TELUS Corporation  and TELUS International, a leading digital customer experience innovator that designs, builds and delivers next-generation solutions, including AI and content moderation, for global and disruptive brands, are pleased to announce a definitive agreement to acquire WillowTree, a premier, full-service digital product provider focused on end user experiences, such as native mobile applications and unified web interfaces. Under the agreement, TELUS International will acquire WillowTree for a total enterprise value of US$1.225 billion, inclusive of US$210 million of assumed debt, of which US$125 million will be settled in TELUS International subordinate voting shares, approximately US$160 million will be reinvested by certain eligible management team members and settled subject to certain performance-based criteria, and the remainder will be paid in cash upon closing. As part of the transaction, majority stakeholder Insignia Capital Group will sell its stake in WillowTree after initially investing in the company in 2018. The acquisition is anticipated to close in January 2023, and is subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals.

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“Since TELUS International’s inception in 2005, ​our company has grown, evolved and expanded our global team and capabilities by organically building, selectively partnering and strategically acquiring​, which has positioned us to consistently capitalize on market opportunities as the pace of demand for digital solutions grows”

“We are excited to announce a strategic next step in our ambition to continue building TELUS International – an important and differentiated growth driver for TELUS – into a global asset of consequence, while significantly enhancing the end-to-end digital experiences of our customers around the world,” said Darren Entwistle, Chair of the Board of TELUS International and President and CEO of TELUS. “The acquisition of WillowTree brings key tech talent and diversity to TELUS International’s portfolio of next-generation solutions, and further augments its digital consulting and innovative client-centric software development capabilities. Furthermore, WillowTree will enhance TELUS International’s ability to accelerate TELUS’ own ongoing digital transformation and support key product development across our business, particularly within health and agriculture and consumer goods. Benefiting from TELUS International’s track record of execution excellence, including completing the largest technology IPO in the history of the Toronto Stock Exchange in 2021, this transaction will enable our international team to further bolster its client diversification, adding new marquee customers and amplifying cross-selling competencies on a global basis. Importantly, WillowTree will augment our go-to-market transformation capabilities in respect of digital, cloud and software-based services that will be highly sought-after as we progress toward a period of economic recovery in the months to come. We look forward to welcoming WillowTree employees into our TELUS International family and leveraging our collective technological and human innovation to deliver outstanding experiences for our valued customers worldwide.”

“Since TELUS International’s inception in 2005, ​our company has grown, evolved and expanded our global team and capabilities by organically building, selectively partnering and strategically acquiring​, which has positioned us to consistently capitalize on market opportunities as the pace of demand for digital solutions grows,” said Jeff Puritt, President and CEO, TELUS International​. “Today marks the next step in our company’s journey, and I look forward to working alongside the talented members of the WillowTree team to jointly raise the bar for ourselves to better envision, create and implement high-impact, technology-powered brand connections that fuel customer loyalty and establish and maintain industry market leadership for our clients.”

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Hero Digital, a leading customer experience digital transformation company, today announced that it has been ranked in the San Francisco Business Times’ 100 Fastest Growing Private Companies in 2022, a list honoring firms at the forefront of the bay area economy with the highest revenue growth.

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This award continues a pattern of momentum for Hero Digital following its recent recognition as Adobe’s Emerging Partner of the Year as well as being named Optimizely’s DXP Partner of the Year for North America. The digital transformation consultancy was also named the customer experience innovator of the year at the Martech Breakthrough awards in August.

“It’s an honor for Hero Digital to be included on this list alongside other successful industry leaders in our area,” said David Kilimnik, CEO & Founder at Hero Digital. “This award demonstrates the continued faith our clients and employees have in our CX digital transformation capabilities and ability to craft industry-leading customer experiences. Ultimately, we’re proud that our accomplishments continue to be recognized and greatly look forward to continuing our growth in 2023.”

Hero Digital is a leading independent digital customer experience company leveraging strategy, design, technology, marketing, and data, to solve the critical digital transformation needs of the Fortune 1000. Hero Digital’s purpose is to bring moments of Truth & Beauty into people’s lives by creating customer experiences that are good for people and good for business. Hero Digital’s blended teams help Fortune 1000 companies like Comcast, U.S. Bank, Salesforce, Twitter, UnitedHealthcare, and TD Ameritrade Institutional invent, transform, and perform to deliver new business value.

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Qualtrics , the leader and creator of the experience management category, announced that hundreds of organizations worldwide, including L.L. Bean and Vinfast, selected its customer experience solutions in the third quarter of 2022 to create extraordinary experiences for customers during an uncertain time.

“When times are tight, customers are looking closely at where they spend their money. A single bad experience—like an error at checkout or a frustrating customer care conversation—can result in a lost customer”

“When times are tight, customers are looking closely at where they spend their money. A single bad experience—like an error at checkout or a frustrating customer care conversation—can result in a lost customer,” said Brad Anderson, Qualtrics’ President of Products and Engineering. “Organizations must understand exactly how their customers feel and where they are experiencing issues, whether it’s on their digital channels, their contact center, or in their physical locations, so they can take the right action in real time before those issues turn into lost revenue.”

Rising costs are changing the consumer landscape, and people are taking steps to improve their financial standing by trimming their expenses, according to Qualtrics research. Almost one in five (18%) working adults have cut their expenses by moving to an area with a lower cost of living, and another 13% are planning to do so. Nearly 70% of working parents say their pay isn’t keeping up with costs. At a time when customers’ needs, circumstances and priorities are changing quickly, it’s crucial that companies know what their customers find important and take action to make changes to fit those unique needs.

Qualtrics’ CX platform allows organizations to listen to customer feedback wherever their customers are — through surveys, online reviews, call center conversations, social media and more. With that data at their fingertips, companies can better understand how their customers are feeling and what action they need to take to better their brands and products to fit changing consumer needs in a competitive market.

In the third quarter, the following organizations chose Qualtrics to better understand peoples’ emotions, effort and intent to create more personal and empathetic experiences:

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TDCX, Inc., a high-growth digital customer experience (CX) solutions provider for technology and blue-chip companies, was recognized as a Leader in the 2022 Information Services Group (ISG) Provider Lens Contact Center — Customer Experience Services report for Singapore and Malaysia.

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“TDCX is an ideal partner for high-growth clients looking to tap into Asia’s strong market potential. TDCX combines best practices and technology to develop a comprehensive remote work solution.”

Singapore and Malaysia are highly attractive markets for international companies looking for outsourced customer experience services. These markets also offer higher cost efficiencies than many Western countries such as the U.S. and Australia. In addition, both countries have robust IT infrastructure and government support for the CX industry.

The report by ISG, a leading global technology research and advisory firm, identified TDCX as a leader in all three categories – Digital Operations, Work From Home Services and Social Media CX Services.

Ms Angie Tay, Group Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President, Singapore, TDCX said, “We are humbled and grateful for the recognition by ISG. Emerging as a leader in two very competitive markets is testament to our commitment to delivering excellence in customer experience. At TDCX, we have been helping brands delight their customers through our innovative solutions and expertise in human resource management. Our global footprint and Asian expertise also mean that we can support our clients in more than 30 languages, including Asian “unicorn” languages such as Bhutanese, Dhivehi and Sinhalese.”

The report noted that contact centres are turning into smart centres with the ability to gain customer insights and to predict human intent. Through workforce optimisation, analytics and other advanced applications, call centres are becoming customer experience centres. Such changing requirements and the increased focus on enhancing CX are leading enterprises in Singapore and Malaysia to seek the right partner to provide digital solutions.

Mr Byron Fernandez, Group Chief Information Officer and Executive Vice President, Malaysia, TDCX, said, “Increasing customer expectations coupled with the ease of switching to another brand underscore the need for brands to create a positive experience. As such, brands need to be more agile, adaptable and innovative in the way they serve their customers. This also needs to be supported by skilled and engaged human capital and strong IT infrastructure. To keep pace with such demands, we are seeing more brands choose to work with specialist CX providers such as TDCX so that they can focus on their core business.”

Mr Craig Baty, Lead Author of the ISG report, said, “TDCX is an ideal partner for high-growth clients looking to tap into Asia’s strong market potential. TDCX combines best practices and technology to develop a comprehensive remote work solution.”

TDCX specialises in solving complex customer interactions to help brands acquire new customers, build customer loyalty and protect their online communities. TDCX recently announced its entry into Türkiye, launching its 27^th campus as it continues its global expansion strategy.

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NICE announced IGT Solutions (IGT), a next-gen customer experience (CX) company, has chosen NICE CXone’s world-leading cloud CX platform to ramp up its operations, fostering seamless customer interactions in the Travel and Hi-Tech industries. For more than two decades, IGT has provided integrated business process management, technology, and digital services and solutions across industries. Moving to the NICE CXone cloud native platform will support IGT as it further grows its digital capabilities, enabling IGT to continue delivering exceptional service as consumers from all generations expand the ways they engage at an exponential pace.

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IGT employs more than 23,000 customer experience and technology experts across 23 global delivery centers in China, Philippines, Malaysia, India, UAE, Romania, Indonesia, Spain, Colombia, and the USA. By engaging the Six Sigma approach for process improvements, IGT identified the capabilities of NICE CXone to quickly scale and deliver effortless, consistent, and personalized digital first experiences. In addition to more efficient customer care services, NICE will also assist the IGT customer experience center to make smarter data and AI-driven decisions. IGT is recognized by Gartner as one of the top 25 fastest growing BPO service providers, and with the deployment of NICE CXone, IGT is empowered as a champion of innovation to provide their customers with a frictionless experience.

Akhil Agarwal, COO, IGT Solutions,said, “At IGT our goal is to be the world’s greatest next-gen CX company making a billion complex interactions simple every year. We always strive to find the best way to deliver a superior customer experience. Bringing on NICE CXone will help us achieve that vision, giving us a well-rounded software solution for better experiences for both agents and customers.”

Darren Rushworth, President, NICE International,said, “We are delighted to support IGT’s growth by empowering their contact centers to scale securely and deploy quickly to serve their global customers. As more consumers demand digital-first experiences, NICE CXone provides IGT with a complete solution for every journey with end-to-end journey orchestration, smart self-service, prepared agents, and complete performance with AI information at every step. We are honored to play a role in managing IGT’s CX journeys across travel and Hi-tech industries.

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Qualtrics , the leader and creator of the experience management category, announced its biggest quarter in government yet with dozens of U.S. government agencies, including the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, selecting Qualtrics solutions in the third quarter of 2022. By adopting technology to better understand both residents’ experiences with their government and the government workforce experience, these agencies are innovating and leading the transformation of government services to better serve the public.

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“There is no improving trust in government without governments investing in technology to modernize and better serve residents,” said Dr. Sydney Heimbrock, chief industry advisor for government at Qualtrics.

“There is no improving trust in government without governments investing in technology to modernize and better serve residents,” said Dr. Sydney Heimbrock, chief industry advisor for government at Qualtrics. “Inclusive and accessible digital access to government services must be rooted in human-centered design, and that depends on listening to and understanding as many resident voices as possible on every channel available. We all want to feel seen and heard, and the Qualtrics platform enables that in an effective, scalable way.”

President Biden’s Executive Order on Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government has driven an unprecedented level of attention and resources to improving digital resident services. Qualtrics CustomerXM (CX) solutions enable real-time experience insights, capturing feedback wherever it’s being shared and initiating action to improve experiences before they impact services and trust in government. At the same time, people deliver government services and there is broad agreement that delivering an effective customer experience requires creating a positive employee experience. Qualtrics EmployeeXM (EX) solutions – developed by industrial and organizational psychologists using rigorous scientific methods – enable leaders to manage experiences across the employee lifecycle, delivering recruitment, engagement and retention results that build healthy government organizations.

In the third quarter, the following government organizations selected Qualtrics to transform their approach to experience management and deliver critical government services that are designed to better serve all residents:

One of the largest consumers of citizen data, the U.S. Census Bureau expanded its DesignXM program with additional capabilities to support its High Frequency, Rapid Response and Panel Management initiatives, as well as to support employee engagement and retention research. Stronger engagement with employees and external audiences will help Census to better understand the impact of the economy, employment, health and education on the country and residents.

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G2, the world’s largest and most trusted software marketplace, has honored Sogolytics as Leader in Enterprise Feedback Management Software.

This achievement, reported in the G2 Fall 2022 Grid® Report, is based on a comparison of verified reviews across a category of similar products. An overall G2 Star Rating of 4.5 highlights the value users place on Sogolytics.

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“Feedback is a core element of our business, and we’re proud to receive such positive reviews from our clients,” said Sogolytics CEO Hamid Farooqui. “Just as our clients use the data they collect to make better business decisions, feedback powers our own growth and innovation, too.”

Even as the company unveiled a rebrand in August, Sogolytics reviews have been consistently positive. From recognition as a Leader in the G2 Summer 2022 Grid® Report to badges like “Users Love Us” and other honors, user experience ratings continue to demonstrate the company’s commitment to customer success.

“One thing I love in reading these reviews and hearing from our clients is just how different their use cases are, but how our platform gives them the flexibility to meet their goals,” shared Sogolytics VP of Success Melissa Krut. “We’re growing with our partners, and we’re all learning along the way!”

Beyond continuous product growth, Sogolytics is set to continue growing its market presence and thought leadership as a full-cycle feedback and experience management software provider. To learn more about how Sogolytics can help support your team’s success, request a free demo.

Founded on the belief that better data leads to better decisions, Sogolytics, formerly SoGoSurvey, is on a mission to help make that data accessible to more teams. From customer experience initiatives to employee engagement and all points between, Sogolytics enables organizations to collect the feedback they need to make a difference while having their back every step of the way.

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Ushur, the leader in AI-powered Customer Experience Automation (CXA), announced its healthcare listing is now available in AWS Marketplace, a curated digital catalog from Amazon Web Services (AWS) that customers can use to find, buy, deploy and manage third-party software, data and services to build and run their businesses. The no-code Ushur platform lets healthcare enterprises rapidly design and deploy automated, personalized member, patient and high-volume business to business (B2B) experiences. The AWS Marketplace listing makes incorporating Ushur into your technology stack easier than ever.

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The scale, security and resiliency of AWS is instrumental in providing the ability for organizations to modernize and provide new and innovative customer experiences. Ushur’s perspective on customer experiences is that building them should be as easy as using them, and its new availability in AWS Marketplace is just one more way for enterprise information technology (IT) departments to increase velocity when partnering with Ushur in the healthcare sector.

Ushur VP of Partnerships Bruce Holbert said: “Patient and member experiences built by health plans, payers and providers can be big lifts for any IT group to handle on their own. Listing Ushur in AWS Marketplace shortens the process of acquiring a new technology into the healthcare ecosystem and gives our healthcare clients the chance to easily and compliantly design the member experiences we’ve already seen be so impactful in the market.”

“By leveraging AWS, we are helping to empower healthcare IT teams. Ushur brings speed and velocity to deliver key business objectives,” said Ushur CEO Simha Sadasiva. “Enterprises across the whole of healthcare want to leverage and deploy technological solutions to create the culture of digital-first companies. Ushur has created one of the most comprehensive platforms for no-code, and automation to help bridge the gap between automating customer conversations and the resulting back-office knowledge work, in one single platform.”

Ushur’s CXA Platform provides non-technical citizen developers with the products and tools they need to drastically improve the engagements between their company and end-consumers. In a market where everyone has access to world-class products designed by digital-native companies, a high-quality customer experience is a requirement and often the difference between retaining and losing customers. Now, building better experiences easily and cost effectively is more important than ever.

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The Houston Rockets and GameOn Technology, the developers of the industry-leading conversational AI experience, announced  that the official team chat application is now available on the Rockets website, within the official team application and Facebook Messenger.

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The Rockets chat experience will cover the entirety of the fan journey. This new platform is a consolidated channel for Rockets fans seeking content related to ticketing, retail, in-arena and guest experience. The experience will help amplify existing Rockets properties including direct access to their shop through seamless integrations. In addition to automating the Rockets knowledge base and supporting fan service and support features, GameOn’s exclusive relationship with the NBA will allow for API connectivity with the Rockets’ Chat, providing live scoring updates, team and player stats, videos, news, league standings, and much more. Fans can even personalize their experience by selecting and following their favorite players to get custom content.

“GameOn’s ChatOS platform offers a one-of-a-kind experience for leading teams and brands looking to better engage and support their fans in a variety of channels,” said Richard Cheng, President of GameOn Technology. “Teams like the Rockets are now able to save time and resources while still providing instantaneous answers to fan inquiries while proactively delivering highlights, news, and other content based on fan preferences, around the clock. Even better, through conversational data collection, teams are able to build a robust internal database to better engage and anticipate fan needs over time in the long run.”

“Working with GameOn Technology has been a smooth and streamlined process,” said Rockets Vice President of Digital Marketing Paul Suarez. “Thanks to the efforts of GameOn, we were able to get a comprehensive chat experience up and running across multiple channels with minimal strain on our own staff. In addition to supporting Rockets fans with team inquiries, we’re excited to say this integration also extends the scope of the project to provide concert and event attendees with everything they need to know about visiting Toyota Center.”

The Rockets chat experience will be equipped to answer questions for any Toyota Center events, and any and all things Rockets. It is now available on a multitude of channels including the Rockets/Toyota Center mobile app and the Rockets Website, coming soon to the Toyota Center Website bringing extensive content to where the fans are.

This new chat experience is an extension of GameOn Technology’s relationship with the NBA with the company having exclusive rights to NBA content across chat. For customer-obsessed and digital-first businesses, GameOn develops conversational AI solutions that create robust and personalized audience engagement across the customer life cycle.

The Houston Rockets chat experience is built on ChatOS, GameOn’s proprietary end-to-end development and integration platform designed specifically for the future of messaging and voice applications. The industry-leading technology streamlines the deployment of robust, content-driven, premium conversational experiences. ChatOS connects directly to brands’ Content Management Systems (CMS), data sources and API feeds, allowing them to effortlessly deploy content across a wide array of platforms and applications through highly engaging chat experiences.

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Emplifi, the leading customer experience platform, released social data highlighting a significant rise in growth and activity for finance influencers on Instagram and YouTube between January and August, 2022. According to Emplifi’s social insights, finance influencers published more than five times as many videos on YouTube and gained nearly double the number of subscribers compared to other influencers on the platform. Finance influencers on Instagram experienced similar growth, gaining more followers than all other influencers and publishing more than double the number of posts as other influencers.

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“The primary takeaway from our research is that finance influencers are experiencing a substantial rise in popularity. The amount of content they are producing is outpacing all other influencers, which is likely helping drive exponential audience growth”

“The primary takeaway from our research is that finance influencers are experiencing a substantial rise in popularity. The amount of content they are producing is outpacing all other influencers, which is likely helping drive exponential audience growth,” said Zarnaz Arlia, Chief Marketing Officer, Emplifi.

As part of its analysis, Emplifi looked at finance influencer subscriber growth on YouTube and follower growth on Instagram, breaking down median growth rate by the influencer’s account size. Emplifi also looked at the number of videos and posts published by finance influencers on YouTube and Instagram and engagement numbers so far this year, comparing finance influencer data to all other influencers on the respective platforms.

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