Top News in Customer Contact | January 2025

As the first month of the year draws to a close, we compiled some of the top stories in customer contact from January. 

• 8x8 has appointed Joel Neeb as their new Chief Transformation and Business Operations Officer following the recent unveiling of 8x8 Platform for CX. As a SaaS global business leader, Neeb recently served as Vice President of Execution and Transformation at VMware, where he helped launch their AI roadmap. Don’t miss a chance to hear from Mr. Neeb directly at CCW Digital’s Seminar Series in February on the state of generative and agentic AI. 
• JPMorgan, the largest bank in the US, informed their employees of a mandatory return-to-office beginning in March. The transition from hybrid to full-time in-person for all global employees was met with immense backlash, eventually resulting in administrators disabling comments on the internal message board where the memo was posted. 
• In an insightful interview with YourStory, Freshworks CTO Murali Swaminathan discusses AI trends and challenges facing customer and employee experiences.
• In one of his (many) first actions as President, Trump rescinded Biden’s 2023 executive order on AI regulation. In a field with limited regulation to begin with, this action could have outsized consequences as the big players in AI race to scale up.
• Change Healthcare, part of UnitedHealth group, has revised its estimate of the number of individuals impacted by last year’s cybersecurity breach to be almost double what was initially thought. This case serves as yet another example of how even mammoth organizations with billions of dollars at their disposal cannot always protect against the increasingly advanced attacks. Companies of every size should heed these warnings to shore up their digital defense to protect customer data before it’s too late.
• Meta to lay off the “bottom 5%” of workers in February, coming not long after Mark Zuckerburg’s podcast appearance in which he expressed interest in replacing mid-level engineers with AI.