ICMI

By | Date Published: October 05, 2026 - Last Updated October 05, 2026 | Comments There’s something different about a T-shirt with a rock ’n’ roll band or album on it.It isn’t just clothing.It’s a memory you proudly wear. The faded black shirt with a band logo, an album cover or the name of a legendary tour often tells a story. Sometimes,it’s a story that only the person wearing it understands.Maybe you bought it at a concert when you were a teenager.

By | Date Published: September 28, 2026 - Last Updated September 28, 2026 | Comments “We're 30% over volume on this queue.” “What's driving it?” “General inquiries.” I've heard that exchange more times across my career than I can count, in escalations, in leadership updates, in conversations with clients asking what's happening on their line. “General inquiries” sounds like an answer, but it’s not.

By | Date Published: September 23, 2026 - Last Updated September 23, 2026 | Comments Throughout my career, and especially during my travels and time spent working inside organizations, I encountered a familiar workplace phenomenon: The Energy Vampire. Someone whose presence, attitude, behavior, or perspective consistently drains energy, optimism, motivation and enthusiasm from the people around them. They often operate from a place of negativity, pessimism, cynicism or self-interest.

By | Date Published: September 21, 2026 - Last Updated September 21, 2026 | Comments For more than 25 years, I've been brought into contact center and sales organizations to do rapid turnarounds. Usually, something is seriously wrong. Costs are too high. Customers aren't happy. Employees aren't showing up. Technology is outdated. Processes are broken. One of the toughest ones I ever worked on was for more than 2,000 employees. Attrition was running at nearly 400%.

By | Date Published: September 15, 2026 - Last Updated September 15, 2026 | Comments In my recent article, “Is AI the Latest Version of Makeup?,” I explored the blurry line between using AI to polish your work and allowing it to replace your thinking. I also disclosed that AI helped me write the piece. But what does “AI helped” actually mean? I decided to show my receipts. Yep, all 21 pages of them.

By | Date Published: September 14, 2026 - Last Updated September 14, 2026 | Comments There he was. The CEO of our Fortune 500 company was standing at the edge of our contact center floor, unscheduled and unannounced, having come from our corporate headquarters in New Jersey to our operations center in the Midwest. He was smiling as he watched our teams work. I had no idea how long he had been standing there, but as the VP of Operations, I was curious.

By | Date Published: September 08, 2026 - Last Updated September 08, 2026 | Comments Recently, I walked into the meeting with a contact center director. She was concerned that the company’s senior level leaders would see all the wrong things in the numbers. And at first glance, they sure didn’t look good. Average handle time was up. Cost per contact was up. Contacts handled per agent were down. First-contact resolution was down. But she and her contact center team had been working hard on improvements.

By | Date Published: September 01, 2026 - Last Updated September 08, 2026 | Comments As a man, I may not be the right person to speak about this, but it feels like AI may just be the latest version of makeup and/or plastic surgery. Hear me out. There’s a wide spectrum of how people want to present themselves. Some people want to go completely natural with no makeup. Some people love makeup.

By | Date Published: August 31, 2026 - Last Updated August 31, 2026 | Comments Every CX vendor has an agentic AI offering now, including many players you’ve never heard of. With AI evolving so quickly, there is no shortage of choice, and to varying degrees, most any vendor can do the job. That, of course, is the challenge, as you’re only interested in the offerings that are right for your contact center.

By | Date Published: August 30, 2026 - Last Updated August 30, 2026 | Comments I recently witnessed a leadership meeting where an agenda item grew into a major, heated discussion. Should a common customer request be handled entirely by AI, or does a person need to stay in the loop? It was supposed to be a quick decision. Get it wrong one way, and you frustrate customers with unnecessary friction.