Contact Center Show

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?