If you told me 20 years ago that I’d be writing an article that had the phrase “artificial empathy” in the title I’d probably have hurt myself laughing…yet here we are. The use of chatbots, particularly in customer service and support (call center) activities continues to increase rapidly. Customer expectations for “good” digital experiences are high, and the past 3+ years has seen record numbers of people online and using digital channels. In addition to the consumer behavioral changes businesses have faced several challenges including difficulty hiring and retaining qualified employees, friction with employees over working from home or returning to the office, and very difficult economic pressures, all of which created a resource constrained work environment. This is a considerable challenge for many businesses that has resulted in wider deployment of automation, specifically chatbots to reduce the burden on employees.

Today IBM announced the intent to purchase Apptio, a cloud-based financial and operational IT management and optimization solution (FinOps) for $4.6 billion from Vista Equity Partners. Vista paid $1.94B to take Apptio private in 2018. This move signifies IBM’s strategic push to bolster its cloud and enterprise offerings, as it integrates Apptio's unique expertise and portfolio into its ecosystem.

As technology evolves at an exponential pace, businesses must adapt to stay competitive. One of the most exciting developments in recent years is Generative AI, which can generate new data that is similar to the data it has been trained on. There is a lot of “hype” around AI and generative AI recently but let’s look beyond the hype at how Generative AI can be a competitive advantage for sales and marketing teams looking to enhance their strategies and drive more revenue.

Everywhere you look (or listen) lately you will see some new article on AI, large language models like ChatGTP, robotics and automation in general. Don’t misunderstand me though, it is exciting and there are lot’s of new use cases that offer some real world business value. AI isn’t new of course, its history goes back decades to the early 1950’s. What has changed the evolution of the technology though is a combination of the Internet’s impact on the creation, collection and distribution of data and a massively scaleable compute infrastructure. The other shift that fuels this “hype” is the openness of businesses and institutions to choose to invest in automation and AI. There are a number of reasons for that, including the business disruption and changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath including labor shortages, broad shifts to remote work, the subsequent noise of “return to office”, inflation and the rapid increase of interest rates, threats of a recession, and the threat of the US debt default (mischief managed, at least for now). In other words, businesses are feeling pressured from many fronts to change and adapt in order to stay competitive and healthy.

Earlier this year I co-hosted an episode of In the Hot Seat looking at Generative AI in higher education. I was lucky to be joined by Dr. Ali Green from the University of West Florida and Keeley Meentze from The Keeley Company, along with my co-host Professor Stephen LeMay, also from the University of West Florida. Artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, has sent shockwaves through various sectors including higher education. Along with a great deal of controversy, the discussion of generative AI in education, at least among a subset of educators, has shown a strong potential as a pivotal tool in reshaping and improving higher education. Built upon frameworks such as GPT-4 from OpenAI, generative AI can analyze vast amounts of data, learn patterns, and generate new content autonomously. This capability has far-reaching implications for higher education, offering transformative possibilities that promise to revolutionize teaching, learning, and administrative tasks.

The first week of May Zoho had its user conference at its US headquarters in Austin. They invited a number of analyst to attend an analyst program as well, and of course there were a number of interesting announcements. Hidden in those announcements is a set of new offerings currently in beta, designed to extend Zoho’s reach down to solopreneurs and also bridge the gap to startup creation and growth (and the rest of the Zoho solution portfolio). The proposition of engaging with a customer as they launch their solo business and providing a series of offerings to help them grow and scale along the way is a long view on gaining and retaining customers, something that is in character for Zoho.

Your customers’ want what they want, when and how they choose. That’s not a revolutionary concept, but needs repeating from time to time. It is easy, apparently, for you to project your desires on your prospect or customer. It doesn’t work now…maybe (with a few exceptions) it never worked. I’ve made these statements about sales, about how prospects buy, about your customer journey map, service and support and probably a few other topics. Let’s look at one of the most fundamental issues though, consumers care about how you interact with them, and on what channel for each specific online activity.

I’ve had numerous conversations recently, including a couple of web shows (CRM Playaz Roundtable, In the Hot Seat) about the biggest trends in 2023+ for CRM and customer experience (CX). I believe we’re approaching an inflection point that will create some radical departures from our current approach to CRM and CX solutions in the near future. I believe this in part because of these factors:

• The growing seller - buyer gap

• The potential for moving to real time streaming data.

• The rapid evolution of AI tools including the use of large language models like ChatGPT.

• Consumer fatigue with contextually irrelevant personalization.

• Lower engagement with several communication channels caused by overuse.

• Growing dissatisfaction with the poor experience created by outdated tiered support models.

And we went to India… Sometimes the only way to really understand a thing, is to see it in its most natural context. I’ve known Zoho and (at least part of) its unusual culture and business approach for many years. The narrative; Indian startup, no outside investments so completely bootstrapped, private, a wide variety of SaaS products that work across the whole business and are very attractively priced, employee focused and dedicated to giving back to the communities in which it operates. It’s an interesting story and just on its face, unique in a tech world that is funded by venture capital and private equity, obsessed with growth over anything else and with an ultimate goal of entering the public markets or another “big money” exit. As I would eventually learn, what I didn’t know (or maybe the word is “understand”) about Zoho was fairly significant. The event, Truly Zoho, is aptly named, and brought ~15 analysts who have covered Zoho for many years to its Chennai HQ, with a short visit to Tenkasi at the end of the week.

Automation is applied to all sorts of systems and business problems. RPA can provide a great deal of value relieving humans from the routine process actions and increasing productivity and outcomes by giving the humans the space to handle exception and higher level tasks. IA goes much further than simple RPA, and add the capabilities to work outside the program framework, inferring, predicting and taking actions based on the unstructured. It also learns and improves its performance over time. IA then, is essentially the next generation RPA, supercharged by applying AI technologies.

The tech industry has been enamoured with the subscription business model since the late 1990’s as Netsuite and Salesforce first began offering applications as a service over the Internet. The “Great Recession” of 2007-2009 accelerated the adoption of software as a service (SaaS) across a variety of businesses as capital investment dried up and companies that wanted to be competitive moved software acquisition to SaaS and subscription (and their operating budget versus capital budget). Since 2009 SaaS and cloud computing has rapidly expanded to include all types of technology from infrastructure (IaaS) to hardware and is the default business model for most tech companies. Over the past 10 years that expansion of the model has moved into a rapidly growing list of industries including consumer goods, automotive, manufacturing, media, entertainment, and many others.

At Dreamforce last week there were two announcements that overshadowed the rest in my opinion, Salesforce Genie, which I already covered here; and Slack Canvas. I guess I shouldn’t just discuss Slack Canvas though, there were several Slack enhancements of interest and also a tie back into the Genie announcement. Slack and Salesforce customers are clearly benefiting from the acquisition, the investment of resources and linkage to the overall strategy really show.

Salesforce Genie is a real-time data platform that enables the delivery of personalized and individualized experiences across sales, marketing, service and commerce. Genie, which runs on Hyperforce, leverages Salesforce Flow and Einstein AI to maximize the effective use of all your customer data in real-time or near real-time.

Building relationships and trust online can be difficult and the ongoing relationship can be fragile. The more online interactions the greater the opportunity to increase trust through positive experiences, but the dark side of that opportunity is the risk of exposure to poor interactions and the damage they can do to trust. Subscription based products and services, which are more prevalent now than ever before in a wide variety of industries, are particularly exposed to experience risks since long term company success is tied to renewals and relationships. Customer service (and customer success) takes on significantly increased importance to those experiences and the health of the customer relationships.

Yesterday subscription management provider Zuora announced that it plans to acquire Zephr, a provider of a subscription experience platform. The London based Zephr, which focuses on the digital publishing and media industry vertical, already integrates with the Zuora application suite “out of the box” with several joint customers in production. In general the two sets of applications are complimentary with little overlap. The overall subscriber experience is business critical in both new customer acquisition and long term customer retention, so it’s easy to see the opportunity for the combined solution.

In the recently published report on subscriber experience, we examined a number of topics including the factors that are important in making a subscription purchase decision. The report is based on a survey conducted in May of 2022 (N=394) and focused on business to business (B2B) subscriptions. There were two questions related to the selection and purchase, one looked at influence on the purchase decision and the other at selection of the service provider.

We recently published a report on subscriber experience based on a survey conducted in May of 2022 (N=394). The survey collected data on a number of subscription topics, including trying to understand why customers upgrade from a free version. Free versions and free trials are important tools in building a product led growth (PLG) business and conversion to paid is always a hot topic in a PLG company. There are many factors that can influence the customer’s decision to convert, but there is a core set of levers that can be manipulated.

There’s a process in incident management called “swarming” that has emerged over the past couple of years. The idea seems pretty simple (and maybe just puts a name on something that companies have done in some fashion for a longer time), when there is a critical incident, bring a team together that has the capabilities and skills to find and execute the resolution. This approach eliminates handoffs and puts the spotlight on the issue and the “right” team to sort it out. While the idea is pretty simple, executing it effectively has some complexities and impediments created by the lack of a systematic way to manage the swarming. The process also eliminates the need for the escalation or tiered model in your support organization, creating instead a collaborative support model.