CDP Institute

CyberMonday may be the hardest day of the year for call centers, so I guess I’ll cut some slack to the company that – wait, they don’t deserve it. WellCare transferred me between five agents and still couldn’t complete an address change. I canceled my account. It’s the sort of outcome that makes customer service tech company Kustomer worth roughly $1 billion to Facebook, which just bought them.

I also gave up trying to upgrade my cable TV service after several agents quoted wildly different prices while (by the sound of it) sitting in the middle of a train station. They might have benefited from customer success platform Gainsight, which just sold a majority of its shares to Vista Equity Partners at a reported $1.1 billion valuation.

I had a better experience opening the WellCare replacement account, although the very nice agent kept telling me he was copying data into two different systems. He was intrigued to learn that products like ServiceNow can automate that sort of thing, although of course he wasn’t in a position to buy one. ServiceNow itself just bought Element AI, which will add more AI capabilities to their workflow automation. Price is estimated at $500 million.