Perspectives

Straight talk on CX, AI, and delivery.

Opinions formed in practice, not in PowerPoint. No hedging, no vendor worship — just what we've seen work and what we've watched fail.

Why most AI pilots fail — and how to fix them

Everyone has an AI pilot. Few have AI in production. The pattern is consistent — and so is the fix.

Off-the-shelf AI vs custom build: how to choose without bankrupting yourself

The vendor demo was slick. Six months later you're on their third escalation engineer. Here's how to navigate the gap.

When AI meets customer experience: three rules that keep you out of court

AI in customer experience is not a technology problem. It is a risk management problem.

The contact centre transformation that actually stuck

Nine out of ten contact centre transformations fail. Not technically — organisationally. Here's what the ones that lasted had in common.

CX platform shootout: Salesforce vs ServiceNow vs Zendesk vs Freshdesk

Choose the wrong platform and you'll spend two years on something that makes your agents slower. Here's how to decide without the noise.

Why your £5 million programme will deliver nothing

The business case was elegant. The steering committee had PowerPointed for months. Then implementation started, and everything slowed down.

In-house team vs consultant vs Big 4: a decision framework

You need expertise you don't have. Should you hire, contract, or call the Big 4? The answer depends on what you're willing to pay for bureaucracy.

Why your CCaaS migration will fail

Modern platforms are genuinely capable. They fail because organisations treat this as an IT project when it is fundamentally a business transformation.

The real cost of 24/7 customer service

Every brand wants to be always on. Before you promise customers that someone will always answer, ensure someone competent actually will.

How to measure customer satisfaction without annoying your customers

Response rates to post-call surveys have collapsed. Your customers do not exist to provide feedback. There is a better way.

The agent attrition problem nobody talks about

Forty percent of contact centre agents leave within twelve months. The industry treats this as inevitable. It isn't.

AI agents are not the future of customer service

The hype machine has it wrong. Companies that chase full automation disappoint customers and burn budget. Here's what actually works.

Why your chatbot handles 40% of enquiries but solves 0%

Your chatbot dashboard looks impressive. But containment is a meaningless metric because it is trivial to manipulate.

The implementation roadmap that actually works

65–70% of CX technology implementations fail to deliver their promised benefits. This roadmap is built on 12 years of programmes that stick.

First call resolution is killing your customer experience

Most contact centres celebrate FCR like the holy grail. Obsessively chasing it creates perverse incentives that damage customer relationships.

Omnichannel means nothing if your agents cannot access history

Most 'omnichannel' operations are multi-channel operations pretending sophistication. Here's what the gap actually costs you.

The skill gap nobody is training for

The skills required to work effectively alongside AI are completely different from what we've been training for decades. Almost nobody is teaching them.