It is time to celebrate our industry’s biggest holiday: Customer Service Week. It is a great opportunity to celebrate our people who wow our customers and enhance our brand. What a rewarding and energizing week.
Don’t let it be a once-and-done event, though, right? Let’s carry our messages, feelings of gratitude, and thankfulness forward through the year. It would be a missed opportunity if we put away the decorations and special recipes and we didn’t carry forward our celebrations.
Have a great week in October…and 51 more weeks after that to celebrate our people!
Linda
Table of Contents, October 2026
FEATURE ARTICLE
Home is Where the CX is
By Brendan Read; Q&A with Earl E. Smith Jr.
How Home Telecom transformed its business.
CUSTOMER SERVICE WEEK
The Extra Mile Has Rules
By Mark Pereira
How to best set them up and follow them.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Before AI Becomes the Next IVR
By Mike Aoki and Adam Boelke
How contact center leaders can implement AI properly.
VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER
Enhancing the VOC Process – Part 1
By John Goodman, with Thomas Hollmann, Bill Price, and David Beinhacker
First, building the foundation.
METRICS
When the Audience Is Not Human
By Miki Furman
Why traditional deflection metrics can’t be trusted.
CRM
Is Legacy CRM Holding You Back?
By Michael Ramsey
Here’s what to do about it.
CONVERSATION INTELLIGENCE
The Phone Is Not Dead
By Lee Barth
How to turn conversations into insights.
DATA MANAGEMENT
Contact Center AI Is Inheriting a Data Crisis
By Frank Palermo
Here’s how to manage it.
CONTACT CENTER STRATEGY
What Will You Be Measured On?
By Scott Kendrick
To succeed, you need to treat customer conversations as invaluable assets.
A special thank you to our authors this month for sharing their insights and wisdom: Mike Aoki, Lee Barth, Adam Boelke, Miki Furman, John Goodman, Scott Kendrick, Frank Palermo, Mark Pereira, Michael Ramsey, and Brendan Read.
Sincere appreciation to our vendor community: CallMiner, Centrical, Cognigy, Human Numbers, Khoros, MediaShark, MediaSmith, Modulate, NiCE, NP Digital, Regal, Strategic Contact, SuccessKPI, Walker Sands, Webex, and Xima Software.
