In a conversation with CX Today, Martin Schneider, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, broke down how generative AI is shifting CRM pricing models, and suggested how companies can implement the new models into their customer service offerings. 

“We’re going from historical CRM as a system of record [to] a system of action,” Schneider explained.  

Under previous systems, CRMs would charge the same amount regardless of who was using it or how much value they got out of it. 

However, with the rising popularity of AI agents, Schneider believes that “fixed per-seat per-user price doesn’t make as much sense in terms of value transaction between provider and user.

What we’re seeing with Agentic and Generative AI, outcomes can now be analyzed and measured because of the system, not because of the user.

The Constellation Research VP also outlined some of the benefits and value that AI agents can deliver, stating:

“These AI agents are digital workers that can be tied to the innovation in the CRM application, it’s 24/7, it’s global, it’s multi-currency, it knows everything about your company and products” 

This change in pricing is moving towards paying for the work being done and the outcomes generated by these agents. 

By evaluating how much you spend on your Agentic AI software a month in comparison to an SDR, you can judge how much more or less the AI is really worth to your workforce

“You should be paying for that work that is getting done and for those improved outcomes,” Schneider said.

Alternatively, Schneider suggests tying the prices directly to the results through the AI system, much like the e-commerce model:

“Others in CRM are looking at it from value levers and outcomes-based – how much volume do you do, how complex is it, and we’re going to take a percentage” 

However, he also notes the possibilities of the industry eventually replacing human agents with these AI models, as they can help “rationalize your spend.

“Since you’re not paying humans anymore, you’re actually saving money.”

Which Vendors Are Leading the Charge On This New Pricing Strategy?

Currently, vendors are taking multiple approaches to moving from systems of record to systems of action. 

In regards to Salesforce, Schneider notes how the company has taken a “gamble” in adopting their credits model, Flex Credits, which allows customers to “mix and match between users and credits when you renew.” 

This enables customers to either squash or reduce their CX human headcount spending, allowing them to transfer more money to the AI credits. 

Hubspot is another major firm that is experimenting with new pricing models. Schneider commended the vendor for understanding the future shift towards consumption and providing inexpensive products with what the vendor refers to as “‘core users’ for $70 and access to as many users as you want.” 

Away from the larger vendors, Schneider believes that new pricing models can be an effective play for small companies, as the “customer success space are small enough to be disruptive with this and be really forward thinking”. 

Elsewhere, other companies are taking intentional distances from AI by focusing on revenue protection, due to the “lack of predictability” that comes with these new models. 

This way, “you’re not marrying yourself to one of these new models without seeing that lack of predictability,” Schneider explained.  

Current State of the Market

Whilst the traditional per-seat per-user model is still popular in the industry, the rise of AI has clearly opened the door for alternative pricing systems.

And with the majority of these newer models still in their early, hybrid stages, it’s still unclear how they will perform in the long term.

“It’s so early to tell who’s being successful with it because at the end of the day, most of these guys are still predominantly selling the per seat/per user,” Schneider says. 

Moreover, vendors have frequently expressed advantages towards the fixed model, as it provides the predictability necessary to project company growth, as well as being straightforward for clients.

Despite this, the growth of AI will likely demand a shift towards the newer model in the near future, as Schneider explained:

“It’s the future, but in the meantime, you’re still renewing, selling and expanding your seats, new divisions and new departments”. 

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Watch on YouTube.

Clare Muscutt, Founder, Women in CX hosts Ejieme Eromosele, GM EMEA, Quiq, Charlotte Kennett, Sr. Director, SS&C Blue Prism, Laura Campbell, Strategic Business Development Director, ASAPP & Jennie Lewis, Customer Insights Senior Manager, Airship.

Women and minorities are underrepresented where it matters most, in positions of power and influence that can shape the future of Customer Experience.

Whilst the business benefits of diverse leadership teams are well known and publicised, a recent study by McKinsey & Company found that women make up only 28% of senior leadership positions in the technology industry globally, but why is this?

Whilst the movement for getting more women into STEM roles has made important strides in developing the pool of women who can code there has been little impact at a leadership level with only 8% of US Chief Technology Officers being women.

But, as the majority of conversations about ‘women in tech’ center around the technical narrative, could we be inadvertently reducing the potential of greater representation of women in leadership more broadly by failing to ‘empower women’ who are in non-technical roles to the same degree?

The panel will explore the reasons behind the gender gap, including the lack of emphasis on non-technical roles in diversity and inclusion initiatives and explore the perception that technical roles matter more.

The panellists will discuss how this underserved group of women can be better supported, including through communities, mentorship and sponsorship programs, advocacy for the importance of non-technical roles, and addressing biases in hiring and barriers to promotion.

Watch on YouTube.

Clare Muscutt, Founder, Women in CX hosts Susanna Baque, Senior Director Global CX, SCIEX, Renee Fokken, Director of CX, Cisco, Czarina Sheikh Mathew, Business Excellence Exec, The Access Group & Shameem Smillie, Founding Member, Women in CX.

In this session we discuss the following:

• What has been the big evolution in CX over the last few years and what part has tech played in that?
• How does lack of diverse leadership impact the challenges we are seeing in CX?
• What kinds of experiences have impacted you along your journey?

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It’s hardly surprising, what with remote working becoming permanent and prominent across many sectors, a major driver in the reasons behind the spike in cloud sales along with the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise and fall of cases.  

But what I did find of interest was the top three key players in the report behind such a surge. Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounted for 32% of total cloud infrastructure services spend in Q3 2021, making it the leading cloud service provider. It grew 39% on an annual basis. Microsoft Azure was the second largest cloud service provider in Q3, with a 21% market share. It grew over 50% for a fifth consecutive quarter and Google Cloud was the third largest provider and grew 54% to account for 8% of the market. 

I had expected to see other contenders such as Five9 among the top three players, or NICE. But these didn’t appear in the report. What I also found of interest was despite how much Google Cloud had grown it only accounted for 8% of the market overall. We’ll update readers as to where these contenders appear when we get the results of Q4 – perhaps the leadership board will look starkly different in 2022.  

I was also keen to delve into reasons why less than 30% of businesses are choosing to prioritise the full customer journey. Our article revealed companies that fall under the figure are failing to cultivate and nurture customer relationships throughout the social purchase journey, and putting their long-term social commerce growth at risk.    

Regardless, the same report uncovered social commerce is expected to grow by 31.4% by 2027 and the global social commerce market is estimated to hit a massive $604.5 billion by the same year.   

Should businesses and brands want a slice of the social commerce pie – or capitalise from the booming cloud contact centre market – the customer must come first. Demands continue to be higher than ever, and as we know the COVID-19 pandemic is no longer an excuse for poor CX. Businesses must place a higher value on the heads of their customers – to not just retain their customer base, but to exceed in the new year. 

The value of non-traditional support

Every event organiser needs to meticulously plan and juggle multiple tasks to turn their ideas into a successful event. From attendee, speaker and sponsor lists to promotional strategies and finding the right event platform, it’s fair to say the amount of to-do items is long. Rather than doing it alone and risking a stressful experience, event planners must have comprehensive support from their virtual and hybrid event platform provider that offers immediate, live assistance every step of the way – from onboarding to the big day (s) of the event.
Not all customer support, unfortunately, is created equal. When answers are needed immediately, waiting for customer support to email you back could be agonizing, if not impractical. More than just providing training on the platform, a good customer support team will be the extra set of hands every event planner needs to ensure a perfect event – if only their budget would allow it.

Catering for different requirements

No two events are ever the same, and there are different things that can go wrong when organising a hybrid and virtual session. But they don’t have to. Customer success teams are prepared for every eventuality and trained for all the corner cases that might come up.
That includes the most common issues during a virtual event: login errors, problems with an internet connection, technical glitches due to firewall limitations, and video streaming failures, all of which can stop the event from going live. That blank screen on the other side can be a real risk to one’s reputation, but the best support teams will first do their due diligence to ensure that all the basics are covered, and then work to prevent the worst from happening, and if glitches do occur, they’ll provide the necessary resolution straightaway to ensure minimal impact on the attendee front.

Hybrid events have different support requirements. As they connect the best of both physical and online worlds, there should always be a support team ready to cater for the virtual aspect of the event and minimise the above-mentioned issues as well as on-site personnel ensuring a smooth experience on the ground. The support queries should also be divided into tech-related and event-related ones for the most efficient communication and fast problem resolution.

Ensuring flawless execution

The best customer success teams go the extra mile and ensure every organiser is 100% ready to execute their virtual or hybrid event, make changes on the fly, and confidently run their own show. They prepare contingency plans, provide comprehensive onboarding and on-the-day support, and go through various scenarios to minimise possible issues. With the business’ reputation on the line, diligent and committed customer support will guarantee a flawless event experience, giving the organisers the utmost ease for planning, and at the same time leaving them wanting more.

Greg Volm is SVP, Sales and Success, at Hubilo.

As a result, customers have turned into somewhat impatient human beings who expect immediate responses to their questions, seamless self-service options, and 24/7 availability of businesses’ communication channels.

These elevated expectations make the balancing of customer experiences over multiple channels an increasingly challenging task for businesses and organizations.

One of the especially high-pressured channels is communication over the phone. Unlike the touch-based visual experience provided by smartphones, customers interacting over a voice channel must rely solely on spoken communication that often results in lengthy conversations and moments of frustration.

Fortunately, with the latest advancements in speech analytics technology, businesses can offer intuitive customer experiences, even over the phone and other voice-powered interactions.

Speech Analytics Capabilities

Even though speech analytics has been around for some time, it has experienced massive improvements in recent years.

Businesses can now utilize speech analytics to uncover a wide range of useful insights from the spoken interaction between a customer and a call center’s agent (or a voice bot) and finetune business processes to meet customer expectations.

Typically, speech analytics is based primarily on the speech transcription technology that analyzes the spoken conversation’s context. However, modern speech analytics do not stop there. It is equally valuable to be able to recognize the language of the conversation, detect silent spots and cross-talks, and estimate the age group and gender of a caller based on their voice (leveraging the voice biometrics aspect of every spoken conversation).

Used together, these cutting-edge insights enable businesses to perform powerful real-time improvements to customer experiences as well as gather all necessary inputs for efficient adjustments to internal processes.

Business Benefits of Speech Analytics

Companies that interact with customers over the phone (and any other voice channel) can find many notable benefits in speech analytics. These benefits can be explored from various angles as they impact the business on multiple levels.

Automation of Routine Tasks

Routine tasks, such as the categorization of calls, are often viewed by call center agents as a time-consuming activity that is best avoided. With speech analytics, such tasks can be performed automatically based on the context of a call (e.g., the automatic categorization of calls).

More Enthusiastic Agents

The elimination of boring tasks via automation improves the mood of call center agents as they can focus on creative challenges instead of routine tasks. This makes agents much more enthusiastic when communicating with customers over the phone, positively influencing the customer experience.

Better Handling of Emergency Situations

Speech analytics can detect specific keywords appearing in calls automatically and sound the alarm when selected keywords (outage, blackout, water leak, crash, etc.) begin suddenly appearing in calls too frequently. This enables organizations to detect unprecedented situations faster and handle them better.

Comprehensive Coaching of Agents

Everyone has good and not so good days. Therefore, it is important to evaluate agents’ performance based on as many calls with customers as possible. Speech analytics can automatically analyze each agent’s conversation for silent spots, cross-talks, script alignment, and other metrics to provide a fair and comprehensive assessment of their skills to their supervisors.

Easier Up-Selling and Cross-Selling

Real-time speech analytics can also help with personalized customer offers. Call center agents can receive notifications on their screens based on the context of an ongoing conversation to help them identify cross-selling and up-selling opportunities more easily and suggest hard-to-resist offers.

Better NPS and CSAT Scores

Enthusiastic agents who respond to customers’ challenges with meaningful solutions are what customers want. This directly affects the key customer experience indicators such as the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and the Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score, both of which improve.

Data-Driven Business Decisions

Better context means better decisions. Therefore, as speech analytics provides highly sophisticated insights uncovered from the entire call base, businesses can draw data-based decisions and measures that have an impactful and long-lasting effect on the company’s success.

Cost Savings

The time saved by the automation of routine tasks, automatic detection of up-selling and cross-selling opportunities, and perfected skills of contact center agents via comprehensive coaching lowers the company’s costs and improves revenues.

Speech Analytics Perfects the Customer Experience Over the Phone

Customer expectations are growing every day. It is, therefore, vitally essential for organizations to care about the customer experiences provided over the phone and perfect them via cutting-edge speech analytics. This approach will pay back in the form of greater customer satisfaction, lowered costs, reduced employee churn, and increased revenue.

Michal Hrabí is CEO at Phonexia, the leading company in voice biometrics and speech recognition solutions.

As a remote worker myself, I can completely relate to most of these issues and like many have spent hours wide awake at night flicking through emails wondering why I’ve not yet drifted off to sleep like the rest of the world. It’s all part of modern living, this being so readily available via multiple channels.  

Added to that, ‘Coronasomnia’ hasn’t help the sleeping patterns of most of us over the past 18 months. In fact, the number of Brits struggling with sleep problems has risen from one in six to one in four, research suggests. 

But reading on, there was one concern among remote workers in the study by Instant Offices that I was surprised to see – difficulties with communication (16%).  

We all have different ways of communicating with colleagues, whether via video call, messages or email. However, with so many fantastic new collaboration tools on offer for remote workers, hybrid agents or on-prem employees this problem can be easily resolved. Perhaps the issues with communication could be down to lack of training, a common issue that creeps up under the topic of workforce management. If this is the case, it’s of course up to management to provide training for staff using solutions they may find complicated.  

What’s certain however, is that wherever the issue falls, businesses should be taking more steps to help remote workers reduce these concerns causing stress and anxiety as well as other mental health problems.  

Instant Offices provided some top tips to help remote workers. These include:  

• Break the Culture of Silence: There is still a stigma around mental illness that makes employees more likely to suffer in silence than share information with their managers or bosses. Now is an ideal time for leaders within businesses to talk more openly about mental health and create a culture that encourages conversations around these issues. Taking a mental health day or asking for support should never impact an employee’s reputation or how they are perceived 
• Keep Socialising with Your Teams: Remote working has its perks, but a lot of people are feeling isolated right now. British workers are missing the days of office banter and face-to-face meetings 
• Lead By Example: With many employees working remotely, managers need to be more conscious of the challenges different households face. Encouraging flexibility, self-care and regular check-ins is key to reducing presenteeism and stress, and ensuring employees facing any issues can be identified and supported. Encourage transparent conversations and put action plans in place for team members who need help 
• Introduce Team Activity and Training Sessions: With employees using tools like Zoom to connect with the office remotely, now is a great time for businesses to encourage morning catch-ups, remote Friday drinks, yoga sessions or even company training sessions. Encourage team members to take a class they’ve always wanted to try or to attend industry-related Webinars. This is a great way to support employees looking to upskill themselves and stay busy 

The truth is remote working isn’t for everybody, and there are many who prefer the hustle and bustle of the office set up. But with so many businesses having adopted the hybrid working model now, remote working is an aspect of daily life for many agents.  

The findings revealed 72% of online shoppers would refuse to buy from a brand who they felt had not been responsible with their data – a figure up 86% for over 65s, compared to 56% of 18-24-year olds.   

The Rise of the Responsible Marketer, the report title, provided an insight into the imperatives for businesses to take a customer-centric approach to marketing.   

The study also shared 56% of respondents said they had become more mistrustful of how companies are using their data during the course of the pandemic.   

It also found 51% of participants said they had felt far more aware of how their data was being used by online businesses and brands.   

The findings highlight the stark difference between expectations and reality when it comes to customer trust, which I found of great interest while devouring the results of the study.  

The report read: “Brands must therefore put data stewardship at the heart of their marketing efforts not only to reassure consumers but to build the long-term meaningful relationships that drive loyalty.   

“The explosion of ecommerce, brought about by the Covid pandemic, which has seen record growth in new cohorts of shoppers coming online, is good news for brands, but comes with a number of new challenges around consumer expectations, the capabilities of current technologies, and the limitations of processes built for a more permissive marketing environment.   

“The imperative is for more responsible marketing that will enable brands to meet their regulatory responsibilities as well as reach and sell to consumers more effectively.” 

This analysis couldn’t be more accurate. The pandemic has brought great new challenges for businesses, brands, customers and the global economy that has seen many businesses collapse as a result of not making that all-important shift to digital. But at the same time, while customers experienced a lack of control, it’s good to see it’s been clawed back when it comes to how businesses use their data.  

But without going off on a rant, we’re also a nation of experimentalists too. The same study by Five9 also found that the UK is most likely to use webchat (20%), over a quarter (26%) of UK consumers are more willing to use social media platforms for customer service than they were a year ago and two-fifths (40%) of UK consumers are already using virtual agents where available.

Brian Atkinson, Vice President and General Manager, EMEA from Five9 said: “Our Customer Service Index suggests some correlation between customer service and brand loyalty. Most businesses have faced unprecedented uncertainty over the last 12 months and simply cannot afford to lose customers.

“It’s therefore essential to get customer service right – especially for UK consumers. To do this it is ultimately about human connection, which is the underlying theme across the survey results. The phone is still popular because consumers want to feel like they are talking to a real person, and are being understood and listened to.  

“Yet, they still expect the same across chatbots and social media. Human connection needs to therefore be at the heart of every communication – even if an actual person isn’t present.”

The study found the UK isn’t yet comfortable with video, however. 42% of consumers would prefer not to use a video call with a customer service agent. Understandable I guess, and I suppose the general consensus is if the phone is there why bother with video?  

These figures made me think though. We’ve all got a lot going on right now, as we all try and navigate out of the nightmare of COVID. It’s vital we all try out these new technologies and ways of communicating with businesses. The pandemic has changed the face of CX across the globe and companies and their customers are still finding their feet. And while us Brits are keen to try new things, perhaps we can be a little more patient in the process.