com?subject=Tip%20from%20article" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Email him</a>.</em></p> </section> Apprenticeship may solve the problem of training new contact center hires after AI vacuums up all the entry-level jobs humans now perform. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/ai_a205627811.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/366645896/World-leaders-confront-AI-layoffs-more-in-store-for-contact-centers Wed, 15 Jul 2026 15:30:00 GMT <p>Customer service tiers are a hierarchical support model that organizes service teams into levels based on issue complexity. Simple, repetitive requests remain at the lowest tiers, while technical or unusual cases are escalated to specialists. Most organizations structure customer support across four or five tiers, from self-service resources to third-party experts.</p> <p>For the C-suite, tiered customer support is a cost-and-margin decision as much as a service decision. The model matches labor cost to issue complexity: Inexpensive <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/customer-self-service-CSS">customer self-service</a> and generalist agents absorb the bulk of inbound volume, thereby protecting expensive specialist and engineering time for problems that require a higher level of service. That structure lets support organizations scale ticket volume without scaling head count at the same rate, and it produces the tier-level metrics executives need to manage cost per resolution, staffing and service quality.&nbsp;</p> <p>For B2B support leaders, the tier framework also defines escalation paths and accountability -- two factors that directly affect retention when a high-value account faces a serious problem.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="The 5 customer service tiers"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>The 5 customer service tiers</h2> <p>Tier definitions vary across organizations as some run only Tiers 0 through 3, while others fold self-service into Tier 1. The five-tier model below is the most common structure and is a great place to start when building out customer service teams.</p> <h3>Tier 0: Self-service</h3> <p>Tier 0 requires no agent at all. Customers resolve issues on their own through self-service channels, via help centers, knowledge bases, FAQ pages, community forums and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/definition/chatbot">chatbots</a>. Typical Tier 0 interactions include password resets, order status checks, how-to questions and basic account changes.&nbsp;</p> <p>Tier 0 is the least expensive way to resolve an issue, so support leaders invest heavily in deflection, or resolving requests before they become tickets. A <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcontentmanagement/tip/Tips-for-creating-a-knowledge-base">well-maintained knowledge base</a> also feeds every tier above it, because agents rely on the same documentation customers do.</p> <h3>Tier 1: Frontline support</h3> <p>Tier 1 is the first human contact point. Generalist agents handle routine questions, account help, basic billing inquiries and known issues with documented fixes. These agents work from scripts, macros and knowledge base articles. They resolve the majority of inbound volume. Routine requests typically make up 60% to 80% of tickets for consumer-facing teams.&nbsp;</p> <p>Customer interactions at Tier 1 are high-volume and fast. Agents aim to resolve on first contact and escalate only when an issue exceeds their tools or training. Tier 1 also performs triage by logging the issue, gathering details and routing what it can't resolve to the appropriate specialist.</p> <h3>Tier 2: Specialized support</h3> <p>Tier 2 agents carry deeper product knowledge and broader system access. They handle technical troubleshooting, complex billing disputes, configuration problems and issues that require investigation rather than a scripted answer.&nbsp;</p> <p>Customers reaching Tier 2 have usually already explained their problem once, so the <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/feature/Context-is-key-The-limits-of-experience-analytics-software">interaction depends on context transfer</a>. Effective Tier 2 agents pick up the full ticket history. This includes what the customer reported and what Tier 1 has already attempted, so Tier 2 can continue the diagnosis rather than restarting it. Tier 2 typically resolves issues in longer, fewer interactions, often over email or scheduled calls rather than live chat.</p> <h3>Tier 3: Expert support</h3> <p>Tier 3 is staffed by the organization's most senior product specialists, and often by engineers who split time between support and development. This tier handles product bugs, integration failures, data issues and escalations that require code-level investigation or architectural knowledge.</p> <p>Customer interaction at Tier 3 is rare and high-stakes. These cases frequently involve enterprise accounts, span days or weeks, and require coordinated updates among the customer, account team and engineering. Tier 3 also produces fixes that flow downstream, patch documentation and perform <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/definition/root-cause-analysis">root cause analysis</a> to prevent the same issue from escalating again.</p> <h3>Tier 4: Third-party support</h3> <p>Tier 4 sits outside the organization. When a problem originates in a vendor's component, a payment processor, a cloud provider or licensed software embedded in the product, resolution depends on an external party.&nbsp;</p> <p>The customer usually doesn't interact with Tier 4 directly. The organization's support team manages the vendor relationship and serves as the customer's point of contact, making ownership critical. The account should never feel like it was handed off to a company it didn't buy from.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="How escalation works"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>How escalation works</h2> <p>Escalation moves an issue up the tier ladder with full context. The ticket carries the customer's original report, troubleshooting steps already attempted and any diagnostic data collected, so each tier builds on the last rather than repeating it.</p> <blockquote class="main-article-pullquote"> <div class="main-article-pullquote-inner"> <figure> Poor handoffs are where tiered models break. </figure> <i class="icon" data-icon="z"></i> </div> </blockquote> <p>Escalation paths need explicit triggers, such as time limits, complexity thresholds or customer-impact criteria, so agents know when to hand off rather than hold on. Poor handoffs are where tiered models break. Customers forced to re-explain their problem at every level will rate the experience poorly no matter how the ticket ends.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="What role does AI play in tiered support?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>What role does AI play in tiered support?</h2> <p>AI is reshaping the bottom of the tier structure. Modern AI chatbots resolve far more than scripted bots once could, and published case studies report <a target="_blank" href="https://www.zendesk.com/blog/ai/ai-customer-service/" rel="noopener">deflection rates of 30% to 60%</a>. This expands Tier 0 into territory that previously required a Tier 1 agent. The boundary between the two tiers is blurring as a result.&nbsp;</p> <p>Higher up the tier structure, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/feature/AI-should-remove-friction-not-agents-from-contact-centers">AI works alongside agents rather than replacing them</a>. Copilot tools summarize tickets, suggest responses and surface relevant documentation for Tier 1 and Tier 2 agents, cutting handle time on routine work. AI-driven triage classifies incoming tickets by intent and sentiment and routes them directly to the right tier, reducing misrouted tickets and transfers that inflate resolution times. The practical effect is that lower tiers shrink, and human agents concentrate on the judgment-heavy work that AI can't close.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Benefits and challenges of tiered support"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Benefits and challenges of tiered support</h2> <p>The model's benefits explain its dominance:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li><b>Faster resolutions and lower costs.</b> Routing issues to the right skill level the first time raises <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/definition/first-call-resolution-FCR">first-contact resolution</a>, and resolving the most volume at inexpensive tiers lowers the cost per ticket.</li> <li><b>Consistency.</b> Documented procedures at each tier produce uniform answers across agents and channels.</li> <li><b>Scalability.</b> Organizations can absorb volume growth by expanding Tier 0 and Tier 1 without adding specialists at the same rate.</li> <li><b>Clear career paths.</b> Tiers give agents a visible progression, which helps with retention in high-turnover support roles.</li> </ul> <p>The challenges are real but manageable:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li><b>Communication gaps.</b> Every handoff risks lost context and forces customers to repeat themselves.</li> <li><b>Training complexity.</b> Each tier requires distinct skills, documentation and onboarding, which multiplies the enablement workload.</li> <li><b>Escalation ping-pong.</b> Tickets may bounce between tiers or get re-escalated after a failed fix, prolonging resolution and frustrating customers.</li> <li><b>Information silos.</b> Specialists who only see escalated cases can lose sight of common customer pain points.</li> </ul> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="How businesses evaluate a tiered model"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>How businesses evaluate a tiered model</h2> <p>Three factors determine whether a tiered structure fits:</p> <blockquote class="main-article-pullquote"> <div class="main-article-pullquote-inner"> <figure> Tiering pays off when volume is high, and most issues are simple. </figure> <i class="icon" data-icon="z"></i> </div> </blockquote> <ul class="default-list"> <li><b>Ticket volume and complexity.</b> Tiering pays off when volume is high, and most issues are simple. Teams with low volume but consistently complex cases often do better with swarming, a model in which specialists collaborate on a ticket from the start instead of escalating sequentially.</li> <li><b>Team skills and escalation paths.</b> The model requires enough skill differentiation to justify separate tiers, plus clearly defined triggers for moving tickets up.</li> <li><b>KPIs.</b> Resolution time by tier, first-contact resolution, escalation rate and re-escalation rate reveal whether the structure works. A healthy benchmark would be Tier 1 resolving 70% to 80% of all tickets without escalation. A low Tier 1 resolution rate signals training or documentation gaps.</li> </ul> <p>Tiers reward discipline. Aim to keep simple issues low, move complex ones up quickly and make sure context travels with them. Organizations that manage all three achieve faster resolutions at a lower cost, without customers ever needing to know the structure exists.</p> <p><em>Griffin LaFleur is a RevOps and GTM Engineering leader at Granite GTM, where he works with B2B technology companies on go-to-market strategy, systems architecture, and revenue operations.</em></p> </section> Customer service tiers range from self-service to expert help. CX pros need to understand these tiers so they can allocate investments and resources effectively. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/customer_service12.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Customer-service-tiers-and-escalation-paths-explained Tue, 14 Jul 2026 14:49:00 GMT <p>To bring AI agent development under one roof, Oracle today updated AI Agent Studio for Fusion Applications.</p> <p>The AI agent builder combines no-code, low-code and pro-code tools, which can accommodate line-of-business users building simple task-based agents. It also supports developers, who can build more complex agents with Git-based workflows and coding tools such as Claude Code, and they have access to sandboxes and other familiar testing tools.</p> <p>Oracle also released Fusion Agentic Applications, native runtime apps that can manage Oracle and third-party AI agents and AI automations within Fusion cloud apps, spanning CX, HR, ERP and supply chain.</p> <p>The new tools and apps build on Oracle's previous <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatamanagement/feature/4-trends-that-will-shape-data-management-and-AI-in-2026">"agent swarm"</a> orchestration, which deploys multiple lightweight agents together to execute more complex work, said Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research. Fusion AI Apps update traditional apps for the AI era.</p> <p>"You don't use your Fusion apps and add the agent," Mueller said. "You build a new app, which uses an agent for what an agent does well, and then there's other stuff that the human still has to do."</p> <p>Many cloud companies in the CX realm -- including Pegasystems, Adobe <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/366626390/Genesys-Cloud-AI-Studio-enables-generative-AI-agents">and Genesys</a> -- are working to <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/opinion/Customer-service-AI-pricing-just-turned-into-the-biggest-shell-game">limit LLM calls</a> by combining deterministic workflows with probabilistic ones and by setting limits such as monthly caps on AI agent costs.</p> <p>Mueller added that, compared to this time last year, enterprises are no longer looking to LLMs to accomplish everything in sight. Rather, they want to apply AI only where it makes sense -- logically and economically -- in the workflow.</p> <p>"Either my agent returns me my sales numbers, or it doesn't," Mueller said. "There's nothing probabilistic in that."</p> <p>Fusion Apps aren't strictly an <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchapparchitecture/tip/Harness-engineering-Agent-harnesses-as-critical-infrastructure">AI harness</a>; they are business applications with an outcome in mind, such as improving collections, workforce optimization or service call deflections. But they utilize some of the same capabilities, such as security and governance rules within the Fusion environment, said Kaushal Kurapati, <span data-olk-copy-source="MessageBody" data-ogsb="" data-ogsc="" data-ogab="" data-ogac="" data-markjs="true">group</span>&nbsp;<span data-ogsb="" data-ogsc="" data-ogab="" data-ogac="" data-markjs="true">vi</span>ce president of applications development at Oracle.</p> <p>"[It's a] combination of AI-assisted reasoning with LLMs, but yet a deterministic runtime execution," Kurapati said. "So you get the flexibility and power of the LLM and the predictability, reliability, consistency and speed you need for executing an enterprise workflow."</p> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/screenshot_meg-f.jpg"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/screenshot_meg-f_mobile.jpg" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/screenshot_meg-f_mobile.jpg 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/screenshot_meg-f.jpg 1280w" alt="Screenshot of Oracle's AI agent builder " data-credit="Oracle" height="272" width="559"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>Oracle's AI agent builder can accommodate line-of-business users describing what they need in plain language. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Studio merges development modes"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Studio merges development modes</h2> <p>AI Agent Studio for Fusion Applications brings together plain-language coding tools with a pro-code environment that includes app lifecycle management, local validation, debugging and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsoftwarequality/CI-CD-pipelines-explained-Everything-you-need-to-know">CI/CD workflows</a>.</p> <p>In doing so, Kurapati said, line-of-business users -- the ones who know where the workflow bottlenecks are -- can work with developers to resolve them with new apps. Non-developers can write or describe agents, and when necessary, developers can step in to apply an enterprise's testing and deployment methodologies.</p> <p>Pro developers can also build AI agents, <a target="_blank" href="https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/generative-ai/skills.htm" rel="noopener">AI skills</a> and Fusion Agentic Applications in popular AI coding tools such as OpenAI Codex and Anthropic Claude Code, which integrate with AI Agent Studio.</p> <p>"A business user, if they're comfortable with a natural language interface, can go in and build it," Kurapati said. "They can [also] quickly prototype, show it to a developer and say, 'Look, why don't you harden this with all the safeguards, guardrails, testing use cases and everything, and build me that same thing in Codex?"</p> <p><em>Don Fluckinger is a seasoned B2B technology journalist with more than 30 years of experience specializing in enterprise IT, digital experience and content management. As a senior news writer at Informa TechTarget, he delivers award-winning analysis that helps IT and business leaders navigate complex technologies to enhance customer and employee experiences. Got a tip?</em>&nbsp;<em><a href="mailto:don.fluckinger@informatechtarget.com?subject=Tip%20from%20article" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Email him</a>.</em></p> </section> AI apps: Oracle's latest answer to mixing deterministic and probabilistic automations with governance. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/machine_learning_g1184268577.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/366645665/Oracle-AI-agent-builder-brings-no-code-low-code-and-pro-code-together Tue, 14 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT <p>AI call routing uses machine learning and natural language processing to connect each caller with the right resource. In this article, we examine how AI call routing works, why it matters when delivering efficient customer service and what business leaders should consider before adopting this form of intelligent automation.</p> <p>Few things test customers' patience like a misrouted call. Oftentimes, customers explain their problem to a menu, press numbers, wait, then reach an agent who can't help. Each step is small, but together they erode customer trust and inflate the cost of every conversation. Intelligent routing looks to remove that friction.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="What is AI call routing?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>What is AI call routing?</h2> <p>AI call routing uses AI -- mainly machine learning and natural language processing -- to decide where an incoming call should go. Instead of making customers navigate a menu, intelligent routing interprets the reason for the call, weighs it against available agents and past outcomes, and connects callers accordingly. The difference from a traditional <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/definition/Interactive-Voice-Response-IVR">interactive voice response</a> system is the routing logic is learned rather than hard-coded, and this logic improves as the AI system handles more calls.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="How AI call routing works"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>How AI call routing works</h2> <p>A single routed call has several layers:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li><b>Intent detection.</b> Natural language processing interprets what the caller wants, rather than matching keywords against a menu.</li> <li><b>Customer context.</b> The system draws on CRM data, such as past interactions, open cases and account value, to understand who is calling and why.</li> <li><b>Agent matching.</b> Routing weighs the caller's need against agent skills and availability to find the best fit, not simply the next free agent.</li> <li><b>Continuous learning.</b> Customer outcomes feed back into the model, so routing accuracy improves over time as the system handles<i> </i>more calls.</li> </ul> <p>Some systems add <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/How-AI-inferred-sentiment-analysis-unlocks-customer-insights">sentiment analysis</a>, escalating a frustrated caller to a senior agent before a relationship is damaged.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Why the C-suite should evaluate AI call routing"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Why the C-suite should evaluate AI call routing</h2> <p>For senior business leaders, AI call routing is more than a contact center upgrade; it sits <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/6-ways-customer-experience-influences-sales">where customer experience, cost and revenue meet</a>. Better call routing cuts customer wait times and transfers and improves first-contact resolution -- the measures that most shape how customers feel about a brand. It also recovers the agent time that every misrouted call wastes. And, because routing decides which customers receive which level of attention, directing a high-value or at-risk account to a specialist is a commercial choice, not just an operational one.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="What AI call routing means for CX"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>What AI call routing means for CX</h2> <p>Call routing works best as part of an integrated stack, drawing on the same <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/How-to-centralize-customer-interaction-data-in-one-platform">unified customer data</a> that powers personalization elsewhere. Connected to that data, the experience becomes coherent: Customers who start online and then call the contact center, don't have to repeat themselves because the agent already has the context. Handling the customer as one person across channels, rather than a series of disconnected contacts, is what separates a <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/feature/Call-center-vs-contact-center-Whats-the-difference">modern CX operation from a traditional call center</a>.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="AI call routing benefits and challenges"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>AI call routing benefits and challenges</h2> <p>The benefits of AI call routing are clear:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li>Shorter wait times.</li> <li>Higher first-contact resolution.</li> <li>More personalized handling.</li> <li>Better use of agent capacity.</li> <li>Call routing accuracy that improves as the system learns.</li> </ul> <p>The challenges are mostly not technical. Routing is only as good as <a target="_blank" href="https://emarketingplatform.com/blog/what-happens-when-ai-is-pulling-from-bad-crm-data/" rel="noopener">the data behind it</a>, so fragmented or outdated records produce confident but poor decisions. Integrating AI routing with existing telephony and CRM systems takes planning. Learned routing can be hard to explain, which matters for governance and compliance. And over-automation can trap callers in loops, worsening the very experience it set out to improve.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Routing as a strategic capability"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Routing as a strategic capability</h2> <p>As with most AI in CX, the technology is an enabler, not a cure; it amplifies the data and processes already in place. The businesses that benefit the most won't just switch on a tool. They will treat routing as a strategic capability, grounded in clean, unified customer data and aligned to clear outcomes. Approached that way, AI call routing becomes less about answering calls efficiently and more about making every conversation count.</p> <p><i>Robert Peledie is an enterprise architect, solution architect and director of CRM consultancy 365Knowledge Ltd. He has several years of consulting experience in global organizations.</i></p> </section> AI call routing connects customers with contact center agents quickly and with context. While that sounds great, businesses still have to deal with some challenges. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/chatbot_g1273438441.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/AI-call-routing-What-it-is-how-it-works-and-what-it-means-for-CX Wed, 08 Jul 2026 11:04:00 GMT <p>Model Context Protocol, known more commonly as MCP, has become the lingua franca of AI agents.</p> <p>Salesforce is banking on this API-like open standard, which exposes application data to AI agents, as the mechanism that turns Slack into its new interface and, indeed, the platform from which Salesforce customers run their businesses. Co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff has reiterated this idea since 2020, before the <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/252492912/Possible-Salesforce-Slack-buy-set-to-shake-up-CX-space">$27.7 billion Slack acquisition</a> closed.</p> <p>The idea is to drive interoperability between AI agents of all stripes by embedding MCP integrations with Salesforce's sales, marketing, e-commerce and service platforms, as well as agents originating outside of Salesforce, including from Anthropic, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatamanagement/news/366638535/Snowflake-launches-new-AI-tools-unveils-OpenAI-partnership">OpenAI and Vercel</a><a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatamanagement/news/366638535/Snowflake-launches-new-AI-tools-unveils-OpenAI-partnership"></a> -- an up-and-coming agent development platform -- plus a host of other applications that support the standard.&nbsp;</p> <p>This interoperability play will enable all of Salesforce's functionality -- and that of outside agents -- within Slack, said Ryan Gavin, Salesforce executive vice president and Slack chief marketing officer.</p> <p>It also could be considered an AI orchestration play, with Slackbot acting as a "super agent" that understands and tracks the functions of all the other task-based agents -- so the humans don't have to -- and then executes plain-language orders.</p> <p>Orchestration <a href="https://aibusiness.com/generative-ai/openai-vs-anthropic-vs-google-model-isn-t-the-point" target="_blank" rel="noopener">has become a competitive battleground</a> for enterprise tech vendors, as most generative AI models have become powerful enough to meet operational needs in the typical enterprise.</p> <p>For companies that have already begun transitioning their sales operations to Slack, these latest MCP integrations will reduce salespeople's <a href="https://www.intellective.com/5-ways-to-decrease-swivel-chairing/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">"swivel-chairing"</a> between Slack, Tableau, Salesforce CRM and other applications, said Rebecca Wettemann, founder of independent research firm Valoir.</p> <p>Agentic AI will also give sales managers more frequent insights into how their pipelines are progressing, as automation aggregates data in real time and forces salespeople to update CRM records more frequently. AI Agents can't account for recent activity if they haven't been notified of, for example, the outcome of a sales meeting.</p> <p>"Instead of having a pipeline forecast that's as accurate as it's ever going to be at one fixed point in time once a week -- whatever time sales management says you've got to update CRM by -- I can actually have it all the time," Wettemann said.&nbsp;</p> <p>Salesforce claims that this latest set of Slackbot MCP AI functionality requires little to no engineering lift. Admins can set up agentic AI tools that previously required many steps -- and developers -- to make them work.</p> <p>"If you can turn your phone into airplane mode, you can do this as an admin," said Gavin, referring to the slider-switch integrations list that pops up to connect Slackbot to internal Salesforce and external business apps as well as AI tools using MCP.</p> <p>"We've done the work of connecting the MCP client [and] MCP server. So, as an admin, you simply need to enable those capabilities on your dashboard, and then your organization can access them -- it's as simple as that."</p> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/salesforce_mcp_in_slackbot_tableau_example-f.jpg"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/salesforce_mcp_in_slackbot_tableau_example-f_mobile.jpg" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/salesforce_mcp_in_slackbot_tableau_example-f_mobile.jpg 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/salesforce_mcp_in_slackbot_tableau_example-f.jpg 1280w" alt="Screenshot of Tableau data visualization in Slack via MCP AI" data-credit="Salesforce" height="315" width="560"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>Slackbot MCP AI connectivity ports functions such as Tableau data visualizations to the Slack interface. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Slackbot, the 'super agent'"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Slackbot, the 'super agent'</h2> <p>For Salesforce users, it might be tough at first to distinguish what to deploy in Slackbot from what to deploy in Agentforce because they have seemingly overlapping capabilities.</p> <p>Salesforce's gambit is that users will want to use a "super agent" like Slackbot to manage and route end-user requests to task-based agents. In theory, a human doesn't need to know which agents to access to update a CRM while speaking into a phone mic, or to visualize sales trend data. Instead, Slackbot figures it out.</p> <p>But where does this leave the old familiar Salesforce interface that customers have learned to rely on over the decades? Gavin said that Salesforce co-founder and current Slack CTO Parker Harris put it this way: If Slack and its input channels, such as voice, become the home for Salesforce -- and users never go back&nbsp; -- "that's not a bad outcome."</p> <p>"That's a pretty powerful way of working that I think everyone would agree would be an upgrade from today," he said.</p> <p>As organizations become more comfortable with the yin and yang of MCP and AI, it will likely be easier for them to spot use cases in their workflows that will actually deliver efficiencies. It will become clearer which tools from different vendors will work best.</p> <p>The race is on. Salesforce, like all its competitors, hopes to emerge victorious atop that pile.</p> <p>Right now, enterprise tech buyers and CIOs are very confused about what AI tooling to use when, Wettemann said. They're getting bombarded with product releases and announcements about competing bots and different platforms for deploying AI. For Salesforce users, there are multiple options within the platform to do the same thing using MCP and AI functionality.</p> <p>"Salesforce needs to be very prescriptive in telling customers, 'These are the kind of things you should do with Slackbot,' 'These are the kind of things you should do with Agentforce,' and 'These are the kind of agents you should build in Agentforce and then deploy in Slackbot,'" Wettemann said.</p> <p><em>Don Fluckinger is a seasoned B2B technology journalist with more than 30 years of experience specializing in enterprise IT, digital experience and content management. As a senior news writer at Informa TechTarget, he delivers award-winning analysis that helps IT and business leaders navigate complex technologies to enhance customer and employee experiences. Got a tip?</em>&nbsp;<a href="mailto:don.fluckinger@informatechtarget.com?subject=Tip%20from%20article" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><i>Email him</i></a>.</p> </section> MCP is now table stakes, just like APIs had to be back in the early era of microservices. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/competition_a118929427.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/366645614/The-AI-handshake-More-MCP-interoperability-for-Salesforces-Slackbot Wed, 08 Jul 2026 08:00:00 GMT <p>Customer service is ground zero for agentic AI. This business unit has the most need for automation and operates on long-accepted performance metrics such as customer satisfaction and time to resolution -- everything an agent does can be put to the test through rigorous measurement. There is no rationalization or magical thinking for human -- or AI -- service agents.</p> <p>So why can't technology vendors get on the same page in regard to pricing?</p> <p>For tech buyers and their CIOs, slogging through <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchitchannel/definition/request-for-proposal">requests for proposals</a> must feel like playing a <a href="https://matthewfurman.com/shell-game/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">shell game</a>. Or, for those who have ever been to New York City, <a href="https://zelmanow.medium.com/three-card-monte-a-lesson-in-spotting-rigged-games-in-life-05d74d47c57c" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Three-card Monte</a> -- the classic street swindle designed to separate tourists from their money.</p> <p>That's because of "outcomes-based AI pricing," a catchphrase in vogue for customer service tech, loosely explained as "we don't get paid until our AI resolves a customer call autonomously." The grift happens in the fine print, as it's difficult to compare apples to apples when everyone has a different definition -- and price -- for case resolution. &nbsp;</p> <p>Taken individually, they sound logical. But try to calculate, compare and contrast the monthly costs for some market leaders:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li>HubSpot's <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/opinion/ITs-budgetary-nightmare-Tech-buyers-face-AI-pricing-variance">outcomes-based pricing</a> kicks in if a customer doesn't escalate a case to a human in 72 hours.</li> <li>Zendesk has a complex rubric with different kinds of agents, and it includes an outcomes component metered after a "72-hour quiet period."</li> <li>Salesforce still works mostly on consumption pricing, but is toying with something called "Agentic Work Units," which <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/opinion/Potential-Salesforce-pricing-reset-latest-sign-of-SaaSpocalypse">may or may not be a red herring</a> -- and also plans to introduce outcomes-based pricing for Agentforce Help Agent that involves <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/366644924/Salesforce-productizes-its-own-customer-service-AI-agent-for-users">several different metering criteria</a> this month.</li> <li>ServiceNow also has a complicated formula of <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/news/366641692/ServiceNow-AI-pricing-change-takes-on-enterprise-ROI-struggles">AI usage tiers</a> in a hybrid mix of consumption and outcomes-based pricing.</li> <li>Pegasystems meters after a case is closed and has introduced flat-rate pricing that removes token pricing from the equation.</li> </ul> <p>These are just a few. There are other variations on this theme out there in the customer service tech and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/definition/contact-center-as-a-service-CCaS">contact center as a service</a> marketplace.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Pega's economic argument"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Pega's economic argument</h2> <p>The Pegasystems model is interesting because it also remakes agent architecture processes <a href="https://futurumgroup.com/insights/will-pegas-flat-rate-ai-model-force-a-rethink-of-token-based-pricing-in-enterprise-automation/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">designed to minimize large language model calls</a> during the runtime phase, writes Keith Kirkpatrick, vice president and research director for the Futurum Group.</p> <p>"There is increasing concern in the marketplace about the amount of money that's being spent on AI and the actual value that it's returning," said Don Schuerman, CTO and vice president of marketing and technology at Pegasystems.</p> <p>"People are realizing that if you're not careful, you can send agents off to burn a lot of tokens without them making a meaningful difference in the efficiency of your business or in the experiences that you return to your customers."</p> <p>Constellation Research analyst Liz Miller said the current fog of tech jargon around outcomes-based pricing has obfuscated that point. Pegasystems has figured out a key to sustainable AI economics, she said: repeating processes that should be repeatable with business rules after AI figures it out the first time. One doesn't need to invoke Anthropic or OpenAI models anew for every single case.</p> <p>"Once you have that the first time, you can then run through good, old-fashioned 'what we used to call AI five years ago' -- deterministic, runtime models that are still AI-driven processes," Miller said. "It's just not going through that whole costly agentic token cycle."</p> <div class="youtube-iframe-container"> <iframe id="ytplayer-0" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4ZR_ZEdBzn8?autoplay=0&amp;modestbranding=1&amp;rel=0&amp;widget_referrer=null&amp;enablejsapi=1&amp;origin=https://www.techtarget.com" type="text/html" height="360" width="640" frameborder="0"></iframe> </div> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Defining the 'AI outcome'"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Defining the 'AI outcome'</h2> <p>On the surface, these ideas appear to put the customer at the center of the pricing equation -- and vendors seem to tie their AI pricing to the customer's business goals. But the fact is, vendors still control the definition of that subjective word, outcome.</p> <p>"Until we get better at monitoring -- on an ongoing basis -- whether AI is executing effectively, outcome-based models are going to be problematic," said Rebecca Wettemann, founder of independent research firm Valoir. "They have always been problematic in software. They're even more problematic when I don't actually have the ability for a human or AI to evaluate at scale."</p> <p>The vendors will tell you that they listen to their customers on their various boards, panels and surveys. They do -- and will continue to do so.</p> <p>But the hard economics of generative AI only give them so much wiggle room: No one, ever, shed a tear for a SaaS vendor, but the reality is that they have back-end costs from AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google, xAI and Meta. Someone's got to pay them.</p> <p>That's the bad news. Is there any good news?</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Tech buyers, stay hopeful"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Tech buyers, stay hopeful</h2> <p>Customer service tech companies know this is a market sea change. Each vendor is trying to come up with the best-sounding narrative that proves they're the ones making AI costs the most stable and predictable -- and that they really care.</p> <p>They have to.</p> <p>Kishan Chetan, executive vice president and general manager of Agentforce Service, and his colleague Prasad Raje, senior vice president of product management, said that Salesforce vetted with customers its ideas for the outcomes-based pricing it plans to roll out for Agentforce Help Agent this month -- and that it will continue to do so as the company bends its cost models to plug into their business goals.</p> <p>"The reality in this agentic market is: All of us are continuing to evolve as we work with customers," Chetan said. "There's no precise answer."</p> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/3_card_monty-f.jpg"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/3_card_monty-f_mobile.jpg" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/3_card_monty-f_mobile.jpg 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/3_card_monty-f.jpg 1280w" alt="Three-card Monte photo illustration" height="336" width="559"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>Evaluating customer service AI pricing can feel a little like playing Three-card Monte, a street variation of the shell game familiar to New Yorkers. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> <p>For customer service -- and agentic AI, in general -- you could call the current environment an AI "hype cycle," the "formation years," "unfinished business," the "messy middle" between the early innovators and the mass adopters or whatever.</p> <p>CIOs and their buying teams can take solace in the fact that, amid this chaos, if past IT pricing trends around <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchapparchitecture/definition/service-oriented-architecture-SOA">service-oriented architecture</a> (microservices), cloud computing and data lakes hold with AI, both pricing and barriers to entry will come down. Several factors could influence the race to the bottom, including constantly improving, <a href="https://aibusiness.com/data-centers/schneider-electric-foxconn-partner-build-next-gen-data-centers" target="_blank" rel="noopener">more efficient compute power and data centers</a>.</p> <p>Also, Wall Street could play a role in this. <a href="https://aibusiness.com/generative-ai/spacex-ipo-filing-opens-up-xai-finances" target="_blank" rel="noopener">xAI just went public</a>. Meta is public. OpenAI and Anthropic <a href="https://aibusiness.com/generative-ai/prompt-anthropic-s-ipo-filing-signals-ai-s-next-phase" target="_blank" rel="noopener">plan to go public</a>. Stockholders, demanding as they are, will insist on sharper competition to drive higher revenue -- and that's likely to commoditize generative AI further and drive down prices.</p> <p>The caveat, vendors and analysts alike said, is the race to make AI more and more powerful. As models evolve, they will drink up more compute power, energy, water and costs. This opposing economic force could cancel out some of the pricing benefits of AI companies going public.</p> <p>This might seem like a time when "fear of missing out" on AI -- sentiments sometimes driven by CEOs who don't really understand how AI works or how legal and data readiness constraints <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/feature/Beating-AI-fatigue-Quick-wins-for-CIOs">slow adoption</a> -- is rapidly turning into "fear of messing up," <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/366641853/Salesforce-releases-Agentforce-dev-tools-updates-Agent-Fabric">as Wettemann frequently puts it</a>. CIOs are caught between lofty AI expectations and the difficulties of executing on them.</p> <p>But even in this upside-down world where it doesn't seem possible that the customers could be in charge of the AI situation, you all are. You hold the power of the purse. If you don't sign that renewal, your vendor pals don't get paid. And if they don't negotiate on your terms, you don't have to sign the renewal.</p> <p>That is, after all, how enterprise IT works, even though this time around the negotiations might feel kinda like you're buying a used car from a pushy salesperson -- or worse yet, playing a shell game.</p> <p><em>Don Fluckinger is a seasoned B2B technology journalist with more than 30 years of experience specializing in enterprise IT, digital experience and content management. As a senior news writer at Informa TechTarget, he delivers award-winning analysis that helps IT and business leaders navigate complex technologies to enhance customer and employee experiences. Got a tip?</em>&nbsp;<a href="mailto:don.fluckinger@informatechtarget.com?subject=Tip%20from%20article" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><i>Email him</i></a>.</p> </section> For buyers, picking customer service tech might feel closer to playing a shell game than the traditional enterprise IT RFP process. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/digdeeper/4.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/opinion/Customer-service-AI-pricing-just-turned-into-the-biggest-shell-game Thu, 02 Jul 2026 14:22:00 GMT <p>Customer self-service portals can be convenient and&nbsp;improve CX when they help consumers get what they need more quickly and easily than speaking to or chatting with a live agent. But when customers can't get what they need from self-service tools or businesses have an upsell opportunity that requires human intervention, that benefit ends.</p> <p>Determining whether to route customers toward or away from self-service portals is now less challenging with the <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/366639392/Oracle-drops-a-truckload-of-CX-centric-generative-AI-agents">arrival of generative AI agents</a> powered by large language models (LLMs). No longer must customers browse categories, run keyword searches that spit out links to follow, or have stilted conversations with rule-based chatbots. Instead, they can engage in casual conversation with AI agents that understand their intent, tap into the company knowledge base, and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/feature/Context-is-key-The-limits-of-experience-analytics-software">deliver contextually relevant information</a> that can resolve even the thorniest of problems.</p> <p>Now, 52% of companies use AI text agents and 42% use AI voice agents for customers, according to a global Metrigy study of 759 companies that researched the role of AI in CX. AI is fundamentally changing the customer interaction model, to the point where more businesses now say technology matters more than people in delivering successful customer interactions.</p> <p>In fact, most companies (79.5%) say AI will have a positive effect on their customer service in the next two years. In the coming years, they anticipate the percentage of customer interactions that AI fully resolves will double, from 29.2% today to 60% by 2030.</p> <p>Customer-facing AI agents already are proving generally better at handling most customer issues than human agents, including confirming or changing deliveries, appointments and reservations, getting product information, and reaching out proactively. Human agents are better for refunds, complaints and selling products or services, according to the Metrigy <a target="_blank" href="https://www.metrigy.com/product/ais-role-in-customer-experience-2026-27/" rel="noopener">study</a>.</p> <p>As companies develop and refine their&nbsp;customer self-service strategy, they must consider how and when AI will play a role.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="AI self-service best practices"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>AI self-service best practices</h2> <h3>Never finish building a knowledge base</h3> <p>The self-service knowledge base is always a work in progress that changes with the company. The more a business can automate those updates, the better. As customers ask chatbots, AI agents or human agents questions, AI will note the addition of new inquiries, compile appropriate answers to each and automatically add new questions to the knowledge base. What's more, as content in the knowledge base itself changes, AI can automate those updates. For example, if the warranty terms have changed and are updated in the company warranty file, AI can see that update and automatically update the knowledge base.</p> <h3>Optimize unstructured content for AI agent use</h3> <p>To maximize the value of AI in self-service, organizations must ensure their <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchbusinessanalytics/definition/unstructured-data">unstructured data</a> is properly formatted for AI consumption and indexed for use by <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/definition/retrieval-augmented-generation">retrieval-augmented generation</a> (RAG) systems. RAG systems elevate self-service deliverables by retrieving specific knowledge base and document sets for relevant data based on the customer's conversational prompt. The retrieved data gets added to the LLM prompt for context, and the LLM generates a response using that newly provided data, improving accuracy and contextual relevance.</p> <h3>Incorporate triage agents into self-service journey</h3> <p>Currently, two-thirds of companies begin at least some of their customer interactions with an <a target="_blank" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4964463770650-About-intelligent-triage" rel="noopener">AI triage agent</a>. These AI triage agents, which typically replace interactive voice response systems, effectively ask customers what they need using natural language instead of having customers select from a menu. Today, 36.3% of all customer interactions start with an AI-powered triage agent. However, human agents are still most effective for handling complaints, processing refunds and selling products or services.</p> <h3>Use transactional self-service</h3> <p>Self-service becomes more complex, but also incredibly useful, when it's transactional. Think of tasks such as transferring money, rescheduling an appointment and retrieving medical records. To support self-service transactions today, 64.3% of companies are using AI agents to automate the integration between <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Contact-center-back-end-integrations-drive-revenue-growth">front-office CX applications and back-office systems</a>. These tasks reduce the business's operational costs because, in the past, a human had to be involved in each of them.</p> <h3>Make proactive suggestions</h3> <p>Use AI to make suggestions for either solving a problem or selling something that aligns with the customer's characteristics or activities. Reach out proactively, using AI guidance for customer segmentation, message generation and best time to contact.</p> <h3>Personalize interactions</h3> <p>Personalization and customization matter. Rather than just providing knowledge bases that customers can search, use AI to deliver personalized responses based on a customer's past purchases or interactions. <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Proactive-customer-service-drives-satisfaction-and-revenue">Proactive outreach should be highly personalized</a>, as well.</p> <h3>Give customers options</h3> <p>If self-service fails, always provide an option to chat with a human agent or schedule a call or chat if the business does not operate 24/7.&nbsp;</p> <h3>Take advantage of mobile devices</h3> <p>When designing an effective self-service strategy, consider other enabling technologies that can increase the use of self-service portals. For example, businesses with mobile-enabled self-service portals see substantial increase in use. Customers who use mobile devices typically want a quick answer to a pressing question.&nbsp;</p> <h3>Use interaction analytics</h3> <p>To further refine a self-service strategy, businesses need to <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Customer-interaction-analytics-spurs-better-business-results">make the most of interaction analytics</a>. Customer interaction data is an invaluable source of information for the business in general as well as for gaining an understanding of how AI agents and human agents can better serve customers.</p> <p><b>The bottom line:</b> Customers want intelligent self-service that provides them with answers quickly and guides them to new products and services, opportunities to join loyalty programs or proactive notification systems, and personalization based on their past interactions.</p> <p><i>Beth Schultz is vice president of research and principal analyst at Metrigy. She focuses her research on unified communications, collaboration and digital customer experience.</i></p> </section> Customer service is now the top area for AI adoption across the enterprise. Follow these best practices to implement AI-driven self-service in your organization. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/chatbot_g1250576673.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Best-practices-for-using-AI-enabled-self-service Tue, 30 Jun 2026 12:30:00 GMT <p>Contact center tech stalwart Genesys acquired AI startup Pinkfish and its 25,000 Model Context Protocol server tools.</p> <p>Genesys plans to make Pinkfish capabilities available in its AppFoundry by the end of July and then natively embed them in Genesys Cloud by the end of January 2027. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.</p> <p><a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/tip/How-the-Model-Context-Protocol-simplifies-AI-development">Model Context Protocol</a> (MCP) is the backbone standard for data sharing among AI agents. Several CX enterprise tech vendors, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/366644421/Salesforce-plans-to-acquire-Fin-agentic-customer-service-AI">including Salesforce</a>, have recently acquired AI startups specializing in these toolkits rather than building their own.</p> <p>Pinkfish was launched by former <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Top-10-contact-center-platforms">Talkdesk</a> product and engineering heads. It has built more than 500 integrations with common enterprise apps such as Salesforce, Adobe Acrobat Sign, Microsoft 365, Workday, SAP and many more. Within those integrations are prebuilt tools that execute common actions, searches and data retrievals using MCP.</p> <p>Pinkfish also has an agent builder platform, prebuilt agents for employee and customer self-service, agent governance tools and a plain-language AI workflow designer.</p> <p>CX vendors in general need to incorporate MCP tools quickly to remain competitive in a rapidly advancing AI agent-fueled customer service marketplace, said Rebecca Wettemann, founder of Valoir, an independent research firm. Pinkfish gives Genesys customers access to automations for frequently repeated actions that reduce -- and save users the cost of -- large language model calls.</p> <p>The acquisition also brings talent to the Genesys fold -- talent that built all those tools quickly and got them through technical review and into production. Larger, established vendors need such nimble teams, Wettemann said, and with Pinkfish, Genesys also gains a customer base already using those tools.</p> <p>"That's critically important for the AI arms race that we have going on now," Wettemann said. "I want to get more customers in deployment, and if I'm acquiring them, I'm also getting the talent that was able to execute on that."</p> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/ai_sharpens_contact_center_features_and_actions-f.png"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/ai_sharpens_contact_center_features_and_actions-f_mobile.png" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/ai_sharpens_contact_center_features_and_actions-f_mobile.png 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/ai_sharpens_contact_center_features_and_actions-f.png 1280w" alt="Benefits of contact center AI graphic" height="355" width="560"> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Orchestration to rule them all"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Orchestration to rule them all</h2> <p>In a <a href="https://www.genesys.com/blog/post/the-next-frontier-of-ai-enabling-ai-agents-to-get-work-done-across-the-enterprise" target="_blank" rel="noopener">blog post</a> discussing the deal, Genesys senior vice president, general manager and head of product Mike Szilagyi said that agentic AI has proven its ability to perform customer service tasks such as summarizing conversations, analyzing sentiment and understanding the intent behind customer questions.</p> <p>But there's more left to build. Contact centers still need help orchestrating that work to derive value from the technology, orchestrating both joint human-AI workflows and end-to-end AI deployments from the beginning of a customer case through its resolution.</p> <p>Pinkfish will help enable that, Genesys hopes, by reaching into enterprise apps to retrieve data from outside the contact center as a service in an order management system, billing app, ERP or -- in the cases of workflow management or <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchhrsoftware/tip/Top-tips-to-improve-employee-experience-in-uncertain-times">employee experience</a> support -- HR platform, and then by taking the next step: Getting agents to do actual work.</p> <p>In the CX space, the <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/366636690/Agentic-orchestration-the-next-AI-issue-for-CIOs-to-tackle">SaaS vendors are all competing</a> for control of the agentic AI orchestration layer. The competition is both with each other and with cloud hyperscalers such as Google and AWS. Genesys was one of the first to recognize the value of owning that piece of enterprise tech real estate, and it has been building orchestration tools in earnest since ChatGPT's early days.</p> <p>"Ultimately," Wettemann said, "whoever is conducting gets to decide who plays."</p> <p><em>Don Fluckinger is a seasoned B2B technology journalist with more than 30 years of experience specializing in enterprise IT, digital experience and content management. As a senior news writer at Informa TechTarget, he delivers award-winning analysis that helps IT and business leaders navigate complex technologies to enhance customer and employee experiences. Got a tip?</em>&nbsp;<a href="mailto:don.fluckinger@informatechtarget.com?subject=Tip%20from%20article" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><i>Email him</i></a>.</p> </section> Genesys jump-starts its agentic toolkit. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/chatbot_g1196309272.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/366645318/Genesys-acquires-Pinkfish-to-speed-up-contact-center-AI-deployments Tue, 30 Jun 2026 11:17:00 GMT <p>CVS Health is Salesforce's largest Agentforce customer in a regulated industry and the sixth-largest publicly traded U.S. company overall, with $402 billion in annual revenue.</p> <p>The combination retail pharmacy, health insurer and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/pharmalifesciences/feature/Understanding-PMBs-role-and-impact-on-drug-pricing">pharmacy benefits manager</a> (PBM) has become one of the proving grounds for <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/366639798/Salesforce-rolls-out-Agentforce-Health-AI-agents">Agentforce Health</a>, the version of the platform Salesforce is building for the healthcare vertical.</p> <p>Salesforce and CVS Health recently <a target="_blank" href="https://www.cvshealth.com/news/company-news/cvs-health-to-deliver-faster-more-personalized-call-center-care.html" rel="noopener">forged a partnership</a> that highlights how the largest of large organizations can roll out AI agents. During regular check-ins, the company communicates progress reports to Salesforce and identifies technology gaps to be addressed in the Agentforce Health roadmap. The initial Agentforce initiatives at CVS Health focus on quickly providing human contact center agents with more personalized data about a customer calling in, as well as checking an order's status.</p> <p>The problem the two companies are trying to solve involves freeing up data marooned in disparate systems, which can slow down processes such as prior authorization -- where patients need insurer approval before they can fill certain prescriptions. Like many processes in healthcare, prior authorization is ripe for automation because it's currently fraught with numerous IT and human bottlenecks among the various parties involved.</p> <p>Can AI help cut down on those potential snares? CVS Health, which also owns insurer Aetna and the Caremark PBM, thinks it can. Its Salesforce project promises to pull together insurance and PBM data more quickly for joint customers, automating that process and potentially expanding it further down the road.</p> <p>The sprawling CVS developer organization works on <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsoftwarequality/tip/Epics-features-and-user-stories-explained">Agile product initiatives</a> that are continuously improved. The company started with prior authorization and order status agents because these processes are mostly deterministic, said Pushpendu Pal, senior vice president and chief digital and technology officer of pharmacy services at CVS Health.</p> <p>Pal advises his peers at other organizations to also think small when deploying agentic AI, with strict governance and humans in the loop "for the foreseeable future."</p> <p>"Start with the efficiency play," Pal said. "My boss always says, 'Use the uncool AI,' where you can very clearly understand the benefits to the consumer. I would start there before getting into a truly generative AI solution [that would] make it self-service, make it more probabilistic, make it leverage the various heuristic models to be able to predict or provide insights."</p> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/cvs-f.jpg"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/cvs-f_mobile.jpg" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/cvs-f_mobile.jpg 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/cvs-f.jpg 1280w" alt="Picture of CVS customer getting a barcode on their phone scanned for a pharmacy pickup" height="373" width="560"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>CVS hopes that deploying AI agents to gather and process insurance and healthcare provider information will make pharmacy checkout more efficient. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Agentic AI and the patient experience"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Agentic AI and the patient experience</h2> <p>Technology vendors often sell a dream of agentic AI solving huge problems -- like unifying siloed data systems or adding structure to mountains of unstructured data -- by just feeding everything into an LLM and turning on their products. Users suddenly become "AI companies" in an amorphous "AI transformation."</p> <p>Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff envisions a world where companies "kind of run themselves" with AI agents, as he put it at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last January. Such aspirational marketing isn't confined to just Salesforce; it's just one of many companies making this claim.</p> <p>CVS Health's Pal sees potentially interoperable agents deployed in a carefully architected environment designed to handle growing complexity over time. Agents may work together, managed by "super agents" orchestrating their work.</p> <p>But that's in the future.</p> <p>CVS Health will, for the moment, focus on more tactical, task-based agents and build slowly and deliberately to control how it enhances and deprecates agentic capabilities as business needs dictate -- without incurring <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/technical-debt">technical debt</a>. It reminds Pal of the <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchapparchitecture/definition/REST-REpresentational-State-Transfer">emergence of modern APIs</a>, which, like agentic AI, enabled connections between applications and their data.</p> <p>"The technical environment is changing very fast; we do not know who will be the key players, who will be ahead of the game, six months or 18 months from now," Pal said. "We do not want to create too complex a task within one agent. We'd rather they do a discrete set of tasks -- and attach them together very similar to a Lego set -- that way we can modify and alter it very quickly, as it comes to end of life."</p> <p>To its credit, the Agentforce Health team isn't pushing the AI transformation theme as hard as some in Silicon Valley. They've picked a swim lane, said Amit Khanna, senior vice president and general manager of Agentforce Health: making healthcare efficient, which, in theory, will free up bandwidth for providers and allied professionals to care for vulnerable patients before they become high-risk cases.</p> <p>"We are, as a system, reaching out to only people who are at the highest risk," Khanna said. "We are not able to reach out to people who are at rising risk."</p> <p>There's a lot of manual, nonclinical work that Agentforce can automate, he said, such as helping complete documentation before and after a patient visit. On top of that, follow-up communications and appointment scheduling are also prime candidates for automation.</p> <p>Khanna echoed Pal's sentiment that IT leaders should build agentic AI functionality slowly and start small -- so they can claim some quick wins on the way to bigger investments.</p> <p>"Sometimes they end up picking up the most complex [processes], where they think that the most value would be," Khanna said. "But then it takes time, and you start losing faith. The idea that you should be able to give proof of value quickly is something that all customers should think about. It might be a small win, it might mean just saving you one second -- but it's proof that you are moving toward that AI journey rather than doing something that takes 18 months."</p> <p><em>Don Fluckinger is a seasoned B2B technology journalist with more than 30 years of experience specializing in enterprise IT, digital experience and content management. As a senior news writer at Informa TechTarget, he delivers award-winning analysis that helps IT and business leaders navigate complex technologies to enhance customer and employee experiences. Got a tip? </em><a target="_blank" href="mailto:don.fluckinger@informatechtarget.com?subject=Tip%20from%20article" rel="noopener"><em>Email him</em></a><em>.</em>&nbsp;</p> </section> With Salesforce Agentforce Health, CVS Health plans to stitch together provider, insurance and pharmacy data to make processes more efficient for customers. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/health_g1164501548.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/366645102/CVS-tackles-tactical-agentic-AI-rollouts-for-healthcare Thu, 25 Jun 2026 14:38:00 GMT <p>Despite the proliferation of AI, many enterprises struggle to move projects beyond experimentation and into workflows that influence revenue, customer satisfaction and operational performance. For Cartelligent, that challenge emerged at a critical point in the customer journey: the moment a prospective buyer picked up the phone.</p> <p>Cartelligent, a California-based concierge auto broker that helps customers buy and lease vehicles without negotiating directly with dealerships, was facing a growing volume of inbound calls. With fewer than 40 employees, the company needed to manage that volume without dedicating additional staff to answer and route calls.</p> <p>Those calls ranged from qualified buyers and vendors to spam calls and even inquiries outside its service area. The result was a problem familiar to many organizations. <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Customer-interaction-analytics-spurs-better-business-results">High-value customer interactions</a> were competing for attention alongside low-value calls, creating friction for employees and increasing the risk that legitimate opportunities would go unanswered.</p> <p>"If you're a salesperson and one out of 10 times you answer the phone it's a human being who wants to buy a car, and the other nine times out of 10 it's not, you're going to be severely unmotivated to answer the phone," said Jessica Carstens, vice president of operations at Cartelligent.</p> <p>To address this issue, Cartelligent deployed&nbsp;RingCentral's AI-powered receptionist&nbsp;and conversation intelligence tools, using AI to understand caller intent, route inquiries to the appropriate employee&nbsp;and&nbsp;provide managers with greater visibility into customer interactions.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="When AI moves into customer-facing workflows"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>When AI moves into customer-facing workflows</h2> <p>Cartelligent's deployment reflects a broader shift happening across enterprise AI initiatives. Rather than focusing exclusively on productivity gains or cost reduction, organizations are increasingly applying AI to improve the flow of customer interactions and ensure employees spend more time on high-value work.</p> <blockquote class="main-article-pullquote"> <div class="main-article-pullquote-inner"> <figure> Organizations apply AI to improve the flow of customer interactions and ensure employees spend more time on high-value work. </figure> <i class="icon" data-icon="z"></i> </div> </blockquote> <p>The company initially relied on a traditional <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/definition/Interactive-Voice-Response-IVR">interactive voice response</a> system that required callers to navigate menu options. According to Carstens, that approach offered little flexibility and often failed to distinguish between serious buyers and less relevant inquiries. Instead of relying on menu selections, the AI&nbsp;system introduced <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/feature/Context-is-key-The-limits-of-experience-analytics-software">a more contextual approach</a> that analyzed caller intent and routed inquiries accordingly.</p> <p>"We were able to create that logic to qualify those leads better," Carstens said. "Most of the time, it's a high-quality lead who's looking to buy or lease a new car."</p> <p>The company spent about 30 days testing and refining the system before making it available to customers. During that period, employees intentionally tried to break the workflow, identify unanswered questions&nbsp;and&nbsp;adjust <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/AI-call-routing-What-it-is-how-it-works-and-what-it-means-for-CX">routing logic based on real-world scenarios</a>.&nbsp;According to Carstens, the process required ongoing refinement but did not demand deep technical expertise.</p> <p>"If you're logical and can take the time to think things through, you can do this," she said. She also said the positive business outcomes were immediate.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Quantifying AI's ROI"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Quantifying AI's ROI</h2> <p>Cartelligent reported that nearly 80% of valid leads previously routed to an external answering service during business hours are now reaching the appropriate team member directly. The company also eliminated costly answering-service overage fees while improving employee productivity. Yet, Carstens said the most significant outcome was not operational efficiency.</p> <p>"The biggest win is we got [customers] on the phone at a time they wanted to be on the phone with us," she said. "We're able to help them find a solution to their problem."&nbsp;The company has expanded its use of AI beyond initial call routing.</p> <p>Managers use <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Employee-conversational-analytics-unlocks-business-insights">conversation intelligence capabilities</a> to review customer interactions, identify coaching opportunities&nbsp;and&nbsp;evaluate sales performance without manually sorting through large volumes of recordings.&nbsp;The visibility helps managers focus on meaningful interactions while giving employees more targeted feedback.&nbsp;For Carstens, however, the project's broader significance is <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/feature/AI-should-remove-friction-not-agents-from-contact-centers">how&nbsp;AI supports rather than replaces human engagement</a>.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Enhancing the human connection"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Enhancing the human connection</h2> <blockquote class="main-article-pullquote"> <div class="main-article-pullquote-inner"> <figure> We're using this AI tool to enhance that human-to-human connection rather than replace it. </figure> <figcaption> <strong>Jessica Carstens</strong>Cartelligent vice president of operations </figcaption> <i class="icon" data-icon="z"></i> </div> </blockquote> <p>Cartelligent's business model depends heavily on personal relationships and consultative customer service. While the company could have viewed automation primarily as a cost-cutting exercise, Carstens sees a different role for the technology.</p> <p>"Our company is specifically all about a human-to-human connection," she said. "We're using this AI tool to enhance that human-to-human connection rather than replace it."</p> <p>As enterprises continue&nbsp;searching&nbsp;for practical AI deployments that&nbsp;produce&nbsp;measurable results, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/della-pretzer-b2a7714_cartelligenta-california-based-car-buying-share-7467559086792835072-MMPk/" rel="noopener">Cartelligent's experience</a> highlights an emerging reality: Some of the most effective&nbsp;applications of AI&nbsp;may not remove people from customer interactions,&nbsp;but instead ensure customers reach the right people faster.</p> <p><i>Moshe Beauford is a writer with more than a decade of experience covering enterprise technology, including AI, unified communications and customer experience.</i></p> </section> A car broker service deployed RingCentral AI to analyze incoming caller intent and route buyers to the appropriate team member, which reduces missed sales opportunities. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/customer_service03.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/feature/Cartelligent-uses-AI-to-connect-buyers-with-sales-experts Thu, 25 Jun 2026 11:31:00 GMT <p>Evolving its customer service AI offering, Salesforce plans to release Agentforce Help Agent next month.</p> <p>Help Agent commingles training on a user's own Agentforce Service (formerly <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/definition/Salesforce-Service-Cloud">Service Cloud</a>) data with learnings from Salesforce's customer service agent that powers Help.Salesforce.com. It has conducted more than 4.5 million conversations since its launch in October 2024; Salesforce claims its AI agent autonomously solves roughly two-thirds of customer issues at its help site.</p> <p>The agent comes with prepackaged actions and case management. It enables agent communications across numerous channels, all accessible from a single dashboard, including voice, web and text messaging. Another channel is an updated Agentforce Customer Service portal that personalizes experiences to customers' questions.</p> <p>Agentforce Help Agent also includes a testing tool that previews how the agent will answer queries.</p> <p>As Salesforce built out Agentforce during the last two years, the company gathered intelligence on what makes a more straightforward agent deployment through its own rollouts and those at customer sites. The upshot? Rather than prescriptively telling customers how to launch agents, Salesforce needed to simplify implementations by giving them prepackaged, ready-to-use agents, said Rebecca Wettemann, founder of Valoir, an independent research firm.</p> <p>"This is about enabling customers to get up and running more quickly," Wettemann said. "Salesforce has done the heavy lifting for [users] on things like when to use declarative workflow versus LLM calls."</p> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/salesforce_help_agent_setup-f.jpg"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/salesforce_help_agent_setup-f_mobile.jpg" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/salesforce_help_agent_setup-f_mobile.jpg 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/salesforce_help_agent_setup-f.jpg 1280w" alt="Salesforce Agentforce Help Agent customer service AI voice configurator screenshot" data-credit="Salesforce" height="364" width="560"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>The Help Agent comes with plain-language configuration tools to set up customer service AI. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> <p>While Agentforce Service customers are interested in Agentforce, they are still in the exploratory stages. One of them, PenFed Credit Union, has focused on automating specific workflows to enable agents to retrieve customer data faster than humans can look it up -- also streamlining documentation processes for loan applicants and officers.</p> <p>At this point, PenFed's agents are mostly being tested and used by employees, and they're focused on aggregating information more than taking action autonomously, said Nicole LaCamp, senior vice president of platform strategy and engineering at the credit union.</p> <p>The ultimate goal is to incorporate agents in its next generation of “<a href="https://personetics.com/blog-what-is-cognitive-banking/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">cognitive banking</a>," a broader banking trend in which apps dashboard personalizes financial data for the customer and makes recommendations on possible next actions.</p> <p>LaCamp believes that LLMs will eventually help customers consolidate the data across disparate systems and uncover trends such as duplicate transactions or subscriptions and other helpful personal-finance analysis that they can only do manually now.</p> <p>"In terms of being able to take a lot of unstructured data, look at it differently, and provide more proactive information -- that's where I think generative AI sits in that cognitive banking journey," LaCamp said.</p> <div class="youtube-iframe-container"> <iframe id="ytplayer-0" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4ZR_ZEdBzn8?autoplay=0&amp;modestbranding=1&amp;rel=0&amp;widget_referrer=null&amp;enablejsapi=1&amp;origin=https://www.techtarget.com" type="text/html" height="360" width="640" frameborder="0"></iframe> </div> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="New pricing to come"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>New pricing to come</h2> <p>Salesforce <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/opinion/ITs-budgetary-nightmare-Tech-buyers-face-AI-pricing-variance">joins fellow SaaS CX vendors</a>, including Pegasystems, HubSpot and Zendesk, in adopting outcomes-based pricing, which charges users when AI resolves a customer case. They will go into effect next month, along with the release of Agentforce Help Agent. Salesforce also <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/366644421/Salesforce-plans-to-acquire-Fin-agentic-customer-service-AI">acquired Fin </a>earlier this month, which includes features and analytics that Salesforce plans to integrate into future iterations of Agentforce Service once the deal closes.</p> <p>Salesforce calls its pricing model "pay-per-resolution," which doesn't meter customer interactions with AI agents if a conversation is abandoned, escalated to a human, or the customer gives negative feedback.</p> <p>Kishan Chetan, executive vice president and general manager of Agentforce Service, points out that Salesforce can measure outcomes because it has insight into both the human and AI sides of conversations. Customers had been asking for pricing tied to business metrics rather than to the consumption of AI credits or tokens.</p> <p>But there's always a learning curve to new pricing models.</p> <p>"The whole thing is predicated on the fact that you can essentially answer more questions than you ever did before to the customer's satisfaction," Chetan said. "Conceptually -- and from a business goals perspective -- everybody gets it. They know that doing more resolutions drives customer satisfaction. So as long as we explain very clearly what constitutes a 'resolution'…they get it."</p> <p>His colleague, Prasad Raje, senior vice president of product management for Agentforce Service, said that Salesforce's service-oriented customer advisory board influenced the pricing model.</p> <p>"We are aligned with our customers' business goals," Raje said. "If there is no need for a human escalation, that's a clear signal that the agent has done the job. If there is a need for human escalation, that means our customer is going to expend the cost of the human handling that call -- and we don't get paid."</p> <p><em>Don Fluckinger is a seasoned B2B technology journalist with more than 30 years of experience specializing in enterprise IT, digital experience and content management. As a senior news writer at Informa TechTarget, he delivers award-winning analysis that helps IT and business leaders navigate complex technologies to enhance customer and employee experiences. Got a tip?</em>&nbsp;<em><a href="mailto:don.fluckinger@informatechtarget.com?subject=Tip%20from%20article" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Email him</a>.</em></p> </section> Salesforce also becomes the latest CX tech vendor to try its hand at outcomes-based pricing. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/chatbot_g1273438441.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/366644924/Salesforce-productizes-its-own-customer-service-AI-agent-for-users Thu, 25 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT <p>Making decisions based on <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/definition/consumer-data">customer data </a>can help customer experience teams understand market trends, customer needs and pain points that affect the customer experience.</p> <p>One challenge in customer data collection is ensuring that the methods and types of data collected comply with applicable privacy laws, industry requirements and internal data governance policies. The best-known example is the European Union's <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/General-Data-Protection-Regulation-GDPR">GDPR</a>, but organizations might also need to account for U.S. state privacy laws, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/definition/California-Consumer-Privacy-Act-CCPA">CCPA</a>) and California Privacy Rights Act, Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act and Colorado Privacy Act, among others.</p> <p>Privacy requirements do not prevent organizations from collecting useful customer data. However, they do require organizations to be transparent with customers, collect only what they need, protect the data they collect and give customers appropriate notice, choice and control.</p> <p>Learn about seven ways to collect customer data while reducing privacy and compliance risk.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="1. Customer surveys"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>1. Customer surveys</h2> <p>Perhaps the best way to stay compliant is to conduct no-obligation surveys throughout the customer journey. Plenty of customers are willing to share their opinions on purchase decisions, product and service fulfillment procedures and other feedback that CX teams can combine with other surveys. Then, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/7-key-customer-experience-metrics-to-measure">teams can analyze the data</a> to better plan their marketing strategies and sales tactics, and to streamline problematic processes.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="2. Transactional data"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>2. Transactional data</h2> <p>Data collected from sales at the point of sale is known as <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/transactional-data">transactional data</a>, which can include transaction dates, times, locations, products or services purchased, purchase history and payment methods.</p> <p>Then, CX teams can use this data to determine the following:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li>Success or failure of a particular marketing campaign.</li> <li>Shopping trends.</li> <li>Potential campaigns that might be successful in the future.</li> <li>The likelihood of a customer returning.</li> </ul> <p>To reduce <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Top-customer-data-privacy-best-practices">compliance risk when collecting transactional data</a>, CX teams should collect only the information they need for a specific business purpose and avoid storing unnecessary personal or payment details. When possible, organizations should aggregate, anonymize or de-identify transactional data before using it for analysis. They should also limit access to the data and protect it according to internal security and privacy policies.</p> <figure class="main-article-image half-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/custex- collect_customer_data.png"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/custex- collect_customer_data_half_column_mobile.png" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/custex- collect_customer_data_half_column_mobile.png 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/custex- collect_customer_data.png 1280w" alt="Chart listing ways to collect customer data, including surveys, transactional data, web tracking, social media, CRM data and chatbots." height="338" width="279"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>Many customer data collection methods, such as cookies, website tracking, CRM data and social media analytics, require clear disclosure and appropriate privacy controls. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="3. Web tracking"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>3. Web tracking</h2> <p>Organizations that conduct business over websites can collect and analyze data using a number of tracking tools. Understanding how customers interact with a website can highlight what customers want, so CX teams can refine the website layout, content and purchasing methods to better attract prospects and cut down on cart abandonment rates.</p> <p>Businesses should be careful about what website data they collect and whether the data falls under <a href="https://iapp.org/resources/article/us-state-privacy-legislation-tracker">privacy laws</a> such as GDPR, CCPA or other state privacy laws. In many cases, websites that use cookies, pixels or similar tracking technologies must disclose those practices and give users appropriate notice and choices before collecting or sharing certain types of data.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="4. Opt-in digital newsletters and blogs"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>4. Opt-in digital newsletters and blogs</h2> <p>Many organizations stay in the minds of customers because they offer digital newsletters and walled blog content that use an opt-in, opt-out process. These methods benefit both businesses and customers, as they offer useful information, discounts and other incentives to customers while providing a wealth of user data for the business.</p> <p>In many cases, customers are willing to provide their information if the content or discounts entice them. From a business perspective, the newsletters, blogs and other related incentives are worth the time and money spent to engage a loyal customer base.</p> <div class="youtube-iframe-container"> <iframe id="ytplayer-0" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Lb6Gi6IR-Kc?autoplay=0&amp;modestbranding=1&amp;rel=0&amp;widget_referrer=null&amp;enablejsapi=1&amp;origin=https://www.techtarget.com" type="text/html" height="360" width="640" frameborder="0"></iframe> </div> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="5. Social media"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>5. Social media</h2> <p>Social media can help brands engage and interact with existing and prospective customers. Popular platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram offer businesses built-in analytics tools and often provide a near-real-time <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/How-to-gather-and-evaluate-customer-sentiment">view of customer sentiment</a> and an audience's continuously evolving interests.</p> <p>Alternatively, CX teams can extract the data, place it into third-party tools and combine it with other forms of collected information for deeper inspection. When teams extract data from social media platforms, they must understand the business is responsible for keeping it safe and removing personal information that may lead to noncompliance.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="6. CRM data"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>6. CRM data</h2> <p>Most organizations rely on <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Understanding-the-3-types-of-CRM-systems">CRM tools</a> to help track interactions with current or future customers. CX teams must take great care to protect CRM databases, as they contain <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/answer/How-do-companies-protect-customer-data">customers' personal information</a>, including names, email addresses and phone numbers. These systems also store descriptive, qualitative and quantitative data, which helps visualize and quantify customer behavior and lifetime value estimates.</p> <blockquote class="main-article-pullquote"> <div class="main-article-pullquote-inner"> <figure> The key to compliance is not only to request customer consent when required, but also to explain what data is collected, why it is collected and how it will be used. </figure> <i class="icon" data-icon="z"></i> </div> </blockquote> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="7. Chatbots"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>7. Chatbots</h2> <p>As long as users grant consent and an organization's reasons for collecting the data are transparent, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/definition/chatbot">chatbots</a> can help businesses focus on the types of questions, concerns and problems that customers may experience.</p> <p>Whether a user requests specific information about a product or has questions or complaints regarding a pre- and post-sale experience, CX teams can use these data points to get either a high-level or granular view of what the customer wants.</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Customer data collection compliance checklist</h3> <p>Before collecting customer data, organizations should answer several questions:</p> <p>✓ What business purpose does this data support?</p> <p>✓ Is the organization collecting only the data it needs?</p> <p>✓ Has the organization disclosed the collection method clearly?</p> <p>✓ Does the customer need to provide consent or receive an opt-out option?</p> <p>✓ Is the data protected, access-controlled and retained only as long as necessary?</p> <p>✓ Can the organization honor customer privacy rights, such as access, deletion, correction or opt-out requests?</p> <p>✓ Are third-party tools, analytics platforms and AI services covered by appropriate privacy and security reviews?</p> <p>This checklist does not replace legal review, but it can help CX, marketing, IT and security teams identify privacy issues before customer data collection begins.</p> </div> </div> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Consent, transparency are key"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Consent, transparency are key</h2> <p>The key to compliance is not only to request customer consent when required, but also to explain what data is collected, why it is collected, how it will be used and how customers can exercise their privacy rights.</p> <p>Organizations should also practice <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/definition/data-minimization">data minimization</a> by collecting only the data they need for a specific purpose and retaining it only as long as necessary. Digital tools and AI-backed services can help organize, deduplicate, classify and remove personal information, but companies remain responsible for making sure those tools are used safely and in accordance with applicable privacy requirements.</p> <p><strong>Editor's note</strong>: <em>This article was updated to improve clarity and include current customer data privacy and compliance considerations. </em></p> <p><span style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><em>Andrew Froehlich is founder of InfraMomentum, an enterprise IT research and analyst firm, and president of West Gate Networks, an IT consulting company. He has been involved in enterprise IT for more than 20 years.</em></span></p> </section> Customer data can improve CX, marketing and sales decisions, but organizations must collect it transparently, protect it and follow applicable privacy laws. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/legal_g1134366930.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Ways-to-collect-customer-data-that-keep-you-compliant Thu, 18 Jun 2026 11:44:00 GMT <p>Adobe previewed many marketing and creative tools this week ahead of next week's Cannes Lions International Festival in Cannes, France.</p> <p>Marketers waiting to see details on how the <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/366634642/Adobe-bolsters-AI-SEO-with-planned-19B-Semrush-acquisition">Semrush acquisition</a> would unfold at Adobe got their answer: Semrush will be integrated with Adobe's <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/366626187/Adobe-takes-on-AI-search-optimization-with-LLM-Optimizer">LLM Optimizer</a> as a new product called Brand Visibility, coming soon. But it will also remain a standalone product for Semrush users who have built marketing workflows around it.</p> <p>Brand Visibility sits in the Adobe stack alongside other apps such as <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/366620882/Adobe-joins-agentic-AI-fray-with-platform-pre-built-agents">Brand Concierge</a>, Experience Manager and Sites Optimizer. It can suggest content to broaden a company's authority in LLM search and offers benchmarking tools to measure how adding or changing content affects AI search results.</p> <p>While SEO and answer engine optimization are distinctly separate sciences -- or arts, depending on your perspective -- they dovetail and are necessary to the marketer's mix. Brand Visibility monitors and analyzes users' mentions across traditional and AI search to figure out how to make it all work together, said Loni Stark, vice president of strategy and product at Adobe.</p> <p>"A lot still happens in SEO -- AI is one of the biggest users of search, as you see when you type into chat," Stark said. "Another is the question of what people are really typing into ChatGPT? What are people really asking? You know what you're asking, I know what I'm asking, but how do brands know what the collective is asking, and what are the blind spots?"</p> <p>Brand Visibility was one of the fastest integrations of an Adobe acquisition ever, Stark said. Several factors made it happen, including the current state of cloud interoperability through APIs. Also, Adobe prioritized productizing Semrush to satisfy immediate user needs for more sophisticated answer engine optimization tools in a rapidly evolving market. Another factor was the use of new AI coding tools that sped up the typical development cycle.</p> <p>Adobe customers have "held Adobe's feet to the fire" for how long it has taken for past acquisitions to be natively integrated into the company's marketing suite, said Liz Miller, analyst at Constellation Research. But Adobe Experience Platform's modern architecture and Adobe Experience Manager's headless architecture capabilities likely made this integration -- and will make future acquisitions -- faster.</p> <p>Semrush adds outside data and competitive analysis from 28 billion keywords and 289 million prompts to a brand's own website traffic analysis in LLM Optimizer. Together, the two promise to paint a more complete picture to drive a user's marketing decisions.</p> <p>"The breadth of Semrush analytics -- capable of delivering a view of how brand content and conversations appear across the entirety of marketing's paid, earned and owned landscape -- [is] now side-by-side with LLM Optimizer," Miller said. "The [user's] path from identifying insights, getting recommendations and then taking action is accelerated and, eventually, automated."</p> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/adobe_bv-f.jpg"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/adobe_bv-f_mobile.jpg" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/adobe_bv-f_mobile.jpg 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/adobe_bv-f.jpg 1280w" alt="Adobe Brand Visibility answer engine optimization screenshot" data-credit="Adobe" height="255" width="559"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>Adobe Brand Visibility measure AI answer engine optimization questions by, among other things, breaking down activity on AI search sites. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Creative AI, GenStudio tools to come"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Creative AI, GenStudio tools to come</h2> <p>To act on all that fresh analysis from AI and traditional search, Adobe added AI tools to generate and deploy new content within GenStudio, its content supply chain management suite. Included among the new features is Simulated Audience, a synthetic-data tool for testing campaign ideas, in the vein of other marketing tools such as <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/366640444/Qualtrics-expands-synthetic-research-marketing-testing-tech">those from Qualtrics</a>.</p> <p>A new <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/tip/How-the-Model-Context-Protocol-simplifies-AI-development">MCP integration</a> in Adobe Workfront connects to LLMs, allowing marketers to assign tasks, check project status, and manage campaign activities using agent-based workflows. Firefly Graph for Enterprise combines Adobe and third-party AI models to automate content creation.</p> <p>GenStudio for Performance Marketing adds Connected TV (CTV) as a new channel. Its AI analyzes marketing efforts across paid social media, email, display advertising and CTV. The Ad Recommendations feature provides suggestions on which ads to update, expand or optimize; another related feature, Next Best Creative, enables automatic generation of the next advertising or marketing asset based on those currently getting the best response.</p> <p>Adobe also showed numerous updates to its tools on the Creative Cloud side in the run-up to <a target="_blank" href="https://www.canneslions.com/" rel="noopener">Cannes</a>.</p> <p>Creative Agent, deployed in apps such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Frame.io, InDesign and others, automates complex workflows and can quickly perform tasks such as iterating and creating product reels, brand kits, storyboards and other collateral. The agent can work off standardized elements and within style guidelines to keep creatives and marketers from straying outside of brand rules.</p> <p>Adobe will make Creative Cloud apps -- using Firefly and other models -- usable from prompts within AI tools such as Anthropic's Claude, Microsoft Copilot and OpenAI's ChatGPT, with Google Gemini to come. That is notable, as Anthropic emerged as a competitor earlier this year with a preview of <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/366642473/As-Claude-Design-debuts-Adobe-users-and-buyers-shrug">Claude Design</a>, an app that creates editable visual content from an AI prompt.</p> <p><em>Don Fluckinger is a seasoned B2B technology journalist with more than 30 years of experience specializing in enterprise IT, digital experience and content management. As a senior news writer at Informa TechTarget, he delivers award-winning analysis that helps IT and business leaders navigate complex technologies to enhance customer and employee experiences. Got a tip? </em><a target="_blank" href="mailto:don.fluckinger@informatechtarget.com?subject=Tip%20from%20article" rel="noopener"><em>Email him</em></a><em>.</em>&nbsp;</p> </section> Semrush integration with LLM Optimizer is quickly productized; Creative Agent propagates Adobe app functionality and AI chat interfaces such as ChatGPT, Copilot and Claude. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/telecommunications_g1196912050.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/366644874/Adobe-previews-answer-engine-optimization-agentic-AI-creative-tools Thu, 18 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT <p>Some tech acquisitions are purely for the talent. Some are for the customer list. Others are for technology. With a planned acquisition of Fin's customer service AI agents and underlying platform, Salesforce appears to have coveted all three to augment its flagship Agentforce AI offering.</p> <p>The deal is expected to close sometime in Salesforce's fiscal 2027 fourth quarter, which runs from November 1, 2026, through January 31, 2027. The deal is worth approximately $3.6 billion, Salesforce said.</p> <p>Fin specializes in autonomous AI agents that run on Apex, a proprietary AI model designed for customer service. Its Intercom platform can resolve customer service issues across a host of channels, including live chat, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Discord, email and phone. It is generally perceived as a market leader among customer service users. Salesforce Service Cloud, where the Fin agents would be deployed if the merger goes through, accounts for the most revenue across all Salesforce clouds.</p> <p>Salesforce has told customers repeatedly over the last two years that Agentforce makes it easy to deploy autonomous AI agents within its platform, said Rebecca Wettemann, founder of Valoir, an independent research firm. Users have found that setting up agentic AI in general -- regardless of vendor -- is not so easy. The Fin acquisition will likely help get customers up and running more quickly.</p> <p>"Service Cloud probably has the most agents running out of any Salesforce cloud, but they still need to do more to drive user adoption," Wettemann said. "This is a great way to acquire a customer base, as well as acquire what are some pretty well-thought-out prebuilt agents that customers can use."</p> <p>Fin, from its start in 2011 up until last month, was known as Intercom. The old name was "baggage," co-founder and CEO Eoghan McCabe said <a target="_blank" href="https://www.intercom.com/blog/today-intercom-becomes-fin/" rel="noopener">in a blog post</a> announcing the new name. Its <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/definition/omnichannel">omnichannel</a> platform retains the Intercom name.</p> <p>Among Fin's claimed 30,000 customers are many tech companies that use Fin agents or the Intercom platform for their customer service operations. The short list includes Anthropic, Perplexity, Monday.com, Crypto.com, Autodesk, Toast and Amazon.</p> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/benioff_dreamforce_2025-f.jpg"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/benioff_dreamforce_2025-f_mobile.jpg" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/benioff_dreamforce_2025-f_mobile.jpg 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/benioff_dreamforce_2025-f.jpg 1280w" alt="Photo of Marc Benioff at Dreamforce" data-credit="Don Fluckinger" height="420" width="560"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff (shown here at Dreamforce 2025) looks to make some hay for Service Cloud with a proposed Fin acquisition. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Salesforce back on acquisition spree"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Salesforce back on acquisition spree</h2> <p>While Fin seems a promising addition to the Salesforce fold for its customer base, its technology platform and its stable of talent -- McCabe will continue to lead Fin within Salesforce, and co-founder Des Traynor will head R&amp;D -- it isn't the only company Salesforce has recently targeted.</p> <p>Salesforce, of course, has a long acquisitions history over its nearly three decades; Slack ($27.7 billion) and Tableau ($15.7 billion) rank among the largest. But so far in the 2020s, it has <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/365530164/Salesforce-upheaval-likely-as-Elliott-Management-moves-in">grappled with activist investors</a> who challenged Salesforce's growth-through-acquisition strategy.</p> <p>But after reaching a de facto truce with the activists, Salesforce has recently returned to its acquisitive ways. In the last year, it has bought companies to build out its data, content, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/366639518/Salesforce-acquisition-of-Momentum-to-boost-sales-functions">revenue management</a> and agentic AI capabilities.</p> <p>Recent highlights include data-management titan Informatica in 2025 and two earlier this month: Composable content management platform Contentful and M3ter, which enables the monitoring and billing of consumption-based services.</p> <p><em>Don Fluckinger is a seasoned B2B technology journalist with more than 30 years of experience specializing in enterprise IT, digital experience and content management. As a senior news writer at Informa TechTarget, he delivers award-winning analysis that helps IT and business leaders navigate complex technologies to enhance customer and employee experiences. Got a tip?</em> <a href="mailto:don.fluckinger@informatechtarget.com?subject=Tip%20from%20article" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><em>Email him</em></a>.</p> </section> Irish CX tech company Fin, long known as Intercom until a rebrand last month, promises to jump-start Salesforce's agentic customer service business. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/competition_a164834714.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/366644421/Salesforce-plans-to-acquire-Fin-agentic-customer-service-AI Tue, 16 Jun 2026 13:48:00 GMT <p>Adobe released Coworker, a "super agent" for marketing that can manage a stable of task-based agents to define campaigns guided by analytics data and then design, tee up, adjust and -- with human approvals -- launch them. All, Adobe claims, on the fly.</p> <p>Not to be confused with Adobe Agent Orchestrator, Coworker is a set of agents built with the same <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/366641743/Adobe-defines-its-AI-powered-customer-experience-platform">CX Enterprise</a> <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchapparchitecture/tip/Harness-engineering-Agent-harnesses-as-critical-infrastructure">agent harness</a>. The harness adds deterministic business rules to probabilistic workflows -- such as gathering required approvals, deploying agentic skills (reusable instruction sets that teach AI the order of operations), and orchestrating agents from multiple vendors.</p> <p>Agent harnesses unlock the potential for more sophisticated workflows than task-based agents can, said Daniel Sheinberg, senior director of product management for Adobe Experience Cloud.</p> <p>"You can just say to the orchestration layer or the harness, 'Here are all the APIs and the tools that are available to you, and on the fly you can figure out these agentic workflows,'" Sheinberg said. "What's happening with these harnesses is, yes, you can give it prebuilt agents, but you can also just expose it to a library of skills, and it will figure out how to use these skills to get what you want done."</p> <p>Coworker agents serve as the manager of Adobe tools -- such as Audience Agent and Journey Agent -- as well as agents from other tools that plumb outside data sources. <br><br>Another agent, Coworker Chat, executes complex edits in Creative Cloud apps like Photoshop and Illustrator from plain-language prompts.</p> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/adobe_coworker-f.jpg"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/adobe_coworker-f_mobile.jpg" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/adobe_coworker-f_mobile.jpg 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/adobe_coworker-f.jpg 1280w" alt="Adobe Coworker agent orchestration screenshot" height="266" width="559"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>Adobe Coworker is an agent orchestration tool that can put together task-based agents into marketing workflows. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Where A2A, MCP come in"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Where A2A, MCP come in</h2> <p>Coworker is Adobe's answer to agent management systems such as ServiceNow's AI Control Tower, albeit without an <a target="_blank" href="https://newsroom.servicenow.com/press-releases/details/2026/ServiceNow-expands-AI-Control-Tower-to-discover-observe-govern-secure-and-measure-AI-deployed-across-any-system-in-the-enterprise/default.aspx" rel="noopener">agentic "kill switch</a>," said Liz Miller, analyst at Constellation Research.</p> <p>Adobe customers hoping to automate, for example, the process of generating social media posts based on fresh website content, don't just need support for model context protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) agentic interoperability standards, she said. They need tools customized to their marketing work, because many processes are fraught with complications when humans do them -- and the agents need to fix that, not add to the complexity.</p> <p>Coworker helps marketers tap into those A2A and MCP standards by embedding them into familiar, everyday marketing workflows, Miller said. These workflows can span creative processes, deployment and execution, guided by analytics and audience data along the way.</p> <p>"We've got an MCP server, they've got a server. I'm looking at A2A, you're looking at A2A. Where do I actually start connecting these things?" Miller said. "It's one thing to be able to say, 'We are looking at protocols that enable one agent to hand off to another agent.' It's completely another thing to actually attribute that to a work product important to a marketer."</p> <p>Users of agentic AI in general -- not just Adobe's -- are discovering that <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/tip/AI-agents-are-running-wild-Secure-the-reasoning-layer-now">security and governance are crucial elements</a> to keeping agentic AI workflows in check. As agents proliferate in marketing, automations that incorporate agents, tap MCP servers and autonomously generate content or take other actions need to stick to guardrails.</p> <p>Coworker also has workflow templates that govern individual use cases, such as campaign creation <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/answer/What-are-the-different-types-of-marketing-personalization">or retargeting</a>, to keep them consistent across an enterprise's marketing operations, Sheinberg said.</p> <p>Coworker, built on <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchapparchitecture/tip/Microservices-vs-headless-architecture-A-brief-breakdown">headless architecture</a>, is available standalone or as an add-on to existing Adobe stacks. Adobe builds a custom interface for each brand using it. A self-service offering is available for smaller business or marketing departments.</p> <p><i>Don Fluckinger is a seasoned B2B technology journalist with more than 30 years of experience specializing in enterprise IT, digital experience and content management. As a senior news writer at Informa TechTarget, he delivers award-winning analysis that helps IT and business leaders navigate complex technologies to enhance customer and employee experiences. Got a tip? </i><a target="_blank" href="mailto:don.fluckinger@informatechtarget.com?subject=Tip%20from%20article" rel="noopener"><i>Email him</i></a>.</p> </section> Meet "Coworker," Adobe's answer to multi-agentic marketing workflows. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/machine_learning_g1184268577.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/366644437/Adobe-releases-Coworker-marketing-orchestration-super-agent Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:29:00 GMT <p>The term <i>buying committee</i> may sound formal, but it reflects how complex things have become for CX leaders as they try to keep pace with fast-changing technology.</p> <p>Not long ago, when contact centers were on-premises, hardware-based systems, they operated separately from the rest of the organization. The technologies were largely purpose-built with complex integrations, and buying decisions were primarily made <i>by</i> contact center leaders, and <i>for </i>the contact center.</p> <p>As technology evolved -- especially the cloud and now AI -- the contact center has become more <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Contact-center-back-end-integrations-drive-revenue-growth">symbiotic with the rest of the organization</a>. As a result, buying decisions can no longer be made in isolation, solely with the needs of the contact center in mind.</p> <p>Equally important, the business focus has shifted from contact center to customer experience (CX), where delivering great CX goes beyond what happens in the contact center. Furthermore, with AI, all the new data coming from CX interactions is of <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Customer-interaction-analytics-spurs-better-business-results">value to many parts of the organization</a>, and not just the contact center.</p> <p>For these reasons -- and others -- CX and contact center leaders can no longer be the only stakeholders when making CX technology buying decisions. These developments have sparked a committee-based approach that reflects the breadth of needs across the organization that will be affected by the adoption of new technology.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Who is on the CX buying committee?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Who is on the CX buying committee?</h2> <p>The answer to this question largely depends on how far the business has shifted its paradigm from customer service to customer experience. Technology-wise, a good indicator is how extensively the cloud has been adopted, as this is the key enabler for integration among various platforms across the organization.</p> <p>More recently, another signpost would be AI adoption, since these new technologies are driving the creation of new CX data streams and the <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/How-AI-inferred-sentiment-analysis-unlocks-customer-insights">analytics to extract valuable data</a> for inside and outside the contact center.</p> <p>If organizations are far down these paths, CX data has a greater chance to affect operations across the business. Even if organizations are modestly advanced here, CX buying committees would typically include the following business functions and stakeholders:&nbsp;</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li><b>Contact center and CX leader.</b> This person would be the prime advocate for the buying strategy since the main focus for new technology is <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/feature/The-ultimate-guide-to-contact-center-modernization">contact center modernization</a>.</li> <li><b>IT leader.</b> Organizations need to consider many factors when integrating new tech with existing contact centers and other platforms across the company.</li> <li><b>Executive leader.</b> Often, CX is a top-down, strategic imperative. Executive input is needed to ensure new investment aligns with brand strategy, business priorities and AI plans.</li> <li><b>Finance leader.</b> This stakeholder is the economic buyer and needs to see a clear business case, <a target="_blank" href="https://watermarkconsult.net/blog/2026/04/12/customer-experience-roi-study/" rel="noopener">ROI plan</a> and a credible risk-reward strategy.</li> <li><b>Line-of-business leaders.</b> These stakeholders typically include marketing and sales departments as their customer interactions affect CX in different ways than the contact center. With AI, lines of business are meshing in new ways. And, more than ever, these departments rely on customer data that flows through the contact center.</li> <li><b>Others.</b> In more advanced scenarios, other stakeholders in the CX buying decision would include the following: <ul style="list-style-type: circle;" class="default-list"> <li>Contact center end users to ensure adoption.</li> <li>Legal department for compliance.</li> <li>AI governance and privacy.</li> <li>Analytics teams for quality assurance and integration with business intelligence databases.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="How CX buying committees make decisions"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>How CX buying committees make decisions</h2> <p>By their nature, committees decide on a consensus basis. Unlike earlier times, when contact center leaders would make buying decisions independently, today's technologies require a more holistic approach. The fundamental <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/definition/contact-center">definition of the contact center</a> is changing to reflect CX evolution and how AI makes data more valuable for businesses.</p> <blockquote class="main-article-pullquote"> <div class="main-article-pullquote-inner"> <figure> Contact center technology buying decisions must now be made in a broader context. </figure> <i class="icon" data-icon="z"></i> </div> </blockquote> <p>All these developments highlight a new reality where contact center technology decisions must be made in a broader context. Contact center and CX leaders have a clear vision for these new technologies. For that reason, they're still in a strong position to drive these investment decisions. However, in some cases, that vision may be lacking, and other departments may know what's best for the business. As such, there will not always be a consensus based on equal input from all.</p> <p>Aside from this dynamic, each stakeholder will have different priorities and expectations from new technology investments. With more stakeholders, the committee will have a harder time pleasing everyone, and the decision-making process will be longer. In cases where a fair balance cannot be met, some external arbitration may be needed.</p> <p>Each CX buying situation may be different. But all these facets are relevant to vendors when trying to close a deal. The merits of the technology are not enough in today's market. Perhaps just as important is understanding how buying decisions are made. To help the buyer reach consensus, a different value proposition is needed for each stakeholder -- and this is why understanding the committee approach is critical for CX vendors.</p> <p><i>Jon Arnold is principal of J Arnold &amp; Associates, an independent analyst providing thought leadership and go-to-market counsel with a focus on the business-level effect of communications technology on digital transformation.</i></p> </section> CX data is now more integrated with other departments. As a result, CX tech buying decisions include more stakeholders. Vendors need to understand this dynamic. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/money_g1222040206.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Understanding-CX-buying-committees-and-decision-dynamics Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:20:00 GMT <p>As with many teams in an organization, customer experience teams have always been at the mercy of someone else's schedule, waiting for IT to clear a backlog, for a vendor to ship a roadmap item or for a developer to free up time. Vibe coding promises to break that pattern. Instead of filing a ticket and waiting, CX professionals could describe what they want in plain language, and an AI tool could generate working software in return.</p> <p>It sounds like a genuine shift in who gets to build. But is there really a story here for CX, or does vibe coding fall apart the moment it meets enterprise data, compliance and scale?</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="What is vibe coding?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>What is vibe coding?</h2> <p>Vibe coding is <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/feature/Vibe-coding-What-IT-leaders-need-to-know">prompt-driven software development</a>. A person describes the intended behavior in natural language, an AI model generates the code, and the person iterates by describing changes rather than editing code by hand.&nbsp;</p> <p>The defining trait is the human steering the work may never read or understand what the model produces. The user judges the result by whether it appears to work. That separates it from the low-code and no-code tools many CX teams use, such as Microsoft Power Platform or OutSystems. Those platforms can constrain users inside vendor-designed guardrails.</p> <p>Vibe coding is open-ended and removes the safety net of a fixed component set. The output is real code, with all <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/tip/Vibe-coding-security-risks-and-how-to-mitigate-them">the power and risk that implies</a>.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Where vibe coding fits in CX"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Where vibe coding fits in CX</h2> <p>The realistic CX and vibe coding opportunities cluster around fast, low-stakes, internal work. With help from vibe coding, organizations could take on the following CX projects.</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li><b>Prototyping. </b>Spin up a rough UI or journey mock-up to pressure-test an idea before committing engineering resources.</li> <li><b>Internal micro-tools. </b>Quick dashboards, one-off data reformatting, a widget that saves agents a few clicks.</li> <li><b>Personalization experiments. </b>Draft the logic behind an offer or content variant to test the concept before anyone productionizes it.</li> </ul> <p>The common thread among these examples is the more important element: These are throwaway-or-validate tasks, internal-facing and reversible. They're a long way from production systems handling live interactions and sensitive data.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Should enterprises use vibe coding in CX?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Should enterprises use vibe coding in CX?</h2> <p>So, the question is: Would, or rather, should enterprises use vibe-coded tools? At this point -- bearing in mind we're still in the early stages of what vibe coding can achieve -- the answer is selectively, inside guardrails and not as a free-for-all.</p> <p><a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/feature/vibe-coding-security-crisis-CIOs-cant-ignore">The friction is well-documented</a>. Scans of publicly deployed vibe-coded applications have found critical vulnerabilities, exposed API keys and personal data sitting in production. AI-generated code tends to prioritize making the feature work and treats security as an afterthought. For CX, which handles customer records under data-protection regulation, these security concerns are not a footnote.</p> <blockquote class="main-article-pullquote"> <div class="main-article-pullquote-inner"> <figure> Used carelessly, vibe coding becomes shadow IT with a faster engine. </figure> <i class="icon" data-icon="z"></i> </div> </blockquote> <p>The other objections echo the first wave of <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/shadow-IT-shadow-information-technology">shadow IT</a>: no audit trail, no clear ownership and risky integration with regulated systems of record like CRM or the contact center. The realistic landing spot is sandboxed environments and sanctioned platforms that wrap vibe coding in the controls IT already depends on. Used that way, enterprises will employ it. Used carelessly, it becomes shadow IT with a faster engine.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="What the C-suite should consider"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>What the C-suite should consider</h2> <p>When considering to vibe or not, CX leaders should weigh the pros and cons.</p> <p><strong>Here are some benefits of vibe coding in CX:</strong></p> <ul class="default-list"> <li>Faster validation.</li> <li>Less backlog dependency.</li> <li>Tighter alignment between the people who understand customers and what gets built.</li> <li>Cheap experimentation.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Here are the drawbacks:</strong></p> <ul class="default-list"> <li>Compliance exposure.</li> <li>Hidden cost of ownership in maintenance and technical debt.</li> <li>Accountability gaps: "The AI wrote it" is not an answer a board of directors will accept.</li> </ul> <p>The reconciliation is to right-size the ambition. Vibe coding, at this stage, belongs in CX as a prototyping capability inside governed boundaries -- not as a replacement for engineering. Its value sits at the front of the build cycle, not at the end where systems touch real customers. Give teams a sandbox, draw a clear line between experiment and production, and you <a target="_blank" href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/vibe-coding-momentum-opportunity-faster-cx-innovation-yasin-nizami-onokf/" rel="noopener">capture the speed</a> without inheriting the risk.&nbsp;</p> <p><i>Robert Peledie is an enterprise architect, solution architect and director of CRM consultancy 365Knowledge Ltd. He has several years of consulting experience in global organizations.</i></p> </section> CX vibe coding should be a safe sandbox play that looks to quicken internal tasks. For now, the security risks are too great for production-level customer interactions. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/code_g1196680867.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Vibe-coding-in-CX-Benefits-risks-and-real-world-uses Tue, 09 Jun 2026 14:43:00 GMT <p>Pegasystems continues to build its product line with an eye toward ushering its risk-averse, compliance-heavy customers in verticals such as banking and insurance into the agentic AI era.</p> <p>The company previewed many new tools slated for release in the third quarter of this year as part of its Pega Infinity '26 update. Its Blueprint agent builder enables line-of-business users to design their own agents with a combination of deterministic business rules and probabilistic generative AI.</p> <p>Blueprint-designed agents will also be able to invoke <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/tip/Secure-MCP-servers-to-safeguard-AI-and-corporate-data">MCP servers</a> while still working within data governance rules. For users supporting agents built in other environments, MCP support will also open up data on the Pega platform to third-party agents from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, AWS and others while retaining governance policies.</p> <p>This is part of what Pegasystems calls the "de-risking" of putting AI agents into production.</p> <p>The Blueprint agent builder can assemble more critical elements of the supply chain for agents than AI alone can, said Predrag Jakovljevic, principal analyst at Technology Evaluation Centers. Blueprint steers the design of AI agents without an over-reliance on prompts, which can be ambiguous for agents. In effect, it adds structure to probabilistic workflows.</p> <p>"Without a supply chain foundation, AI fails," Jakovljevic said. "You must have not only correct data, but also the <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatamanagement/feature/Use-knowledge-graphs-with-databases-to-uncover-new-insights">semantic knowledge graph, ontology</a> and decisioning layer so that AI agents can work properly. And those things come from underlying SaaS and on-premises solutions."&nbsp;</p> <p>Moreover, Pegasystems plans to introduce Customer Engagement Studio, a marketing-centric front-end to its Customer Decision Hub. It promises to deploy agentic-powered marketing campaigns in minutes.</p> <p>Finally, Pegasystems will also change its AI pricing model from token-based to outcomes-based. Each "case," in the company's parlance -- a completed task from start to finish -- will incur charges. This is in line with several other customer experience vendors' current or future plans, including <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/opinion/ITs-budgetary-nightmare-Tech-buyers-face-AI-pricing-variance">HubSpot, Zendesk and Salesforce</a>.</p> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/pega_infinity_studio_screenshot-f.jpg"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/pega_infinity_studio_screenshot-f_mobile.jpg" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/pega_infinity_studio_screenshot-f_mobile.jpg 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/pega_infinity_studio_screenshot-f.jpg 1280w" alt="Pega Infinity '26 agent builder screen shot" data-credit="Pegasystems" height="298" width="560"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>The Pega Blueprint AI agent builder mixes deterministic workflows with plain-language app generation. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="SaaS vs. AI codebase"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>SaaS vs. AI codebase</h2> <p>Pegasystems has been around since 1983. Founder Alan Trefler has seen his company -- and its customers -- migrate to a cloud-based SaaS model over the decades. Now, the <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/news/366639662/SaaSpocalypse-Maybe-not-but-SaaS-applications-are-changing">"SaaSpocalypse,"</a> a scenario in which <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/feature/AI-disruption-How-CIOs-should-prepare-for-a-new-economy">SaaS companies are replaced</a> by LLM-powered coding agents writing custom software for individual companies, has been floated this year by pundits, Wall Street analysts and, allegedly, a few bleeding-edge startups attempting to power their businesses with it.</p> <p>SaaS vendors -- and their customers -- <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchhrsoftware/news/366640361/Workdays-new-old-CEO-reveals-Sana-agentic-AI-updates">are pushing back</a> on that idea. They're confident that their AI won't obsolete their platforms, and that users will not want to assume the liability for data security and governance tools built into established vendors' products.</p> <p>Agents built in SaaS platforms like Pega Infinity are also AI-coded -- or at least AI-assisted with plain-language prompts -- and SaaS companies themselves use AI tools such as Claude Code to author some of their products. But the SaaS world is betting that nobody will want to start from scratch with their IT stacks, especially large organizations, and they're looking to SaaS vendors to provide user-friendly environments for building agents and keeping them from running out of control.</p> <p>Trefler said that the structure of the Pega platform -- and how it is built on workflows -- will be key to his company's survival.</p> <p>"I believe workflows are going to be absolutely central, because they provide a deterministic way to get stuff done," Trefler said. "They can be informed by AI, and they also candidly let you see what's going on. I think we've got a very, very powerful positioning against the people who just say, 'I will generate huge amounts of sloppy code because Claude can spit it out.'"</p> <p>It's been widely reported that some customers of different technology vendors are taking a hard look at the returns -- or potential future returns -- of AI agents, now that pilots are moving into the launch phase and the real costs of building, launching, maintaining and paying LLM usage fees (or outcomes-based fees) are revealing themselves.</p> <p>Trefler said that agentic AI offers Pegasystems customers an easier path to doing what they were already doing.</p> <p>"We've been talking about the autonomous enterprise for many years," Trefler said. "[Now,] we've been able to marry our workflow engine with technologies like Blueprint, which enables you to reduce the effort and increase the speed to reimagine how your business should work. We are just hyper-powering something we've done for decades."</p> <p>Pegasystems previewed the new Pega Infinity '26 features and pricing model at its <a target="_blank" href="https://www.pega.com/events/pegaworld" rel="noopener">PegaWorld user conference</a> in Las Vegas this week.</p> <p><em>Don Fluckinger is a seasoned B2B technology journalist with more than 30 years of experience specializing in enterprise IT, digital experience and content management. As a senior news writer at Informa TechTarget, he delivers award-winning analysis that helps IT and business leaders navigate complex technologies to enhance customer and employee experiences. Got a tip? </em><a target="_blank" href="mailto:don.fluckinger@informatechtarget.com?subject=Tip%20from%20article" rel="noopener"><em>Email him</em></a><em>.</em>&nbsp;</p> </section> Pegasystems emphasizes "de-risking" agentic buildouts for its customers in regulated industries. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/ai_a377464305.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/366643870/Pegasystems-refines-Blueprint-agent-builder-expands-marketing-tools Mon, 08 Jun 2026 11:30:00 GMT 60 webmaster@techtarget.com