New Year Predictions — What 2025 Got Wrong, What 2026 Gets Right
Release Date: 01/13/2026
Stop Chasing Vanity Metrics
Contact Center Show
Most customer experience goals are meaningless. In this episode, Bob Furniss and Amas Tenumah dismantle the way contact centers set annual CX metrics and explain why leaders keep optimizing numbers that customers neither notice nor value. Using insights from a John Goodman article on CX goal-setting, the conversation exposes the disconnect between executives, customers, and frontline teams—and why automation, deflection, and “respectable” percentage improvements often make service worse, not better. This episode is about shifting from internally convenient metrics to customer-impactful...
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New Year Predictions — What 2025 Got Wrong, What 2026 Gets Right
Contact Center Show
2025 predictions — graded AI-powered knowledge Bob’s 2025 prediction: AI would dramatically improve knowledge in contact centers. Result: Early but mostly wrong. The technology moved, but the data did not. Knowledge bases were too fragmented, too dirty, and too poorly governed for AI to meaningfully improve frontline work. The industry instead spent another year chasing bots, automation, and surface-level “AI assistants.” Grade: C+ The failure was not AI. It was the state of enterprise knowledge. Remote work reversal Bob’s 2025 prediction: Work-from-home would shrink and...
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HOLD — The Suffering Economy of Customer Service
Contact Center Show
Amas Tenumah explains why customer service is not “broken” but intentionally designed to fail. Drawing on decades inside contact centers, historical research, and real corporate incentives, he argues that long waits, deflection, and automation-first strategies are features—not bugs. The conversation dismantles common CX myths, challenges executive complacency, and frames consumer behavior as the only force capable of triggering real change. Core Themes The Suffering Economy of Customer Service: When service is universally bad across industries, it’s systemic. Incentives—not...
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Empowering Sales Teams through AI
Contact Center Show
Summary The conversation explores the integration of AI in sales, focusing on how it enhances customer engagement and improves sales efficiency. Bob Furniss discusses the importance of using data to empower salespeople rather than reducing their numbers, emphasizing a customer-centric approach to AI in sales. Takeaways AI can enhance customer engagement in sales. The focus should be on empowering salespeople with data. AI is not just about reducing costs but improving efficiency. Sales strategies should prioritize customer needs. Data-driven insights can lead to better sales...
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Unlocking Value in Contact Centers with Brad Cleveland
Contact Center Show
Summary In this conversation, Amas Tenumah, Bob Furniss and Brad Cleveland discusses the three levels of value that contact centers create: efficiency, customer satisfaction and loyalty, and strategic insights provided by AI. He emphasizes the importance of these levels in improving products, services, and processes. Takeaways there's three levels of value that contact centers create Level one is efficiency customer satisfaction, loyalty, if we do a good job it's the strategic insight that AI can provide it can still tell us, hey, here's a trend I'm seeing Here's an opportunity to improve...
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Stacy Sherman: Why 'Satisfied' Is the New 'Fine' And 12 Reasons That's Not Good Enough"
Contact Center Show
Low-Cost, High-Impact CX Improvements The Power of Language: Transform "I can't" into "How can we" Shift from "I have to" to "We get to" Being "impeccable with your word" (inspired by The Four Agreements) Words trigger emotional responses that shape customer perception Getting CX Buy-In Across Organizations The Alignment Problem: CX initiatives fail when metrics aren't shared across departments Success came when executives adopted the same CX metrics as the CX team Without shared goals, customer insights get shelved with "we'll get to it later" The Pilot Program Strategy: Start small...
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Live from ICMI Conference - HR as a Contact Center with Bianca
Contact Center Show
Episode Summary Broadcasting live from the ICMI conference in Orlando, Amas and Bob discuss the evolving role of AI in contact centers, the ongoing struggle for strategic recognition, and welcome special guest Bianca, who shares her unique perspective on running HR as a contact center at Michigan State University.
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How Contact Centers Became the Corporate Nervous System (Live from ICMI w Daniel)
Contact Center Show
Host: Bob Furniss (without co-host Amos) Guest: Daniel Thomas, Informa Location: ICMI Conference Expo Floor Guest Background Daniel Thomas approaches contact center industry from a research background Surveys audiences and writes research reports Has "front row seat" to industry transformation Conducts the annual State of the Contact Center survey About the State of the Contact Center Report Comprehensive benchmark study surveying contact center professionals Covers multiple verticals including: Training and skills Compensation and salary Technology use Leadership perceptions Strategy ...
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Navigating Complexity in Contact Centers (live show w Luke Jamieson)
Contact Center Show
Summary In this conversation, Amas, Luke and Bob explore the evolving complexity of contact centers, challenging the notion that they are becoming simpler. They emphasizes that while the intention may be to simplify processes, the reality is that sophistication often leads to increased complexity. They also highlights the reliance on outdated metrics, such as those managed in Excel, which can contribute to agent burnout and friction with customers. They advocate for a shift towards more effective lead metrics to enhance the overall efficiency and satisfaction in contact centers. Takeaways...
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Is Salesforce and CRM in trouble?
Contact Center Show
Summary In this conversation, Amas Tenumah and Bob Furniss discuss the evolution of contact centers, the impact of CRM systems like Salesforce, and the role of AI in enhancing agent performance. They reflect on the historical context of CRM, the challenges faced by agents, and the future of customer service technology, particularly focusing on the Agent Force initiative. The discussion also touches on the sentiment within the Salesforce community and the potential for new competitors in the market. Takeaways Salesforce has become a dominant player in the CRM space. The evolution...
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2025 predictions — graded
AI-powered knowledge
Bob’s 2025 prediction: AI would dramatically improve knowledge in contact centers.
Result: Early but mostly wrong.
The technology moved, but the data did not. Knowledge bases were too fragmented, too dirty, and too poorly governed for AI to meaningfully improve frontline work. The industry instead spent another year chasing bots, automation, and surface-level “AI assistants.”
Grade: C+
The failure was not AI. It was the state of enterprise knowledge.
Remote work reversal
Bob’s 2025 prediction: Work-from-home would shrink and revert toward pre-COVID norms.
Result: Correct.
Remote and hybrid work has fallen to within five percentage points of pre-COVID levels. Companies quietly reversed course not because it helped customers or employees, but because leadership never learned how to manage distributed teams.
Hybrid was the worst of both worlds: frontline leaders juggling physical rooms, video calls, and dashboards without the training or structure to do any of it well.
Grade: A
Why remote work collapsed
The reversal was not ideological. It was operational.
Executives defaulted back to what felt controllable: physical presence. Organizations refused to do the hard work of re-engineering leadership, coaching, quality management, and accountability for a distributed workforce. They solved a people problem with proximity.
Amas’ prediction for 2026
Voice comes back.
Digital channels absorbed most of the AI hype: chat, bots, messaging, and self-service. But customers never stopped calling. Voice is where frustration spikes, where trust is tested, and where automation breaks down.
Amas’ call:
2026 will be the year voice reasserts itself as the center of the customer relationship — and the CCaaS market will look radically different by 2027 because of it.
Bob’s prediction for 2026
Data becomes the bottleneck.
AI will only become useful where it has access to clean, structured, reliable data. The industry rushed into AI before fixing the foundations: knowledge, case data, call logs, customer history, and operational context.
2026 will be the year contact centers slow down, audit their data, and rebuild the plumbing that AI actually runs on.
No data. No intelligence.
What the industry is claiming
Analysts and vendors are promising three things for 2026:
• Predictive and proactive service
• Agent empowerment through AI
• Fewer humans in contact centers
Bob and Amas reject the third and remain skeptical of the first two without structural change. The hype assumes AI will replace labor. Reality says AI will expose how broken the systems around labor really are.
Amas’ 2026 wish
Stop calling software “agents.”
For twenty years, “agent” meant a human being doing emotional, cognitive, and relational labor. Rebranding bots as agents erases the workforce and confuses accountability.
Language shapes power. That battle matters.
Bob’s 2026 wish
Focus on the employee.
AI should not be used to replace people. It should be used to remove friction from their work: searching, documenting, switching systems, hunting for answers. Knowledge was always the real use case. The industry just skipped the hard part.
Core takeaway
2025 proved that AI without data, governance, and human-centered design does not transform anything. It only adds noise.
2026 will reward the companies that stop chasing demos and start rebuilding the foundations: voice, knowledge, data, and frontline enablement.
That is where the real disruption will come from.