CX tech in enterprise software is growing in importance

The customer is always right

The rise of software as a service has dramatically changed the experience of being a customer as well as customers’ expectations of their suppliers, and coming out of the two-year pandemic, there is no turning back.

“We are in an economic experience, consumers are very slow,” said Tony Bates, chair and CEO of contact center software provider Genesys. The pandemic has only accelerated these forces, setting in motion long-term effects that will permanently change the future of customer experience technology. But how do companies truly deliver great customer experiences?

The answer involves more than moving to the cloud and updating tech stacks, according to experts, product executives and customers themselves. This requires new thinking and a complete change in organizational thinking.

• About 10 to 15 years ago, the primary way many customers interacted with sellers was through support agents located in large overseas contact centers.
• The focus was then on increasing efficiency, reducing call times and getting customers in and out the door.
• But because “switching costs for both customers and employees are approaching zero,” SaaS vendors need to provide great experiences to drive repeat business, said Brad Anderson, president of Qualtrics products and services.
• “What could have taken another 20 years has certainly been accelerated by the pandemic,” said Simonetta Turek, general manager at Twilio Flex.

With such high expectations, businesses have their work cut out for them if they want to unlock leading customer experiences. Not only do companies need to upgrade their tech stacks to handle the demand for faster, better customer interactions, but they may also need to transform their entire customer-facing operations.

• “One of the most important trends happening right now is there’s a consolidation happening where CX leaders are saying, ‘I need all my customer experience data in one place,'” said Qualtrics’ Anderson .
• As customer interactions become increasingly digital, customers must be able to easily navigate a company’s website, find support articles or contact the sales team.
• “It’s been proven time and time again that effort level is actually more predictive of loyalty than anything else,” said John Ball, senior vice president of customer workflows at ServiceNow.
• But it’s incredibly important that the focus on customers comes from the very top of an organization, says Lara Caimi, chief customer and partner officer at ServiceNow.

Companies really need to put customers front and center to succeed in the years to come. That means forward-looking companies need to move to the cloud, adopt emerging technologies and even restructure business departments.

• “The situation we’re talking about here is not a good one to have, it’s a ‘burning roof’ situation,” Sameer Patel, chief marketing and solutions officer at SAP CX.
• Companies that fail to deliver will be left behind by new market entrants built around agile technology and an innate understanding of customer needs.

Read the full report hereand look the rest of our special customer experience report in business.

— Aisha is counting (email | nervous)

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The MFA is not a magic bullet

It’s still unclear whether the breach of Uber’s internal IT systems, announced Thursday, is more than an embarrassment for the company. But for businesses everywhere, the attack should serve as yet another reminder that the few security controls we once thought were a panacea are no such thing.

Specifically, multifactor authentication. This security control, which requires a second method of verification for a user to log into a corporate network, is considered essential to prevent hackers. But recently, hackers are finding clever ways to defeat it.

In the Uber breach, the method used by the hacker appear what is known as an “MFA fatigue” attack: The attacker (pretending to be someone from IT) sends repeated login notifications to an employee until the employee approves it . Basically, the attacker wears out the employee. But once approved, the attacker is on.

“We thought MFA was always the silver bullet,” said Bryan Murphy, senior director for consulting services and incident response at identity security vendor CyberArk. “Now we’re starting to see that attackers are finding ways around it.”

On Monday, Uber confirmed that it was a contractor whose account had been compromised, “likely” by purchasing the contractor’s corporate Uber password on the dark web. The company confirmed that the contractor allowed the attacker to bypass the MFA requirement by approving the multifactor login request.

Uber said it does not appear that the attackers, who it claims are operating as part of the Lapsus$ group, have accessed any personal customer data or made any changes to its source code.

Interestingly, there is a form of MFA that is still considered “unphishable.” Hardware security keys that comply with the latest authentication standard, known as FIDO2, serve as a second factor that cannot be intercepted because they require the user to physically touch the key. Cloudflare, which provides its employees with YubiKey hardware keys, said attackers in a recent phishing campaign could not get around its MFA by using the keys, preventing the company from being breached.

— Kyle Alspach (email | nervous)

Financial corner

Atlas raised $200 million to develop HR management software.

Quickly raised $100 million to develop software for retailers.

Xeneta raised $80 million to provide real-time analytics on ocean and air freight rates.

Zesty raised $75 million to help businesses save money by automatically adjusting cloud usage.

— Aisha is counting (email | nervous)

Around the enterprise

Zendesk shareholders approved a $10.2 billion private equity round buyout deal after several years of uncertainty.