ICMI

By | Date Published: June 29, 2026 - Last Updated June 29, 2026 | Comments Ask a room of leaders what will transform their business this year and most will say AI. Ask which problem it solves, and the answer is high-level: deflection of contacts, cut cost and improve the customer experience. We’ve heard this for decades as we chased these same goals by investing in self-service. So, the question is: what is really new? What is new is the technology itself.

By | Date Published: June 25, 2026 - Last Updated June 25, 2026 | Comments The best contact centers have earned organizational influence because they improve how the business listens, learns, simplifies and adapts. ICMI co-founder, Brad Cleveland, has written about the contact center's strategic value and how the best organizations are thoughtfully redesigning how humans and AI work together, and increasingly, the contact center is helping lead that conversation.

Jump to main content By | Date Published: June 22, 2026 - Last Updated June 22, 2026 | Comments When most leaders hear the term workforce optimization (WFO), they think of forecasting, scheduling, quality monitoring, coaching and performance management. All are important. In fact, they are essential capabilities for any customer service organization that wants to perform at a high level. Yet many organizations are optimizing the wrong things.

By | Date Published: June 15, 2026 - Last Updated June 15, 2026 | Comments Process improvement has always been about one thing: making work better. Yet somewhere along the way, many organizations started measuring improvement only in speed, efficiency and cost reduction. Today, with AI accelerating change across every industry, there is a growing temptation to believe faster automatically means better. It doesn’t.

By | Date Published: June 09, 2026 - Last Updated June 09, 2026 | Comments Every contact center measures CSAT for its customers. Every interaction gets a survey, every dip gets a meeting. But who measures the workforce team? Forecasters deliver to schedulers. Schedulers deliver to operations. Real-time delivers to floor leaders. Every handoff is a service moment, and in most centers, nobody is asking whether the service is any good. Four years ago, we started asking.

Jump to main content By | Date Published: June 08, 2026 - Last Updated June 08, 2026 | Comments Most contact centers treat their IVR as a static tool. It does the job of routing calls and playing pre-recorded messages, and that’s it. That is the problem! Given that today’s customers have expectations that are immediate, dynamic and self-service driven, this approach creates friction. It’s slow to update, expensive to maintain and disconnected from real-time customer needs. The result?

By | Date Published: June 03, 2026 - Last Updated June 03, 2026 | Comments Walk into most contact centers struggling with high attrition and low engagement, and you'll hear variations of the same explanation: the training wasn't thorough enough, the supervisors need to coach better, the onboarding was rushed, the team just needs more development. These are reasonable things to look at. They are rarely where the problem actually starts.

Jump to main content By | Date Published: June 02, 2026 - Last Updated June 02, 2026 | Comments As workplace expectations evolve, the future of work calls CX leaders to cultivate human-centered belonging that goes beyond performance metrics. True belonging is built by cultivating an intentional, inclusive employee experience in which agents feel valued, seen, understood and respected.

By | Date Published: May 28, 2026 - Last Updated May 28, 2026 | Comments By every measure most contact centers still report on, the call that turned a Chicago bank into international news was a success. That tells you something about the scorecard. When Father Tom McCarthy told a roomful of parishioners in Naperville that Pope Leo XIV had been hung up on by his Chicago bank, nobody in the audience expected the anecdote to go viral.

By | Date Published: May 27, 2026 - Last Updated May 27, 2026 | Comments Alignment is one of the most powerful forces in any organization when it is done well. I often use water as the analogy. When water moves in the same unified direction, it can become powerful enough to sweep away buildings. When streamlined and concentrated even further, it can cut through rock.