Bots vs Humans vs Bots

We've all heard it. We've probably said it ourselves: "The best customer service interaction is the one that never happened."But what if that conventional wisdom is wrong?This week on The Contact Center Show, Amas Tenumah and Bob Furniss challenge one of the industry's most accepted assumptions: that customers don't want to talk to companies.Maybe customers don't hate conversations. Maybe they hate the hold times, endless menus, verification questions, transfers, and friction we've built around those conversations.Consider this: Airlines give their most valuable customers easier access to live agents. If human interaction has no value, why is access to it treated as a premium benefit?Amas and Bob explore what happens when contact centers are designed around eliminating conversations rather than creating valuable ones.In this episode:The myth of the unwanted conversation: Why customers' preference for self-service may reflect frustration rather than genuine preference.The concierge thought experiment: Would customers still avoid calling if a knowledgeable human answered immediately and could solve their problems?The value of talking to customers: How eliminating routine interactions can also eliminate opportunities to understand customer needs and uncover business opportunities.When automation gets it wrong: Why a roadside assistance call shouldn't involve navigating endless menus when someone is stranded.The premium-service contradiction: Why companies provide their best customers with greater human access while telling everyone else to use self-service.Trust your customers: If someone has gone through the trouble of calling, perhaps they've already tried your website and app.The coming consumer AI conflict: Why companies increasingly resist customers using their own AI agents, even as businesses automate their interactions with consumers.The central question isn't how many customer conversations you can eliminate.It's which conversations are worth having—and how you make those conversations easier.A conversation about friction, trust, automation, and why the contact center of the future might need more human interaction, not less.

In 1982, General Motors shut down its Fremont assembly plant, notorious for poor quality, absenteeism, and dysfunction. When Toyota helped reopen the plant under new management, it rehired much of the same workforce. The results were dramatically different.Same people. Different leadership. Different results.This week, Amas Tenumah and Bob Furniss ask an uncomfortable question: Are we running our contact centers like the old GM plant?From rigid attendance policies and obsessive handle-time monitoring to requiring supervisor approval for a $50 credit, contact centers have built entire management systems around the assumption that employees can't be trusted.And when a handful of employees abuse the system, leadership often responds by creating another rule for everyone.Bob argues that the problem isn't necessarily the metrics. It's the absence of individual coaching and the unwillingness to address poor performance directly. He also makes a surprisingly radical suggestion about attendance policies that leaves Amas momentarily speechless.The conversation explores the difference between accountability and control, why blanket policies are easier than actual leadership, and what happens when rules designed for your worst employees eventually punish your best.Same people, different results: What the GM–Toyota Fremont turnaround teaches us about leadership and trust.The tyranny of the exception: Why organizations punish hundreds of employees for the behavior of a few.Coaching versus control: Why changing a system setting is easier than having a difficult conversation.When quality assurance becomes absurd: Bob shares a story about his son receiving a zero quality score despite providing excellent service.The attendance policy debate: Should three absences automatically cost someone their job, regardless of circumstances?The hidden cost of rigid policies: How rules designed to stop abuse can strip managers of the ability to exercise judgment.Accountability without micromanagement: Why trusting employees doesn't mean abandoning standards or performance metrics.Are your policies written for the employees you trust or the employees you're afraid of?Because eventually, the rules you created for your worst employees will be enforced against your best ones.And when that happens, don't blame the policy. Blame the leadership that created it.00:00 – Welcome and catching up00:59 – The Fremont factory: Same workers, radically different results03:10 – Why contact centers operate on distrust06:01 – Do employees really need constant monitoring?08:52 – Why leaders punish everyone instead of coaching a few11:32 – Bob's story: Excellent service, zero quality score14:00 – What would we change if we ran a contact center today?14:46 – Bob challenges traditional attendance policies17:31 – When company policy punishes employees during life's worst moments19:26 – Are we writing policies for the worst offenders?20:23 – Leadership matters more than another ruleThe Contact Center Show with Amas Tenumah and Bob Furniss challenges conventional thinking about customer service, contact center leadership, employee experience, and the future of the industry.Subscribe for conversations that question how we've always done things—and whether we should keep doing them.

Most contact center agents hate customer surveys. And for good reason.A customer is furious about a company policy, a delayed shipment, or a broken process. The agent does everything right. The customer leaves a terrible survey. And somehow, the agent gets punished.We've spent decades measuring customer satisfaction while making the people serving those customers miserable.But what if surveys could actually help agents instead of being used against them?This week, Amas Tenumah and Bob Furniss welcome Scott Thomas from Proponicy to challenge everything we think we know about customer feedback, quality assurance, and the role of AI in the contact center.Scott makes a surprising claim: At many of his company's client organizations, agents actually love the feedback they're receiving.Naturally, we had questions.In this episode:Why agents hate surveys: How companies routinely punish employees for problems they have no authority to fix.The simplest survey fix nobody uses: Separating satisfaction with the company from satisfaction with the human who helped you.What happens when customers know an agent will read their feedback: Why asking customers to help a specific person improve can change the conversation.The QA contradiction: What happens when quality assurance says an agent failed but the customer says the agent was fantastic?AI evaluating 100% of calls: Could comprehensive, evidence-based evaluations be fairer than judging someone on a handful of randomly selected interactions?Coaching instead of punishment: Turning customer feedback into recognition, practical coaching, and continuous improvement.The end of after-call work? How AI-generated notes can free agents to focus on customers instead of typing while they talk.AI that helps humans instead of replacing them: A different vision for automation in an industry obsessed with reducing headcount.The bigger question:We've built entire systems to measure agents, monitor agents, score agents, and correct agents.But how much of that effort actually makes them better at helping customers?Perhaps the problem was never that customers weren't giving us enough feedback. Perhaps it was what we chose to do with it.About our guestScott Thomas is with Proponicy, a company focused on customer feedback, agent performance, quality monitoring, and AI-powered contact center improvement.Website: https://proponicy.comListen to The Contact Center Show with Amas Tenumah and Bob Furniss for an unscripted conversation about what needs to change in customer service.#CustomerService #ContactCenter #CustomerExperience #CX #EmployeeExperience #AI #QualityAssurance

summaryIn this episode, Amas Tenumah and Bob Furniss explore the rapidly evolving world of AI, chatbots, and their implications for contact centers. They discuss real-world experiments with AI agents, the future of customer service, and how businesses can prepare for a world where bots may replace human agents. key topicsAI and chatbots in contact centersReal-world AI experiments with MuseImplications of AI replacing human agentsCustomer experience in a bot-driven worldBusiness strategies for AI adoption

Email was supposed to make customer service cheaper.It didn’t.It was supposed to make it more efficient.It didn’t.Instead, we built a channel where customers write essays explaining their problems, wait hours or days for a response, answer a follow-up question, wait again, and somehow call this progress.Maybe it’s time to kill customer service email.This week on The Contact Center Show, Bob and I get into that argument, plus:Salesforce getting very serious about the contact center.Why digital workforce management may finally be moving beyond forcing phone-era math onto email and chat.Why the back office might be a better place to spend your next technology dollar than another chatbot.And why the contact center technology market has become one giant game of Hungry Hungry Hippos where every vendor suddenly claims to do everything.Also, naturally, we end by discussing whether AI is going to kill us all.A normal episode.#CustomerService #ContactCenter #CX #AI #Dreamforce

This episode cuts through the gap between what executives are saying about AI and what is actually happening inside contact centers. Companies are reporting major efficiency gains, yet contact volume and contact-center employment haven’t collapsed. Amas and Bob unpack the contradiction: pent-up customer demand, harder calls reaching humans, rising handle times, and ROI stories that are far more complicated than “AI saved us 30%.”They also tackle the growing anxiety workers—particularly younger workers—have about AI taking their jobs. Their argument isn’t that AI won’t transform the industry. It will. The advantage increasingly belongs to people who understand what the technology can do, what it cannot do, and where human judgment still matters.Then the conversation turns to Dreamforce and Salesforce’s AI future. If the interface increasingly becomes an AI assistant sitting in front of Salesforce, does Salesforce risk moving from the center of the user experience to infrastructure running quietly in the background? Bob adds an important Dreamforce reality check: what gets announced on stage can still be nine to twelve months away from becoming something customers can actually use.In this episode: AI efficiency versus actual headcount; why better service can create more demand rather than less; the hidden customer demand traditional contact-center metrics miss; what leaders should tell employees worried about AI; why judgment may become more valuable as automation improves; Salesforce, Claude and the rise of “headless” enterprise software; and why you shouldn’t confuse a Dreamforce announcement with a deployable product.The central question: If AI really is making the contact center dramatically more efficient, why aren’t there dramatically fewer humans working in it?

AI was supposed to replace contact center workers. Instead, there are more people working in contact centers today than there were at the beginning of the year.That does not mean AI failed. In many areas, it has exceeded expectations.In this season finale, Amas and Bob examine what they got right, what changed their minds, and what contact center leaders should expect next. They discuss why AI is changing frontline work rather than eliminating it, how automation is exposing leadership failures, and why the agents who remain will handle increasingly difficult work.They also explore where AI is already delivering—particularly in quality assurance, knowledge management, and customer self-service—and why even impressive bots still fail when companies deny them the information or authority required to solve real problems.The next phase will not be about acquiring more technology. It will be about managing what companies have already bought, determining where humans still matter, and separating genuine guidance from vendors selling both the product and the consulting required to make it work.Plus, Amas and Bob revisit their position on customer surveys, predict the issues that will dominate the rest of the year, and reflect on The Contact Center Show’s rise to number 22 among Apple’s management podcasts.In this episode:Why AI has changed contact center jobs without eliminating themWhat Bob learned from two very different AI service experiencesWhy better automation creates harder work for human agentsHow weak bots expose leadership, data, and authority problemsWhere AI has exceeded expectationsWhy customer surveys may still have value when used to develop agentsThe growing importance of AI management and governanceWhy technology companies are becoming consulting companiesThe danger of buying more features than an organization can useWhat The Contact Center Show should tackle next seasonThe Contact Center Show will return at the end of September. Until then, explore the archive and send Amas or Bob your feedback on LinkedIn.

In this episode, Amas Tenumah and Bob Furniss explore the evolving landscape of customer service, tiered service models, and the role of technology in delivering personalized experiences. They discuss how companies can strategically implement paid and differentiated service levels to enhance customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. takeawaysCompanies should consider tiered service models to meet diverse customer needs.Charging for premium support can recoup costs and improve service quality.Operational execution of tiered support requires careful planning and training.Technology enables effective routing and personalized service levels.Customer expectations vary based on loyalty and payment for support.Chapters00:00 Introduction and casual chat about sports4222:10:50 Pivot to service: Should companies charge for attended support?6972:11:09 Examples of tiered service in airlines and hospitality9388:51:23 Consumer perspective on paying for better service11916:38:11 Operational challenges of implementing tiered support15472:11:43 Technology solutions for differentiated customer routing215277:45:28 Historical context of tiered service in business227499:58:49 Recommendations for adopting tiered service models279166:39:06 Operational considerations and workforce planning353611:06:28 Ensuring customer satisfaction and avoiding queue degradation375277:46:37 Closing remarks and World Cup discussion

Customer surveys were once the backbone of quality programs. Today, response rates are collapsing, customers are ignoring them, and contact centers are left wondering how to measure performance without reliable feedback.Fresh from Customer Contact Week in Las Vegas, Amas shares a conversation that kept coming up among industry leaders: transactional surveys are failing. Some organizations have seen response rates drop nearly 90%, creating real problems for coaching, quality scoring, bonuses, and operational decision-making.Bob and Amas explore:Why surveys became the default measure of customer experience.Whether survey fatigue has finally reached a breaking point.Why AI-powered quality monitoring may be replacing traditional Voice of the Customer programs.The hidden flaw in most customer surveys.How changing who the feedback is for—from the company to the individual agent—can dramatically improve participation.The conversation also tackles a bigger question: if customers are giving you their time and feedback, what responsibility do companies have to actually use it?If your contact center still depends on post-interaction surveys, this episode is a timely look at what comes next.

The more important question might be: why are we still struggling with the same training problems we've had for twenty years?In this episode, we tackle a challenge facing nearly every contact center: new hire training that produces high attrition, slow ramp times, and inconsistent performance.The conversation started with a client losing roughly half of its new hires during training and another portion during nesting. Despite new technology, the outcomes felt painfully familiar.We explored some uncomfortable questions:Are organizations hiring the right people for the job?Do recruiters actually understand the roles they're filling?Are training programs teaching agents what to know instead of how to find answers?Why are contact centers still trying to memorize information that changes every few weeks?How much time do leaders spend observing their own training programs?Bob argues that many training failures begin before day one, with hiring processes that prioritize filling seats instead of finding the right fit.We also discuss one of the biggest missed opportunities in modern training:AI is changing how agents work, but many training organizations haven't changed how they train.As AI-powered knowledge systems, agent assist tools, and automation become standard, training leaders need a seat at the table. Yet in many organizations, training teams are disconnected from the technology decisions that will fundamentally reshape agent performance.One of the biggest insights from the discussion:The real opportunity isn't using AI to automate training.It's using AI to automate the things training used to spend time on so trainers can focus on the skills that matter most:Building rapportProblem solvingJudgmentDe-escalationRelationship-buildingHandling difficult conversationsTechnology changes.The fundamentals don't.Topics discussed:Why new hire attrition remains so highHiring mistakes that create training failuresTeaching agents how to find answers versus memorizing answersThe role of nesting and floor supportWhy training content quickly becomes obsoleteThe disconnect between training teams and AI initiativesAgent assist and the future of onboardingTough skills versus technical skillsWhy fundamentals still matter in modern contact centersHow AI should reshape training priorities