Deny it and die, or embrace it and live, Samuel Wilson warns: tech vendors need to aim customer experience (CX) solutions at specific verticals and equip every worker if they want to stay profitable.
The CEO of Campell, Calif.-based software provider 8×8 Inc. was the closing keynote speaker at research firm Cavell’s inaugural CX Summit in the U.K. this past June. Unlike CX events aimed primarily at practitioners, this was a summit that gathered vendors, channel partners and Cavell’s analyst team to look at how the business of offering products and services to contact centers is evolving.
Wilson’s expletive-filled keynote has been uploaded to YouTube and while it isn’t long, it offers a rare glimpse at what’s top of mind for those selling CX solutions, and is blunt about the dangers they face if they don’t change.
While many solution providers initially offered seat-based pricing, for example, Wilson said clinging to that model is hopeless.
“I’m going to tell you where margin is. Most of you are thinking about it wrong. You’re like, “Oh, I don’t want consumption-based pricing.’ You have no choice,” he said. “The customer is telling you we are not going to pay unless you deliver the outcome we expect. No more vaporware, no more racks sitting empty. Consumption-based pricing exists because the customer demands it.”
Consumption-based pricing makes sense in part because it aligns well with CX professionals’ focus on investing to achieve a specific business outcome, Wilson said. In many cases, however, those outcomes are not as broad as what vendors talk about in their marketing and sales outreach.
“Outcomes in my mind mean verticals,” he said. “Some vendor stood up here this morning and said, ‘We have a wildly horizontal solution,’ and I thought, ‘You’re screwed,’” he said. “Your customer is not wildly horizontal. If you sell to an auto dealership, they don’t care what a hospital wants. And if you sell to a hospital, they don’t care what a school district wants, or a retailer wants.”
Wilson recommended tackling verticals within niches for maximum growth. For example, a CX solution developed with a hospital in mind won’t resonate with a dental clinic. Similarly, a financial services-focused CX solution should focus on areas such as mortgage origination.
“Forget ‘We do voice in the cloud.’ Nobody cares,” he said. “That market is dying and is over.”
Where vendors should think more broadly is in the stakeholders who can benefit from CX tools. Wilson argued that cashiers, truck drivers and forklift drivers are all frontline workers who can have a critical effect on delivering experiences.
“(There’s this thinking that) CX equals the contact center. That is so wrong,” he said. “CX is not the contact center. A nurse is CX in a hospital. A school teacher is CX. (Contact center) agents are one part of customer engagement, but they’re not the only part.”
This is an important distinction because Wilson sees a future where every call that comes into a company will run through an AI agent. That means more calls will directed to frontline experts and away from the contact center. We’ll see a reduction to the total number of service reps taking calls within the next three to five years, he said.
The next wave, Wilson added, will come when everyday customers use their own AI agents to reach out to a contact center on their behalf, and interact with a vendor’s AI agents. If that’s difficult to imagine, he said it’s because the AI we see today is at its worst compared to models that are due to emerge soon.
Wilson warned more traditional vendors to stop thinking of each other as rivals, given the power of AI to launch entirely new market entrants that could prove truly disruptive.
“The competitor that keeps me up at night is less than 18 months old, based on Claude code, pushing out features all over the place, has $2 m revenue per employee,” he said, dismissing product categories such as unified communications (UC) and communications platform as-a-service (CPaaS) as terms made up by analysts.
“No customer buys UC or CPaaS. They buy a business technology to solve a problem. That’s what they want.”
Other recordings from the Cavell CX Summit are well worth watching, including sessions on AI In CX, industry economics and more.
