The Ultimate Podcast for Call Center, Contact Center & Customer Experience Professionals.
Looking to stay ahead in the world of call centers, contact centers, and customer experience (CX)? Join industry veterans Angus Peacey and Pete Brown as they dive deep into the technology supply and buy chain that powers customer engagement and service.
From CX software vendors to resellers, analysts, consultants, and end users, we uncover the real challenges, motivators, and trends shaping the industry. Whether you’re a seller looking to sell smarter or a buyer aiming to make informed decisions, this podcast gives you insider insights to navigate the evolving tech sales and buyer landscape.
Tune in and transform the way you approach selling or buying CX technology!
In Series 2, Episode 8, Angus and Pete explore the critical challenge of technology adoption in customer engagement: simply launching tools isn't enough. By examining human psychology and the "Technology Acceptance Model," they provide a roadmap for turning hesitant users into champions, ensuring long-term ROI and customer retention in the subscription era.
**The Subscription Risk Shift:** Modern subscription models have shifted financial risk from customers to vendors, making churn inevitable if value isn't realized. True adoption requires moving beyond technical onboarding to "user adoption," where agents emotionally buy into features and integrate tools into daily workflows to prevent failure.**Overcoming "Button Shock":** Change fatigue and "button shock"—the paralysis caused by complex interfaces—lead 45% of agents to avoid new tech. Success relies on the Technology Acceptance Model: users must perceive the tool as useful and easy to use, or they will retreat to legacy systems.**The Personal Trainer Approach:** Ditch marathon training sessions for bite-sized, "just-in-time" learning milestones. Like a personal trainer, vendors should set collaborative goals and use in-app nudges—which can boost retention by 300%—to build user confidence and celebrate incremental progress throughout the entire software lifecycle.**The "Sense and Respond" Loop:** Don't wait for a customer to leave to address poor adoption. By using usage analytics and NPS as "early warning flags," organizations can sense disengagement before it turns into churn. Leadership must also lead by example, as agent adoption rarely exceeds that of supervisors.**Community and Flexible Pricing:** Fostering internal communities allows agents to learn together rather than complaining about new systems. Simplifying licensing and offering flexible, outcome-based pricing models removes commercial barriers to adoption, making it easier for businesses to justify costs and for workers to successfully operationalise the technology.
30 Jan 2026
S2 Ep 7 | CX 2026: Trends & Predictions
In this episode, Angus and Pete explore customer engagement trends for 2026 and 2027. They discuss how AI is transitioning from an experiment to a strategic necessity, forcing businesses to re-architect their operations. From hyper-personalisation to the rise of AI-native companies, the hosts analyse how brands must balance efficiency with emotional loyalty and ethical practices to survive a predicted decline in global spending.
• Hyper-personalisation and Data: Hyper-personalisation is becoming a standard expectation, requiring meaningful, empathetic, real-time interactions. However, success depends on a "clean" data infrastructure. Without integrated data lakes and end-to-end omnichannel systems, attempts at personalisation will fail, as "garbage in" inevitably leads to "garbage out".
• Evolution of the Contact Centre: The traditional reactive contact centre is evolving into a "profit and insight centre". Instead of being viewed purely as a cost burden, these hubs now serve as the "eyes and ears" of an organisation. They provide gold mines of real-time customer data to drive business-wide efficiency.
• AI-Native Business Models: A major structural shift is the rise of AI-native companies that build technology into their core rather than bolting it onto broken processes. The old "SaaS" model is struggling; the new imperative is designing your business for the technology, rather than the other way around.
• Trust and Emotional Loyalty: Efficiency must not come at the expense of empathy. Premature deployment of frustrating AI tools risks eroding customer trust, particularly among younger demographics. Future loyalty depends on forging deep emotional connections and aligning brand practices with ethical and sustainable values.
• The Human Element and Frugality: As global spending potentially drops by 18%, brands must deliver exceptional value to prevent customers from switching. Interestingly, some brands are rejecting tech-heavy models in favour of "old school" human expertise and empathy, proving that digital is not always the paramount preference.
19 Dec 2025
S2 Ep 6 | Change F - F - F - Freeze
Welcome to Series 2, Episode 6! Angus and Pete explore the dreaded Change Freeze, a vital IT strategy often implemented during peak periods like Christmas. The discussion was prompted by a listener who had a travel nightmare due to a systems upgrade that went wrong during the busiest time of the year. The hosts delve into what the freeze is, why it's critical for service stability, and how poor planning can lead to the infamous "mad dash" effect.
Here are the key show notes from the discussion:
• The Purpose of a Change Freeze: A change freeze is a predefined period where non-essential changes to systems are halted, acting as a safeguard for system integrity and availability. This is critical during periods of massive demand, such as Christmas, when high operational demands coincide with limited staff availability.
• The Risk of the "Mad Dash": A disadvantage of long freezes is the "mad dash effect," where teams rush to cram everything in beforehand. This pressure can lead to poor decisions and mistakes, inadvertently introducing the bugs that the freeze was intended to prevent.
• Planning and Communication are Key: To prevent chaos, planning must start early—around June or July for Christmas—ensuring all stakeholders are aware, including customer service leadership. Clear, simple, non-technical language should be used to communicate key dates and expectations.
• Prioritizing the Customer: Companies should be transparent with customers about issues, using banner notices or updated holding messages, as transparency can make people "far more willing to work with you". Stable, protected systems allow agents to focus on complex, high-emotion issues and turn problems into "nice experiences".
• Measuring True Success: Success criteria for a freeze should not rely solely on meaningless metrics like system uptime. Instead, organizations must focus on customer experience metrics like First Contact Resolution (FCR), Customer Effort Scores, and customer complaints, which truly reflect the outcome of the stability effort.
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