Tag Archives: Conferences

The Indispensable Role of CX

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Insights from CCW’s 25-Year Journey

LAST UPDATED: October 28, 2025 at 12:00PM
The Indispensable Role of CX

by Braden Kelley

I recently had the privilege of sitting down with Mario Matulich, President of Customer Management Practice, at Customer Contact Week (CCW) in Nashville. As an organization celebrating its 25th anniversary, CCW has been a critical barometer for the entire customer experience and contact center industry. Our conversation wasn’t just a look back, but a powerful exploration of the strategic mandate facing CX leaders today, particularly how we manage innovation and human-centered change in an era dominated by AI and tightening budgets.

CCW at 25: The Hub for Benchmarking and Breakthroughs

Mario underscored that CCW is far more than just a conference; it’s a living repository of industry knowledge. Professionals attend for actionable takeaways, which primarily fall into three categories: benchmarking performance against industry leaders, learning about new trends (like Generative AI’s impact), and, critically, sourcing the right vendors and capabilities needed to execute their strategies. It’s where leaders come to calibrate their investment strategies and learn how to do more with their finite resources.

Mario MatulichThis pursuit of excellence is driven by a single, powerful market force: The Amazon Effect. As Mario put it, customers no longer judge your experience solely against your industry peers. They expect every single touchpoint with your company to be as seamless, intuitive, and effective as the best experience they’ve had anywhere. This constantly escalating bar for Customer Effort Score (CES) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) makes a complacent CX investment a near-fatal strategic mistake. The customer experience must always be top-tier, or you simply lose the right to compete.

The Strategic Disconnect: CX vs. The Contact Center

One of the most valuable parts of our discussion centered on the subtle, yet crucial, distinction between a Customer Experience (CX) professional and a Contact Center (CC) professional. While both are dedicated to the customer journey, their scope and focus often differ:

  • The CX Professional: Often owns the entire end-to-end customer journey, from marketing to product use to support. Their responsibilities and definition of success are deeply influenced by where CX sits organizationally — is it under Marketing, Operations, or the CEO?
  • The CC Professional: Focused on the operational efficiency, quality, and effectiveness of the voice and digital support channels. Their reality is one of doing a lot with a little, constantly asked to manage complex interactions while being, ironically, often looked to as a prime source of cuts in a downturn.

Social media, for instance, is still a relevant customer service channel, not just a marketing one. However, the operational reality is that many companies, looking for cost-effective solutions, outsource social media support to Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) providers, highlighting the ongoing tension between strategic experience design and operational efficiency.

“Being a CX leader in your industry is not a temporary investment you can cut and reinstate later. Those who cut, discover quickly that regaining customer trust and market position is exponentially harder than maintaining it.” — Braden Kelley

AI in the Contact Center: From Hypothesis to Hyper-Efficiency

The conversation inevitably turned to the single biggest factor transforming the industry today: Artificial Intelligence. Mario and I agreed that while the promise of AI is vast, the quickest, most immediate win for nearly every organization lies in agent assist.

This is where Generative AI tools empower the human agent in real-time — providing instant knowledge base look-ups, auto-summarizing previous interactions, and drafting responses. It’s a human-centric approach that immediately boosts productivity and confidence, improving Agent Experience (AX) and reducing training time.

However, implementing AI successfully isn’t a “flip-the-switch” deployment. The greatest danger is the wholesale adoption of complex technology without rigor. True AI success, Mario noted, must be implemented via the classic innovation loop: hypothesis, prototyping, and testing. AI isn’t a solution; it’s a tool that must be carefully tuned and validated against human-centered metrics before scaling.

The Mandate for Enduring Investment

A recurring theme was the strategic folly of viewing CX as a cost center. In a downturn, the contact center is often the first place management looks for budgetary reductions. Yet, the evidence is overwhelming: CX leadership is not a temporary investment. When you are leading in your industry in customer experience, that position must be maintained. Cut your investment at your peril, and you risk a long, painful road to recovery when the market turns. The CX team, despite being resource-constrained, often represents the last line of defense for the brand, embodying the human-centered change we preach.

As CCW moves into its next 25 years, the lesson is clear: customer expectations are only rising. The best leaders will leverage AI not just to cut costs, but to augment their people and apply the innovation principles of rigorous testing to truly master the new era of customer orchestration. The commitment to a great customer experience is the single, enduring investment that will future-proof your business.

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Image credits: Customer Management Practice

Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Google Gemini to clean up the article.

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Sickcare AI Field Notes

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Sickcare AI Field Notes

I recently participated in a conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare. It was the first onsite meeting after 900 days of the pandemic.

Here is a report from the front:

  1. AI has a way to go before it can substitute for physician judgment, intuition, creativity and empathy
  2. There seems to be an inherent conflict between using AI to standardize decisions compared to using it for mass customization. Efforts to develop customized care must be designed around a deep understanding of what happens at the ground level along the patient pathway and must incorporate patient engagement by focusing on such things as shared decision-making, definition of appointments, and self-management, all of which are elements of a “build-to-order” approach.
  3. When it comes to dissemination and implementation, culture eats strategy for lunch.
  4. The majority of the conversations had to do with the technical aspects and use cases for AI. A small amount was about how to get people in your organization to understand and use it.
  5. The goal is to empower clinical teams to collaborate with patient teams and that will take some work. Moving sick care to healthcare also requires changing a sprint mindset to a marathon relay race mindset with all the hazards and risks of dropped handoffs and referral and information management leaks.
  6. AI is a facilitating technology that cuts across many applications, use cases and intended uses in sick care. Some day we might be recruiting medical students, residents and other sick care workers using AI instead of those silly resumes.
  7. The value proposition of AI includes improving workflow and improving productivity
  8. AI requires large, clean data sets regardless of applications
  9. It will take a while to create trust in technology
  10. There needs to be transparency in data models
  11. There is a large repository of data from non-traditional sources that needs to be mined e.g social media sites, community based sites providing tests, like health clubs and health fairs, as well as post acute care facilities
  12. AI is enabling both the clinical and business models of value based care
  13. Cloud based AI is changing diagnostic imaging and pattern recognition which will change manpower dynamics
  14. There are potential opportunities in AI for quality outcome stratification, cost accounting and pricing of episodes of care, determining risk premiums and optimizing margins for a bundled priced procedure given geographic disparities in quality and cost.
  15. We are in the second era of AI that is based on deep learning v rules based algorithms
  16. Value based care requires care coordination, risk stratification, patient centricity and managing risk
  17. Machine learning is being used, like Moneyball, to pick startup winners and losers, with a dose of high touch.
  18. It is encouraging to see more and more doctors attending and speaking at these kinds of meetings and lending a much needed perspective and reality check to technologists and non-sick care entrepreneurs. There were few healthcare executives besides those who were invited to be on panels.
  19. Overcoming the barriers to AI in sick care have mostly to do with changing behavior and not dwelling on the technicalities, but, rather, focusing on the jobs that doctors need to get done.
  20. The costs of AI , particularly for small, independent practitioners, are often not affordable, particularly when bundled with crippling EMR expenses . Moore’s law has not yet impacted medicine
  21. The promise of using AI to get more done with less conflicts with the paradox of productivity
  22. Top of mind problems to be solved were how to increase revenuces, cut costs , fill the workforce pipelines and address burnout and behavioral health employee and patient problems with scarce resouces.
  23. Nurses, pharmacists, public health professionals and veterinarians were under represented
  24. Payers were scarce
  25. Patients were scarce
  26. Students, residents and clinicians were looking for ways to get side gigs, non-clinical careers and exit ramps if need be.
  27. 70% of AI applications are in radiology
  28. AI is migrating from shiny to standard, running in the background to power diverse remote care modalities
  29. Chronic disease management and behavioral health have replace infectious disease as the global care management challenges
  30. AI education and training in sickcare professional schools is still woefully absent but international sickcare professional schools are filling the gaps
  31. Process and workflow improvements are a necessary part of digital and AI transformation

At its core, AI is part of a sick care eco-nervous system “brain” that is designed to change how doctors and patients think, feel and act as part of continuous behavioral improvement. Outcomes are irrelevant without impact.

AI is another facilitating technology that is part and parcel of almost every aspect of sick care. Like other shiny new objects, it remains to be seen how much value it actually delivers on its promise. I look forward to future conferences where we will be discussing how, not if to use AI and comparing best practices and results, not fairy tales and comparing mine with yours.

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Join Me at the Virtual Change Management Summit 2017

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Virtual Change Management Conference

On July 12, 2017 I will be speaking at Change Management Review’s Virtual Change Management Summit 2017™, a curated collection of brand new pre-recorded global webinars bringing thought leaders and senior practitioners in the change management profession together.

The purpose of the event is to help participants discover, learn, and reinforce how change management practices and principles are applied in today’s business world.

Click here for more information and to register for this outstanding event

Why is the Virtual Change Management Summit 2017™ important to change management professionals today?

Our profession is currently fragmented and formalizing at different rates across the globe resulting in confusion about how to take part in professional development for those who have just joined the profession and for those who are in the mid-range of their career as a change management practitioner. Aside from formal certification training, there really isn’t a tangible mode to learn more about what is going on and what works unless one attends a conference or an in-person seminar.

The Virtual Change Management Summit 2017™ is an inexpensive means for change management professionals to learn, grow, and understand the business world around them from the perspective of well known experts and senior change management practitioners.

(from the Change Management Review web site)

In addition to myself, the rest of the speaking lineup will include:

  • Theresa Moulton, Editor-in-Chief, Change Management Review™
  • Dr. Dean Ackerman and Dr. Linda Ackerman Anderson, Co-Founders, Being First Inc.
  • Tim Creasey, Chief Innovation Officer, Prosci
  • Jason Little, Agile Management Consultant, Coach and Trainer
  • Kimberlee Williams, President, Center for Strategy Realization
  • Linda Hoopes, President, Resilience Alliance

The title of my presentation will be:

The Future of Project Management is… Change!

… and I will be exploring the intersections and relationships between project management, innovation management, change management, lean, six sigma, agile, lean startup, and design thinking and how organizations can fundamentally transform how they plan and execute what matters most.

I hope you’ll join us on July 12th!
(or watch the sessions on demand after their scheduled times)

Click here for more information and to register for this outstanding event


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