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Articles by Tim Harnett
Unpacking the AI Governance Crisis in Contact Centers
Contact centers are adding AI agents without the infrastructure to govern them. A new benchmark reveals the scale of the problem. Governance gap. Contact center AI adoption is moving faster than the governance infrastructure needed to manage AI agents. Data blockers. 53% of surveyed contact centers say their data isn't organized or centralized enough for AI. Guardrails first. Leaders must define AI agent tasks, authority limits and escalation rules before deployment.
Why Ibexa Is Betting on Trust as the Core of AI Orchestration
At its Lisbon Summit, Ibexa laid out a vision for agentic AI built with guardrails, accountability and customer trust at the center. Trust is the orchestration layer. Ibexa positions governance, transparency, and human oversight as foundational to AI-driven digital experience orchestration — not an afterthought or compliance checkbox. Harmonization without lock-in.
Ibexa Unveils Agentic Digital Experience Platform, Integrates 5 Martech, DXP Brands
EU Digital Experience and Martech vendor consolidates portfolio of acquired and built brands, announces AI agent choreography layer for digital experience professionals. Platform consolidation. Ibexa unifies five martech brands under one orchestration platform. Agentic AI and automation. A new, extensible agentic AI orchestration layer aims to streamline marketing and digital experience operations across the Ibexa ecosystem, and beyond. Ecosystem packaging and pricing.
Trust, Regulation and Ethical AI Use Original
The EU has taken a proactive approach with the Artificial Intelligence Act, while the U.S. remains fragmented in its AI governance. Using AI demands an ethical framework to boost trust in both customers and employees. If customers are going to trust your brand and employees are going to trust that you have their interests in mind, your organization needs a transparent AI framework. This should come from the top. Generative AI should be a tool to create content, not the content itself.
Smarter Middle Ground Between Suite and Best-of-Breed
Martech's future: aggregation over consolidation? New middle ground between suite and best-of-breed. By having an affiliation of companies under a unified brand, aggregator models aim to thread the needle for organizations who want their individual martech components to better talk to each other, but who might not need all the features of a suite solution. Aggregator models are well positioned for the market.
A Strong Community Gives Employees Something to Believe In
With employees working from anywhere and everywhere, it can be tough to ensure that workers are all “on the same page.” Flexible work options have filled employees with confidence and increased their productivity levels. But what else can be done to engage them and keep employees happy and productive? When employees have a strong workplace community, they feel like they’re contributing to something bigger than themselves.
How to Avoid Getting Personalization “Wrong”
Omnichannel marketing and customer demands are pushing organizations to be everywhere at once. But what happens when their efforts turn sour? Personalization lies at the heart of many modern customer outreach strategies. Thanks to evolving marketing efforts, customers these days have become accustomed to — and frequently prefer — when websites, ads and marketing messages are tailored specifically for them.
And What to Do About It
Plenty of statistics these days surround ambitious return-to-the-office plans from companies large and small. Yet while leadership frequently celebrates these plans, they often face resistance from many members of the workforce, from workers hired remotely during the pandemic to those who simply prefer the freedom and flexibility of remote work. To achieve business results, companies need engaged workers, productive and invested in their work no matter where they are.
Build a More Purposeful Workplace Community to Drive Collaboration and Retention
The events of the past several years have caused tremendous upheaval at any company with a physical office. Prior to March 2020, the office was rarely something considered, it just was. When the COVID-19 pandemic forced knowledge workers into remote work, companies adapted. But much like the office was a one-size-fits-all space, so too was remote work. With everyone offsite, companies didn’t have to consider all the options.
How Far Does a Thank-You Go? The Power of Gratitude in the Workplace
Employee engagement isn’t just a buzzword. Employers need to keep their employees happy and productive if they want the kind of company culture that makes people stay and attracts new hires. Recent research from Motivosity and OnePoll shows that creating a mindset of gratitude can go a long way toward this goal. The study took a closer look at how people feel about the gratitude they receive and express in their lives, including the workplace.
How to Drive Growth and Build Trust Through Experience-Driven Sales
The numbers are clear: a majority of businesses view the customer experience as a brand differentiator. At every stage of the customer lifecycle, businesses need to deliver great experiences. Yet when the time comes to make a sale, businesses often run into a Catch-22: customers both love to buy and hate being sold to. Not only that, but expectations around the customer journey have also radically transformed over the past few years.
How to Transform Your Contact Center
Digital transformation has touched nearly every industry over the past two years, as organizations looked for new ways to maintain their revenue streams in the face of a global pandemic. Now more than ever, revenue diversification is essential as businesses compete for the same customers. But where to start? If it makes sense, some organizations might look at their contact centers as a potential revenue stream.
How Deliberate, Considerate Hybrid Offices Are the Future of Work
For the millions of workers who were sent home at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, remote work was initially jarring. How much of people’s personal lives were going to be on camera? Would office work feel disrupted with dogs or bikes in the background of a video call? Thankfully, workers adjusted to their new reality, and remote work flourished. Workers will soon face another potentially jarring paradigm shift: the return to the office.
How CDPs Are Improving the Automotive Industry
Buying a car used to be a straightforward process. Go to the dealership, talk to a salesperson, test drive something on the lot, negotiate terms, drive away with a new car. But the industry’s decentralized nature made it difficult to see where customers were entering the funnel or how automakers and their dealerships could bring them back in if they ever dropped out. The pandemic upended the automotive industry, as it did so many others.
How a Composable DXP Can Help You Scale Your Business
There are times when a monolith suite is the right solution. An all-in-one-box product can get businesses set up to manage and deliver content without too much developing on their end. However, these solutions can suffer from a lack of flexibility and scalability. Surely there’s another way to scale that doesn’t require a ton of developer hours. Thankfully there is: the composable DXP.
Composable DXPs: Building Blocks of a Modern Martech Stack
PHOTO: Adobe Stock As more and more companies refine their digital transformations, the demand for digital experience platforms (DXPs) is expanding. CMSWire data suggests that at 23% of organizations, DXPs are part of the investment strategy to improve the customer experience. Further, the DXP market is expected to grow 13% annually from 2022 to 2030.
Understanding Where Perks Fit in the Post-Pandemic Workplace
The workplace has undergone not just one, but several significant changes over the past three years. Businesses that had never entertained the idea of remote work were suddenly forced to develop a remote-first strategy. Plans to return to the office changed and changed again as the pandemic ebbed and surged. Even now, as the COVID-19 pandemic enters yet another stage, companies are having serious discussions on how and when to bring employees back into an office — if at all.
Want Your Omnichannel CX Efforts to Succeed? Get Your Channels Working Together
PHOTO: Mymemo The days of single-channel customer interactions are over — and if they aren’t, then your organization is already lagging behind. From social media to email, customers need you to be where they are. Problems don’t always occur neatly within the 9-5 hours of a call center and when customers need answers to their burning questions they want those answers found, now. And they won’t wait.
In the Era of the Customer, Companies Need to Flip the Value Chain
PHOTO: Joseph Frank | unsplash Industry advisor Geoffrey Moore’s strategies for building and transforming companies in an age of disruption were birthed as technology was beginning its reign, with “Crossing the Chasm” first published back in 1991 followed by “Zone to Win” in 2015. After years of innovation and a global pandemic, the management strategies Moore posited still remain playbooks for organizations looking to launch, grow and catch their next waves.
Digging Into the Current State of Content Management
PHOTO: Adobe Stock Data creation shows no signs of slowing down. The total amount of data created, captured, stored and consumed is projected to nearly triple, from 64.2 zettabytes in 2020 to 180 zettabytes by 2025. In this environment, companies need better ways to manage their digital content. New and emerging content management technologies, such as headless CMS, are redefining how companies can organize and share their stories.
How a DaaS Solution Can Help Your Business Scale Securely
PHOTO: Adobe Stock Over the past two years, businesses have undergone a digital transformation shift that was always promised, but always seemingly just over the horizon. Now; however, more workers are working from home than ever before and this trend will continue into 2022 and beyond. If they haven’t already, organizations should start codifying processes and procedures around remote and hybrid work that might have started as ad hoc policies in the spring of 2020.
Communication, Collaboration and Cohesion: The Future of Work
After nearly three years of office reopenings, closures and adjusted start dates, almost everyone in the working world has their eyes set on that glorious day when the office doors will open and things will return to normal. We don’t mean to burst your bubble but that day is never coming. This doesn’t mean that there is no workplace anymore. It does mean that the office should be viewed as more of a resource and less of a holding pen.
How RPA and AI Are Lending New Helping Hands to Your Contact Center Agents
PHOTO: Clay Banks on Unsplash The last two years presented huge challenges for companies looking to improve their customer experience. Contact centers have faced a dramatic increase in interaction volume across both traditional channels like phone calls and email as well as emerging channels essential to an omnichannel strategy — things like social media and chat. All of this has been done while contact centers remain short staffed.
How Conversational AI Can Help Improve Customer Experience
Deploying new technology can be a bit of a Catch-22. When implemented successfully, customer service (CX) technology can improve customer satisfaction, increase loyalty and forge lifelong relationships that are critical in today’s environment. However, if brands deploy simply for technology’s sake or overcomplicate the customer experience, it can frustrate, alienate and drive away customers.
Fixing a Broken Customer Experience
By Tim Harnett | Dec 14, 2021 PHOTO: Marianna Smiley/Unsplash Delivering great customer experiences is a tightrope act and improving CX is critical if businesses hope to compete. In a recent survey, nearly all consumers (92%) believe that customer service needs improvement. And the stakes couldn’t be higher: 8 in 10 consumers have switched brands thanks to poor customer service. Many are willing to leave a brand after just a single negative interaction.
Using CDPs to Their Full Potential
PHOTO: Adobe At its core, the hopes and dreams of deploying customer data platforms has been to create a simplified interface that would enable robust interactions with customers, at scale and largely without a great deal of human oversight or interaction. That ... hasn’t happened.
Celebrating the First the Customer Experience Leader of the Year
PHOTO: SMG Improving the customer experience has never been more crucial. Amidst the turmoil and uncertainty of the past two years, CX experts have taken it upon themselves to keep their eye on maintaining a positive customer experience and improving those experiences whenever possible.
A Look at CDP Implementation and Optimization Best Practices
PHOTO: Adobe The advertising ecosystem has been upended and continues to shift, thanks in part to Google’s plans to deprecate third-party cookies, along with Apple’s restriction of access to their mobile ID. Both moves impact the adtech sector and the ability to connect the digital and offline worlds. Marketers thus have their work cut out for them and many feel overwhelmed. Emerging from this marketing uncertainty is the customer data platform or CDP.
Online Experiences Drive the Customer Journey: Is Your CX Optimized?
PHOTO: Adobe Less than 10 years ago, 67% of the buyer’s journey was digital. In 2020, that number climbed to 80%. Nearly all B2B customers start their buyer’s journey with a search, and they will research up to seven different sites before committing to a purchase. Annette Franz, founder and CEO of CX Journey, doesn’t see that changing anytime soon. “These days the path to a purchase involves websites, mobile apps, undertaking more research and reading more reviews than ever before,” Franz says.
2021 Digital Customer Experience Report: Data and insights from 400+ executives
Presented by CMSWire Humanity’s reliance on digital channels has exploded over the last 18 months, forcing even non-digital retailers into the online space just to keep up. At the same time, customers have become accustomed to a certain level of sophistication around their digital experience. Personalization is no longer a nice-to-have — it’s table stakes. Same goes for delivering exceptional customer experiences.
A journey of discovery: Traveling the NFCT
It’s 740 miles long, traverses four states and two countries, offers endless adventure for the novice to the expert. And it’s in your backyard. What is it? Answer: The Northern Forest Canoe Trail (NFCT). This incredible water trail, following the routes traveled by Native American, First Nations, and early European settlers, begins in the Southern Adirondacks and terminates in Northern Maine.
Beyond the Transactional
When ATMs were first introduced, many predicted the bank teller job would disappear, as transactional tasks could now be completed by machines. Yet between 1970 and 2010, the number of tellers increased — even as the number of ATMs grew.[1] Tellers’ marketing and interpersonal skills became vital to the job, as tellers completed tasks that ATMs couldn’t.[2] The need for critical skills continues to challenge the financial services sector.
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