I’m always keen to see how organisations actually deliver when it comes to customer contact innovation, particularly in terms of joining up their service offer across multiple channels.

Stuck in a hotel recently watching Netflix, it struck me as significant how the company is now actively using the WhatsApp Business platform to communicate and encourage account contact with its subscribers.

Everyone talks about providing great customer experiences, but how can you make that happen? Lack of communication on a recent flight I took brought home to me the need to make the customer feedback process as easy as possible - and also highlighted the valuable role that the latest micro survey approaches can play in making feedback as immediate and relevant as possible.

Customer Experience is now the key battleground in today’s hyper-competitive brand landscape. With the pandemic triggering an unprecedented pivot towards digital service delivery, we’ve seen a decade of innovation delivered in the last two years across core CX areas such as AI and automation, cloud delivery, and the application of digital transformation across all aspects of customer experience delivery.

Sabio Group, the leading European Digital CX Transformation Provider, has today announced the appointment of Nils Steinmeyer as its new Chief Financial Officer (CFO).

While previous generation virtual assistants were little more than front-ends to a knowledge base, today's intelligent assistants are taking things to the next level with full conversational interactions - whether via chatbots in messaging threads or through virtual assistants embedded into the web journey.

A recent global survey revealed that 74% of all respondents had used voice search tools within the previous month, and estimated that voice search capabilities were already available on some 3.9 billion Apple, Android and Windows devices worldwide.

Reflecting on Verint’s recent European Partner Summit in Athens, it struck me that - despite our industry’s ongoing evolution towards AI, machine learning and automation – it’s still people that account for around 70% of contact centre expenditure.

News that Amazon has shut down its Mayday on-screen videochat support service for Fire tablets should come as no surprise, given how quickly video is now evolving to support the broader customer experience.

Tap into the world-class power of Amazon Web Services with its low-cost omnichannel cloud contact centre: Amazon Connect.

When Google introduced its Duplex AI service at the company’s recent conference it took a lot of people by surprise as it seemed like such a major leap forward.

Continuing profile series of some of the customer engagement sector’s leaders, we interviewed Leeds City Council’s Technical Support and Development Manager, Laura Batley.

Next week’s ‘C3’ Conversational Commerce Conference in London, presented by Opus Research, focuses in on the real-world opportunities and challenges presented by conversational engagement.

Whether it’s chatbots, intelligent assistants, natural language processing, machine learning or big data, it’s hardly surprising that much of the Conversational Commerce debate centres on technology. However, even the best Virtual Assistant solutions require ongoing optimisation if they’re to succeed for organisations and their customers.

What would someone who has benchmarked over 1,000 contact centres annually, list as the key things the industry need to improve?

Sabio holds regular Executive Forums where we host CEOs, CIOs and CMOs from leading brands to discuss key issues shaping customer experience.

With 300 million voiceprints now authenticated globally, it’s no wonder that Nuance says we’re now experiencing a ‘biometric boom’.

Seeing SpaceX launch a Tesla car towards Mars was pretty amazing. However, watching the Falcon Heavy rocket’s two side boosters perform a perfectly synchronised return to base was possibly even more impressive.

When it comes to customer journey friction points, payment usually comes top of the list. However, in opening its new checkout-free Amazon Go store in Seattle, Amazon hopes to revolutionise the way we shop.

Keen technology observers may have initially been underwhelmed by this year’s CES 2018 show in Las Vegas, but there was clear evidence of massive ongoing investment in voice control across all platforms and gadgets.

With the EC’s MiFID II Markets in Financial Instruments regime coming into effect last week, it’s clear that 2018 is set to be a year characterised by regulatory change and compliance efforts.

The news that Avaya has officially emerged from its restructuring process is a great way to end 2017, and re-assuring for the whole extended Avaya community as the company moves into 2018 stronger than ever.

Earlier this month, leading UK digital retailer took advantage of the proactive intervention capabilities of Sabio’s MaaS Monitoring-as-a-Service solution to prevent a potential outage in the run-up to Black Friday.

Sabio’s customers continued to set the standard at this week’s Verint Engage EMEA 2017 Annual Customer Awards, winning two out of the six available EMEA categories.