Top Headlines In Customer Contact News This Week | 2/27/2024

Welcome back to “Top Headlines In CX News This Week” here at CCW Digital where we’ll be handpicking and highlighting the most interesting news stories in customer contact and business just for your learning pleasure.

After a brief haitus we're back and hungry for more customer service news, and this time around updates are heavy on food CX. Grab your fork, knife and a napkin and let's dig into what's going on

Wendy's To Serve Up Surge Style-Pricing 

Hate to be the barer of bad news here, but don't expect your 4 for 4 order to be $4 24/7 next year. Wendy's new CEO says that in 2025 the company will be testing out dynamic pricing at a sliding scale according to item demand in an effort to transform the brand's fast-food experience. "Beginning as early as 2025, we will begin testing more enhanced features like dynamic pricing and daypart offerings along with AI-enabled menu changes and suggestive selling," he told analysts earlier this month.

The shift is expected to be both tech-saavy and costly: $20 million to roll out digital menu boards to all U.S. company-operated restaurants, and a an additional $10 million over two years to help upsell other menu items, and improve order accuracy. Considering that other household names like Uber have caught flack from customers on their surge pricing strategy, it's yet to be seen if low stakes price hikes will be worth the splurge in the long run. They may not put you in harm's way, but they might just hurt your wallet.

Is Snacking Really A Meal? Kellogg And PepsiCo Are Putting In Their Two Cents

Money these days isn't going quite as far as it used to—whether it's your Wendy's 4 for 4 or your grocery shopping cart. Feeling strapped for cash and sometimes even just too tied to make a "real" dinner (protein, vegetable, carb), anyone can fall prey to a mismatched plate of leftovers, cereal for dinner, freshly made food, premade items and snacks. On TikTok, the plating we just described is affectionately known as "Girl Dinner," something that Gen Z in specific hold near and dear to their heart. 

Parent brands like WK Kellogg and PepsiCo are hopeful that this perfect storm of food fads and financial frugality will motivate some adults to gravitate towards their products—like Frosted Flakes and Doritos—as part the solution to their last-minute meal woes.

The cereal category has always been quite affordable, and it tends to be a great destination when consumers are under pressure,” Kellogg CEO Gary Pilnick recently told reporters. Similarly, PepsiCo's CEO Ramon Laguarta hopes "consumers would use salty snacks, such as Doritos and Rold Gold pretzels, as 'side dishes and ingredients' in meals." That childhood desire of junkfood for dinner might just be making a resurgence in a very #trending kind of way... 

Zoom May Just Zip To The Top Post-Lockdown After All

Over the past four years, Zoom has become a world renouned communication tool, piece of customer service technology and glimmer into the future of society in the digital age. But for all the advancement that it brought about in 2020, by 2024 it's lost its valuation both as a piece of social culture and a financial powerhouse. We reported on the slowdown of Zoom (pun intended) in the past, so to learn from the Wall Street Journal that there might be hope yet for the organization to move the needle forward in 2024 means that digital comms might not be so out of style as we once thought. 

"The videoconferencing wunderkind that shot to fame during the early days of the pandemic has been experiencing a long and painful comedown since," WSJ reports. "In the meantime, Zoom’s investors will need to take comfort in the company’s relatively strong earnings and cash flow that has helped it amass a war chest of about $7 billion in cash and equivalents—the fourth largest among cloud software companies. That fuels the buyback, and could help the company land a decent acquisition."

Google Struggles To Wake Up From AI Ambiguity 

"No matter how hard Google scrambles to fix its Gemini AI problems, this seems like it's going to be an endless Whac-A-Mole," Business Insider reveals. "It's inherently hard to figure out what an AI engine spits out (including when it will simply make things up — or as the industry describes it, to "hallucinate"). And Google's peers at Meta and OpenAI/Microsoft have had similar struggles trying to rein in Bad Answers and Behaviors."

In terms of these "bad answers and behaviors," reporter Peter Kafka is referring to Google Gemini struggling "to generate images of white people via its Gemini chatbot, struggling to say whether Hitler or Elon Musk's tweets have been worse for society; saying it wouldn't promote meat; and saying it wouldn't help promote fossil fuels." 

When it comes to communicating on topics relating to morality, biases, politics and societial behavior, some tech experts are arguing that the tech is leaning more left than right these days. Which when it comes to customers wanting a straight answer from your AI tech, that can be a tough reality to face. 

Concert Ticket Sales Have 'Swiftly' Skyrocketed In A Stadium-Sized Way

"With COVID largely in the rearview mirror, millions are seeking entertainment away from home and they’re willing to spend a lot of money to do it," reports the Associated Press. "Attendance jumped a 20% to a staggering 145 million in 2023, compared with the previous year.” Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band brought in the most revenue, and it's already predicted that 2025 revenue from concert going will surpass 2024's. 

For music fans who have traveled, shopped, ate, and made art in the name of music, it speaks directly to how willing customers will be to invest in experiences and people who speak to their own ways of being, style or hopes for the future. But the pricepoint of these shows, however, is not in alignment with those wildest dreams fans have. The surge special certainly is stealing the show, not to mention the not-so-sweet habit of artists canceling, arriving late and under delivering. Hopefully the entertainment industry gets some things right for the fans in 2024-25... 

Photo by Batu Gezer on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/red-and-white-concrete-building-during-nighttime-AGGhkGuVs2w