Big CX News from Microsoft, Five9, Salesforce, SAP & HubSpot

Unsurprisingly, Customer Contact Week has proven to be an incredibly busy time in the CX space.

We’ve seen Microsoft boasting a “copilot-first CCaaS solution, Five9 integrating Salesforce’s Einstein tool, an SAP acquisition, and HubSpot’s latest sensitive data capabilities.

Here are the extracts from some of our most popular news stories over the last seven days.

Microsoft has launched a “standalone” CCaaS solution: the Dynamics 365 Contact Center.

Generally available on July 1, 2024, the solution connects to a business’s existing CRM system and applies generative AI to “every” customer engagement channel.

In doing so, Microsoft labels its solution “Copilot-first”, with GenAI-fuelled use cases that support customers, agents, and other contact center users.

But it’s not all a Copilot story. Microsoft has added IVR tech from Nuance, intelligent unified routing, and real-time reporting to the platform.

Moreover, as Jeff Comstock, CVP of Dynamics 365 Customer Service, writes in a Dynamics blog post:

Dynamics 365 Contact Center is built natively on the Microsoft cloud to deliver extensive scalability and reliability across voice and digital channels, and routing, while at the same time allowing organizations to retain their existing investments in CRM or custom apps.

Yet, unsurprisingly, the emphasis is once again on Copilot and generative AI, with the tech giant promising to infuse the latter across every contact center workflow

That goes beyond communication channels to self-service, agent experience, and triaging – with the overarching goal of bolstering customer, employee, and business outcomes (Read on…).

Five9 has revealed that its latest release of Five9 for Service Cloud Voice with Partner Telephony will include Saleforce’s Einstein.

Einstein is a generative AI solution, designed by the CRM giant Salesforce to enhance customer interactions by creating intelligent, customised recommendations to service teams based on extensive datasets.

This product partnership represents the latest collaboration between the two customer experience (CX) providers and will strengthen Five9’s existing AI offering.

Dan Burkland, President, Five9, listed some of the benefits its customers can enjoy by incorporating Einstein: “Five9 understands the power of elevating the customer experience through innovative technology and seamless integrations.

Our collaboration with Salesforce pushes the boundaries of what is possible.

According to Five9, the combination of Einstein and Five9’s own set of AI solutions will help to improve CX, increase the understanding of operational health from a management perspective, and assist agents in providing better responses to customer requests.

Einstein AI will utilise Five9’s open APIs and Five9 TranscriptStream to find ways to offer agents real-time solutions via ‘Next Best Action’ guidance (Read on…).

SAP has announced it is acquiring leading digital adoption platform (DAP) leader, WalkMe.

The Executive and Supervisory Boards of SAP and the Board of Directors of WalkMe approved a transaction in which SAP will acquire WalkMe for $14.00 per share in an all-cash deal. This transaction values WalkMe at approximately $1.5 billion and represents a 45 percent premium over WalkMe’s closing share price on June 4, 2024.

The acquisition’s ambition is to enhance SAP’s Business Transformation Management portfolio, particularly its SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX solutions, and thus support customers in their transformation journeys.

Christian Klein, CEO and member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, said:

Applications, processes, data and people are the four key elements of a successful business transformation. By acquiring WalkMe, we are doubling down on the support we provide our end users, helping them to quickly adopt new solutions and features to get the maximum value out of their IT investments.

WalkMe’s solutions assist organisations in managing continuous technological changes by offering advanced guidance and automation features. These capabilities enable users to execute workflows seamlessly across various applications, leading to higher adoption rates of the underlying software and, consequently, driving greater value realisation.

The deal still needs to meet standard requirements, such as approval from WalkMe’s shareholders and regulatory bodies and is expected to be completed by the third quarter of 2024. SAP does not expect this acquisition to significantly affect its 2024 earnings (Read on…).

HubSpot has promised new data protection and compliance navigation capabilities for its Smart CRM users.

The enhancements are supported by “robust” security and privacy protection tools, which HubSpot claims will help to provide companies with a “complete view of the customer in one place.”

Users will be able to access the new features by activating the sensitive data settings within the HubSpot CRM portal. From there, users can select the type of sensitive data that they will be storing.

Once data is marked as sensitive, it will be equipped with an additional layer of encryption, as well as only being accessible by authorized users.

Andy Pitre, EVP of Product at HubSpot, discussed how these new data protection features will address one of the company’s biggest pain points:

It [HubSpot’s sensitive data protection enhancements] not only strengthens the Smart CRM as the single source of truth for customer data, it means businesses no longer need to piece together solutions just to have a single view of their customer.

Let’s take a more in depth look at some of HubSpot’s additional features and how they differ from sector to sector (Read on…).