CX Foundation

“Customer support should move from: ‘How quickly can we get the customer off the phone?’ to ‘How intelligently can we solve the customer's problem and turn that interaction into loyalty?’” That’s the vision of Balaji Balasubramanian, President & CPO for CX & Consumer Industries at SAP, for the future of customer support. At first, it doesn’t sound all that different. Neither do the modes in which SAP aims to support brands in turning interactions into loyalty.

For decades, omnichannel customer experience has been the gold standard, promising seamless handoffs between channels, with no dropped context. But what if customers didn't need to be handed off at all? Instead of moving them between channels, what if one channel could support multiple media - i.e., text, voice, image, video - at once? That's the promise of multimodal customer experience, and CX leaders are taking notice.

On an August 6 earnings call, Five9 announced a total Q2 2026 revenue of $312 million (10% YoY growth), a third consecutive quarter of accelerated subscription revenue growth (14% YoY), and a 78% YoY AI revenue growth. AI now makes up 15% of Five9 subscription revenue, up 6 points from 9% a year ago. Additional Q2 highlights include a $100 million deal with a Fortune 100 financial services firm, 12% cloud communications revenue growth, and 9% revenue growth from voice solutions.

"The room would go completely silent." That's how Kyle Finke, Contact Center Solutions Practice Lead at Kenway Consulting, described telling clients that Salesforce is retiring Open CTI. For many, it was the first time they'd heard the news. Some of these clients were content with their existing infrastructure and had no plans to move at all. Others were less surprised, seeing the value of investing in AI and stronger integrations.

Key takeaways from 8x8’s FY Q1 2027 Earnings Presentation: The Q1 2027 results mark 5 consecutive quarters of record growth at 8x8: a 5.1% YoY increase in service revenue (for a record service revenue of $185 million), and a 4.9% YoY increase in total revenue (for a record total revenue of $190 million) both beat guidance ranges Customer Adoption of AI solutions grew 121% YoY, indicating 8x8 customers have moved from experimenting with AI to using it in production environments – a claim...

On the August 5 Q2 2026 earnings call for enterprise CX AI platform NiCE, CEO Scott Russell announced a 7.6% YoY revenue increase, bringing total second quarter revenue to $782.3 million in 2026. NiCE's international revenue increased 22% YoY, led primarily by the EMEA region's 30% YoY growth amidst increased demand for sovereign cloud deployments.

Conversational AI technologies aren’t exclusively reserved for customer service; there are many employee use cases across the enterprise. Whether someone wants to learn a new process, request a device, or swap a shift, AI is automating more of these requests, easing the burden on IT, HR, and other teams. Given this, Forrester evaluates both the customer and employee service markets, and recently completed its latest Wave report on the employee side.

Today, Avaya appointed 30-year enterprise technology veteran Jeff Clarke as CEO, with Patrick Dennis staying on Avaya Executive Chair. Clarke joins Avaya from his role as CEO at Insurity, a PE-owned cloud platform for insurance carriers. Clarke also served as CEO and Executive Chairman at Doxin, a customer communications management and engagement company for highly regulated markets.

Niklas Heuveldop recently announced he will step down as CEO of Vonage. Taking the mantle is Christophe Van de Weyer, who has spent the past year working alongside Heuveldop. He previously served as CEO of Telesign, a CPaaS competitor owned by Proximus Group. Van de Weyer inherits a company that recently returned to growth and has a much brighter outlook than it did a couple of years ago.

On July 29, Cresta CEO Ping Wu announced the next generation of Cresta Insights, expanding the AI platform’s existing conversational intelligence capabilities to include new Real-Time Trends while deepening existing AI Analyst and Topic Discovery insights. Cresta Insights already helps businesses discover “unknown unknowns”, analyzing 100% of omnichannel customer conversations and answering the questions most companies never would have known to ask.