Keith Kirkpatrick

Consultant Source

Adobe upgraded its Acrobat extension for Google Chrome by adding new tools for users to alter a PDF's text and images directly from the browser. The tools are available now with a free seven-day trial or with the purchase of Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, starting at $19.99 per month.
Adobe in 2021 released its Acrobat extension for Google Chrome and integrated Acrobat PDF tools with Google Drive. The free version of Adobe Acrobat extension for Google Chrome let users modify PDF documents by adding co...

Salesforce announced on March 7 Einstein GPT, a new generative AI technology that combines OpenAI’s enterprise-grade ChatGPT with Salesforce’s private AI models to deliver relevant and trusted AI-generated content across sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT interactions at scale. Einstein GPT is currently in closed pilot, and Salesforce representatives declined to provide the names or total numbers of companies involved in the pilot, but are “are working to quickly bring this to market...

Maintaining a balance between ensuring customer experience and the need to ensure solid revenue streams is a challenge faced by many organizations. Amid an environment where menu hacks are shared on Twitter to highlight ways to save money by using special order combinations that are designed to provide more value to the customer, any pushback from corporate entities often is met with scorn and derision. Press coverage of any corporate actions designed to protect these revenue streams often ta...

End-to-End Interactions Allow B2B Customers to Streamline Operations
SugarCRM, a provider of a CRM platform for mid-market businesses, announced this week several new digital self-service capabilities designed to help business-to-business (B2B) sellers manage customer demands. The company’s self-service tools allow fully digital communications and interactions to take place from end to end, from an initial service request to final issue resolution.
Given the strong demand from consumers who p...

Self-Service, Automation, and Third-Party Partners Can Improve Service, But May Impact CX
The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in the use of several new technologies by restaurants, from quick response (QR) codes to allow guests to download electronic versions of menus, to tableside ordering kiosks, to third-party delivery services, all of which were designed to keep patrons safe and allow establishments to remain open. However, the full impact on customer experience over the long-term, particularly...

Local Municipalities Must Learn from Their Commercial Counterparts
Local governments have been tasked with managing more services and information than ever before, while also being subject to increased scrutiny by watchdog groups and regular citizens. Amid this increased scrutiny, a Deloitte survey published in March 2021 found that only 26% of respondents rated their local governments as trustworthy (with trust being calculated as the percentage of respondents who responded 8, 9, or 10 on a ...

It is a familiar story that tends to be repeated month after month, year after year: a large organization reports that its customer data has been exposed via a data breach, and notices are sent out to affected customers. In January 2023 alone, organizations such as Twitter, Chick-fil-A, PayPal, MailChimp, and T-Mobile announced data breaches. The organizations typically promise to redouble their efforts to close the gaps that led to the breach, enhance customer and employee cybersecurity trai...

Training and Technology Should Be Used in Tandem to Improve CX
Customers can experience friction, pain, or other impediments while interacting with a product, brand, or service. But solving these problems often requires a deeper look into the type of friction encountered, where it is occurring, and an analysis of the tools, training, and teams that must be included in addressing the problem.
Generally, friction or pain can be found in customer interactions with sales, support, or automated sy...

Despite Macroeconomic Uncertainty and Inflation, a TELUS Survey Finds Many Executives Raising 2023 Digital CX Budgets up to 25%
With the period of economic unease continuing into 2023, many companies in the CX sector have cut staff, reduced or frozen plans for new hires, and taken other measures to rein in costs. However, according to research commissioned by TELUS International, close to three-quarters (72%) of enterprise executives surveyed will be spending more on digital CX in 2023 compar...

Amdocs, a provider of customer experience software and services to telecommunications and media companies, and Microsoft announced a new Customer Engagement Platform. The new platform is designed and built to enable communications service providers (CSPs) to provide their customers with simple, cloud-native, and AI-driven intuitive experiences.
According to the release announcing the platform, the Customer Engagement Platform will allow service providers to improve their engagement and end-us...

Salesforce announced in late February several new solutions aimed at the communications industry that are designed to help improve agent productivity and performance, streamline contact center management, and enhance the customer experience.
The company announced its Contact Center for Communications, which extends the Salesforce Contact Center suite of capabilities with solutions specifically tailored to communications service providers (CSPs). These offerings include:
Einstein Conversation ...

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Vending machines, which allow people to easily purchase items without interacting with a human worker, have been around since the 1st century, when a Greek engineer and mathematician named Hero Alexandria created a machine that accepted a coin before dispensing holy water at a temple, to prevent people from taking more than their share of holy water.
Two millennia later, a far greater number and variety of products can be purchased from vending machines, thanks in par...