Customer experience has evolved in exciting ways in the past few years. Michael Iacobucci, CEO at Interactions Corporation, cites two major reasons for this industry-wide evolution: the increasingly critical need for better customer experiences as a brand differentiator, and the AI advancement to enable those experiences. According to a recent survey, 75% of customers say they will pay more to do business with a company that provides good CX. "Exceptional customer service is not optional for today's businesses," Iacobucci said. "In order to succeed, CX must be a top priority."

Mike Iacobucci wants to help you stop screaming at customer service agents--specifically, the automated ones that misunderstand what you say or require an endless series of button pushes to complete a simple task. Iacobucci is president and CEO of Interactions, a company that sells a new kind of interactive voice-response software for customer-care phone systems. With its software, instead of having to go through an interminable series of push-button choices or stick to overly simple verbal commands, you can talk just as you would to a human representative--and, surprisingly, it actually works. Interactions' software is, hopefully, more than a solution to impossibly annoying automated support systems. Rather than relying entirely on software to handle calls, Interactions automatically hands speech that its software can't cope with over to human agents, who select an appropriate response.