Advice from a Call Center Geek!

Send us Fan MailWhat happens when AI bots start calling your contact center on behalf of your customers? In this live solo episode, Tom shares his honest, unscripted thoughts on machine customers: bots asking for discounts, checking balances, negotiating bills and canceling subscriptions. He thinks that in the next 12 to 18 months, more than half of your call volume could be some kind of AI bot, and he walks through the questions nobody has answered yet.In this episode:Gartner's prediction that 20% of inbound contacts would come from machine customers by 2026, and where things actually standGood bots introduce themselves and dangerous ones won't. How do you unmask them in your IVR?Routing: bots don't care if they wait, humans do. Should AI talk to AI while humans talk to humans?Why Erlang C calculators, abandon rate and service level break when bots sit in the queueThe legal mess: who's liable when a customer's bot agrees to something the customer didn't want?Which industries get hit first: retail, internet and energy, and SaaS subscriptionsTom doesn't claim to have the answers yet. If you hear people say they do, question it.Through Expivia Digital, Tom works with contact center leaders on CCaaS platform selection, AI implementations, and NICE Studio and integration services. Same honest, vendor-neutral advice you hear on the Call Center Geek podcast, applied directly to your specific operational challenges. Schedule a consultation at ExpiviaDigital.com to discuss your contact center technology strategy.Follow Tom: @tlaird_expiviaJoin our Facebook Call Center Community: www.facebook.com/callcentergeekConnect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tlairdexpivia/Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@callcenter_geekLinkedIn Group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/9041993/Watch us: Advice from a Call Center Geek YouTube ChannelOttoQA: try.ottoqa.comExpivia: Expiviausa.com  Through Expivia Digital, Tom works with contact center leaders on CCaaS platform selection, AI implementations, and NICE Studio and integration services. Same honest, vendor-neutral advice you hear on the Call Center Geek podcast, applied directly to your specific operational challenges. Schedule a consultation at ExpiviaDigital.com to discuss your contact center technology strategy. Click here:expiviadigital.comSupport the showFollow Tom: @tlaird_expiviaJoin our Facebook Call Center Community: www.facebook.com/callcentergeekConnect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tlairdexpivia/Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@callcenter_geekLinkedin Group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/9041993/Watch us: Advice from a Call Center Geek Youtube ChannelOttoQA: try.ottoqa.comExpivia: Expiviausa.com

Send us Fan MailYour QA score is the least important number in your contact center. I mean that. The 84 your analyst gave that call tells you almost nothing. Think about what that score actually is. One person. Listening to maybe 2% of your calls. Grading against a form somebody built years ago. It hurts your agents. They get judged on a handful of random calls. One bad day becomes their reputation. It hurts your customers. The problems that matter are hiding in the 98% nobody heard. It hurts you. You spend hours arguing over whether something was a 3 or a 4. That time should go to coaching. And it hurts your company. Leadership sees an 84 and thinks things are fine. They aren’t. Nobody can see it. The score was never the point. What happened on the call is the point.  Stop managing to a number. Start managing to what’s actually happening with your data.In this episode I show you how! Through Expivia Digital, Tom works with contact center leaders on CCaaS platform selection, AI implementations, and NICE Studio and integration services. Same honest, vendor-neutral advice you hear on the Call Center Geek podcast, applied directly to your specific operational challenges. Schedule a consultation at ExpiviaDigital.com to discuss your contact center technology strategy. Click here:expiviadigital.comSupport the showFollow Tom: @tlaird_expiviaJoin our Facebook Call Center Community: www.facebook.com/callcentergeekConnect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tlairdexpivia/Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@callcenter_geekLinkedin Group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/9041993/Watch us: Advice from a Call Center Geek Youtube ChannelOttoQA: try.ottoqa.comExpivia: Expiviausa.com

Send us Fan MailThe onslaught of customer AI agents.In the next 9 to 12 months, your customer will be able to say “hey Siri, call my subscription company and cancel my plan, then chat with the ABC airline and move my flight from Tuesday to Wednesday.”The AI agent launches the call or chat. It acts on their behalf.Think about what that does to your cx volume. Interactions are going to skyrocket. This is when and why AI in your contact center stops being optional. You’ll need it just to handle the sheer volume of bots coming at you.So the question becomes whether you have an AI front door. Something that can answer these calls, do the basic triage, and hand off to a human only when it actually needs one.You can still have human service for human callers but you will need Ai to handle the Ai. IMO Sla will become less and less of a core metric as bots will wait in queue and won’t care. How we operate will change too. All you centers with retention lines and agents. How do you downsell or save a bot told to cancel?And it’s going to be really bad at first. Customers will not be happy with the bot outcomes. They will call you back to try to fix. It will get better but it’s going to be a rocky start. Volume are going up. This is one of the main things we’re thinking about at Expivia. And it’s exactly what we’re getting ready to help our BPO customers handle.The bots are coming. The centers that planned for them win. The ones that didn’t get buried. Through Expivia Digital, Tom works with contact center leaders on CCaaS platform selection, AI implementations, and NICE Studio and integration services. Same honest, vendor-neutral advice you hear on the Call Center Geek podcast, applied directly to your specific operational challenges. Schedule a consultation at ExpiviaDigital.com to discuss your contact center technology strategy. Click here:expiviadigital.comSupport the showFollow Tom: @tlaird_expiviaJoin our Facebook Call Center Community: www.facebook.com/callcentergeekConnect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tlairdexpivia/Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@callcenter_geekLinkedin Group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/9041993/Watch us: Advice from a Call Center Geek Youtube ChannelOttoQA: try.ottoqa.comExpivia: Expiviausa.com

Send us Fan MailEverything I've learned about AI QA after 2 years of building OttoQA and being one of the first companies to fully automate contact center quality assurance with AI.I'm breaking down the biggest lessons, the biggest mistakes I see people making, and what actually works when you're implementing AI powered QA in a contact center.I cover why you should never reinvent your scorecard on day one, what "false hustle" questions are and why they're killing your QA program, why most AI QA companies won't publish their accuracy rate, how statistical sampling means you don't need to score 100% of calls, why human QA evaluators disagree 30 to 40% of the time and how AI fixes that, how aggregate data turns QA from a scoring exercise into a real coaching tool, and the REDO feature we built at OttoQA that lets agents practice failed calls with an AI customer.30 years of contact center operations. 2 years of building an AI QA platform. This is what I know. Through Expivia Digital, Tom works with contact center leaders on CCaaS platform selection, AI implementations, and NICE Studio and integration services. Same honest, vendor-neutral advice you hear on the Call Center Geek podcast, applied directly to your specific operational challenges. Schedule a consultation at ExpiviaDigital.com to discuss your contact center technology strategy. Click here:expiviadigital.comSupport the showFollow Tom: @tlaird_expiviaJoin our Facebook Call Center Community: www.facebook.com/callcentergeekConnect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tlairdexpivia/Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@callcenter_geekLinkedin Group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/9041993/Watch us: Advice from a Call Center Geek Youtube ChannelOttoQA: try.ottoqa.comExpivia: Expiviausa.com

Send us Fan MailMost contact centers still believe scoring more calls means better QA.It doesn’t.In this episode, we start with the Law of Large Numbers and break down why scoring 100% of calls doesn’t give you better insight. It just gives you more work. We talk about where the push for full coverage really comes from. Fear. Compliance pressure. Old spreadsheet thinking. And why that mindset quietly hurts coaching, accuracy, and confidence.We also cover what the data actually shows, how statistical sampling works in the real world, where AI helps and where it doesn’t, and what QA should really be optimizing for.If your QA program feels busy but not effective, this episode will make you rethink how many calls you really need to score. Through Expivia Digital, Tom works with contact center leaders on CCaaS platform selection, AI implementations, and NICE Studio and integration services. Same honest, vendor-neutral advice you hear on the Call Center Geek podcast, applied directly to your specific operational challenges. Schedule a consultation at ExpiviaDigital.com to discuss your contact center technology strategy. Click here:expiviadigital.comSupport the showFollow Tom: @tlaird_expiviaJoin our Facebook Call Center Community: www.facebook.com/callcentergeekConnect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tlairdexpivia/Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@callcenter_geekLinkedin Group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/9041993/Watch us: Advice from a Call Center Geek Youtube ChannelOttoQA: try.ottoqa.comExpivia: Expiviausa.com

Send us Fan MailThis episode is my AI Christmas wish list for CCaaS. Not toys. Not buzzwords. The real AI tools contact centers should already have but don’t. Everyone is focused on making AI talk to customers. That’s missing the point. AI in CX isn’t supposed to just talk. It’s supposed to run the contact center. I break down the biggest opportunities CCaaS platforms are skipping, from AI flow builders you can prompt in plain English, to real-time workforce orchestration, predictive routing that replaces “next available agent,” dashboards built instantly by prompt, in-call coaching that actually helps agents in the moment, and real-time billing with zero surprises. This is a wish list, but it’s not fantasy. This is practical, achievable AI that would make life easier for the people running the floor every day. If you’re tired of AI demos that look good but don’t change operations, this episode is for you. All I want for Christmas is CCaaS AI that actually works. Through Expivia Digital, Tom works with contact center leaders on CCaaS platform selection, AI implementations, and NICE Studio and integration services. Same honest, vendor-neutral advice you hear on the Call Center Geek podcast, applied directly to your specific operational challenges. Schedule a consultation at ExpiviaDigital.com to discuss your contact center technology strategy. Click here:expiviadigital.comSupport the showFollow Tom: @tlaird_expiviaJoin our Facebook Call Center Community: www.facebook.com/callcentergeekConnect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tlairdexpivia/Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@callcenter_geekLinkedin Group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/9041993/Watch us: Advice from a Call Center Geek Youtube ChannelOttoQA: try.ottoqa.comExpivia: Expiviausa.com

Send us Fan MailJoin us for an inside look at Expivia Digital and the current state of contact center technology. We share our 30-year journey from running contact centers to consulting on CCaaS platform selection, AI quality assurance, and NICE CXone implementations. As members of NICE's Executive Advisory Board, we discuss the biggest trends shaping the industry in 2025: usage-based pricing, AI automation, agent experience, and how to cut through vendor promises to find technology that actually delivers ROI. Whether you're evaluating platforms, implementing AI, or trying to optimize your current stack - this is the real talk contact center leaders need to hear.Come check us out at Expiviadigital.com Through Expivia Digital, Tom works with contact center leaders on CCaaS platform selection, AI implementations, and NICE Studio and integration services. Same honest, vendor-neutral advice you hear on the Call Center Geek podcast, applied directly to your specific operational challenges. Schedule a consultation at ExpiviaDigital.com to discuss your contact center technology strategy. Click here:expiviadigital.comSupport the showFollow Tom: @tlaird_expiviaJoin our Facebook Call Center Community: www.facebook.com/callcentergeekConnect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tlairdexpivia/Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@callcenter_geekLinkedin Group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/9041993/Watch us: Advice from a Call Center Geek Youtube ChannelOttoQA: try.ottoqa.comExpivia: Expiviausa.com

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we dig into the Keep Call Centers in America Act and uncover the truth behind the headlines. On the surface, it sounds like a patriotic move to keep jobs here in the U.S., but when you look closer, the story gets more complicated. We break down what the bill actually says, how it could affect American contact centers, and why the reality isn’t as simple as politicians make it sound. We also share our perspective on what really drives growth for U.S. call centers and why legislation alone won’t solve the bigger challenges. If you care about the future of American contact center jobs and want the straight truth without the spin, this episode is for you.  Through Expivia Digital, Tom works with contact center leaders on CCaaS platform selection, AI implementations, and NICE Studio and integration services. Same honest, vendor-neutral advice you hear on the Call Center Geek podcast, applied directly to your specific operational challenges. Schedule a consultation at ExpiviaDigital.com to discuss your contact center technology strategy. Click here:expiviadigital.comSupport the showFollow Tom: @tlaird_expiviaJoin our Facebook Call Center Community: www.facebook.com/callcentergeekConnect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tlairdexpivia/Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@callcenter_geekLinkedin Group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/9041993/Watch us: Advice from a Call Center Geek Youtube ChannelOttoQA: try.ottoqa.comExpivia: Expiviausa.com

Send us Fan MailThis episode sounds as good as it gets — huge thanks to Christopher Irwin-Dudek, VP of Marketing Communications at NICE, for joining me.We dive into a wide-ranging conversation covering:The new leadership vision at NICE and what it means for the futureWhether NICE sees itself as a CCaaS platform, an AI powerhouse, or bothThe evolving role of major CRMs in the contact center AI landscapeAnd a whole lot more behind-the-scenes insight from one of the most influential CX tech companies out thereIf you're in the contact center, customer experience, or enterprise tech space, this is a must-listen. Don’t miss it. Through Expivia Digital, Tom works with contact center leaders on CCaaS platform selection, AI implementations, and NICE Studio and integration services. Same honest, vendor-neutral advice you hear on the Call Center Geek podcast, applied directly to your specific operational challenges. Schedule a consultation at ExpiviaDigital.com to discuss your contact center technology strategy. Click here:expiviadigital.comSupport the showFollow Tom: @tlaird_expiviaJoin our Facebook Call Center Community: www.facebook.com/callcentergeekConnect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tlairdexpivia/Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@callcenter_geekLinkedin Group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/9041993/Watch us: Advice from a Call Center Geek Youtube ChannelOttoQA: try.ottoqa.comExpivia: Expiviausa.com

Send us Fan Mail Everyone’s rushing to add Auto QA. But most are thinking too small. In this episode, I break down what most platforms get wrong, why scoring calls is just the beginning, and what to look for if you actually want impact, not just another dashboard. Before you build your own or sign a contract, listen to this. It’ll change how you see QA, coaching, and the real future of AI in your contact center.  Through Expivia Digital, Tom works with contact center leaders on CCaaS platform selection, AI implementations, and NICE Studio and integration services. Same honest, vendor-neutral advice you hear on the Call Center Geek podcast, applied directly to your specific operational challenges. Schedule a consultation at ExpiviaDigital.com to discuss your contact center technology strategy. Click here:expiviadigital.comSupport the showFollow Tom: @tlaird_expiviaJoin our Facebook Call Center Community: www.facebook.com/callcentergeekConnect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tlairdexpivia/Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@callcenter_geekLinkedin Group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/9041993/Watch us: Advice from a Call Center Geek Youtube ChannelOttoQA: try.ottoqa.comExpivia: Expiviausa.com