Cloud Tech Gurus

09/02/2026

83% of customers repeat themselves anyway.

Even after being routed through a bot, an IVR, or a chat flow, most callers still have to re-explain why they're calling once they reach a human. The tech gets credit for "adoption." The customer pays for what's missing underneath it.

We see this constantly. Not because the AI is bad, but because nobody checked whether context actually survives the handoff between systems.

We're 120+ former contact center Directors, VPs, and SVPs. We've spent 4,000+ hours evaluating vendors across 58 categories, and we don't recommend a platform until we know it holds up in a live queue, not just a demo.

That's the difference between buying AI tools and building a system that actually works end to end.

Our CEO broke this down, along with what's realistic to expect from AI investment right now, in a session built for leaders who want a real evaluation framework instead of more hype: Beyond the Hype: Practical AI Strategies for Modern Customer Experience.

Full session here: https://bit.ly/4y8WbMu. If you want a second opinion on your stack before you commit to anything, send us a message.

09/02/2026

Who is going to manage your next BPO?

Not select it. Manage it. Every week, after the signature.

Somebody has to pull the quality scores. Sit in on calibration. Ask why handle time moved and keep asking until the answer is real. Notice when your strongest agents quietly rotate off the program.

Now name that person.

At most companies it's a director who already has a full-time job, doing it in whatever hours are left. Not because anyone is careless. Because the role was never created. So it happens in bursts, and nine months in the conversation has changed from reviewing performance to explaining it.

There's a model built for that exact gap, and most people in this industry have never heard of it. It's called managed BPO. One provider brings in the right contact center from their own network, then works hand in hand with that center's management every day, and reports your numbers to you.

I wrote up how it works, when it applies, and when it isn't the answer:
https://lnkd.in/drkSsQDS

If you're sourcing, renewing or rebidding this year, that last part matters as much as the first.

Darren Prine

This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn

09/01/2026

Most BPO contracts still pay for headcount, not results.

Agents staffed. Hours billed. SLAs met on paper while resolution quality stays flat. A vendor paid by the seat is incentivized to keep contacts coming in, not to make them disappear.

That misalignment is exactly why outcome-based commercial models are gaining ground.

In one recent engagement we've been tracking, a BPO partner moved a client from per-seat to per-outcome pricing. Autonomous resolution climbed in stages from 6 percent to 86 percent. Average handling time dropped from over 12 minutes to under 3.

The model matters more than the logo. Any provider can claim "outcome-based." Few can show milestone data behind it.

Heading into a renewal or a first BPO sourcing cycle, that's the question to ask before the RFP goes out: is this provider paid to solve the problem, or to keep answering the phone?

What's a metric your BPO reports on that has nothing to do with your actual goals?

08/31/2026

There's a BPO model most people have never heard of. It's called managed BPO. If you're sourcing, renewing or rebidding this year, give the video 90 seconds.

08/26/2026

The floor did five jobs. Most companies replaced two.

Answers in seconds, when an agent turned their head and a colleague knew.
Noticing, when a supervisor walked past and saw someone struggling.
Coaching in the moment, while the agent still remembered the call.
Nesting, where a new hire learned by sitting next to somebody.
And belonging, which is the only reason some people lasted in the job.

When floors went distributed, most operations replaced the phone system and the reporting. Those were the two that were easy to see.
The other three were made of proximity. Nothing took their place.
So supervisors compensated the only way they could. More check-ins. More stand-ups. More status pings. Agents call that micromanagement. Supervisors call it flying blind. Both are correct, and the cause is the same.

It gets harder with outsourced seats, where the distance is organizational as well as physical, and your only window into the floor is a report written by the party you are evaluating.|

Sixty seconds above on what actually closes that gap.

We vetted this category and wrote up what we found, including what does not hold up: https://bit.ly/3SvKgsY

08/25/2026

Six vendors. Six salespeople. Six months of follow-up.

That's how most people work a trade show floor. Here's a better way.

Customer Connect Expo, September 9 and 10, Georgia World Congress Center, Atlanta. Microsoft, AWS, Intuit and BlackRock on the agenda, plus a regulatory session covering the FCC's pending rulemaking and the state privacy laws headed for contact center floors. That one's worth the trip by itself.

Cloud Tech Gurus is a proud partner of the show. We have our own section of the floor, the Cloud Tech Gurus Village, Booth 500.

If you're coming and you're sourcing anything this year, book a Show Floor Concierge slot. One of our Gurus walks the floor with you, takes you only to the vendors that fit, and handles every vendor conversation after the show so nobody chases you.

No cost. Four slots a day, two days.

Link in the comments.

08/24/2026

How many screens do you open to answer one question about your contact center?

Users in one admin console. Routing in another. Integrations in a third. Then a spreadsheet somebody swears is current, and a diagram from 2022.

None of them show you the one thing you actually need, which is what is connected to what.

Your admin console shows objects in lists. Queues here, flows there, skills and schedules and data actions each in their own screen, each looking perfectly fine on its own. But the risk almost never lives inside a single object. It lives between them. A flow branch that dead ends. A queue with no members. A skill that three routing rules still depend on.
Nothing in a list looks broken, because in a list, nothing is broken.

There is a new platform called Peregrine, built by Peregrine Labs, that reads your environment down to the configuration level and draws the whole thing as one connected view. Agentless. Nothing to install. Every flow and every branch inside it, queues and their members, skills, schedules, data actions and the APIs they call, SIP connections, number routing, users, roles, integrations.

20+ screens to one view.

To be clear about what this is not: it is not an argument for fewer administrators. It is an argument for giving the ones you have something better than good memory and a stale spreadsheet.

Discover is free. Permanently. Not a trial, no expiration, no credit card. Amazon Connect and Genesys Cloud are live now, and every registration gets a walkthrough with a CTG Guru before anything is connected.

Systems admins, honest answer: how many consoles are open on your second monitor right now?

See your own map, free: https://bit.ly/3SpL2Yu

08/20/2026

It's here. The first episode of CX Gurus is live.

Six cardiac arrests. 55 shocks to the heart. A 1% chance of survival.

Wes Dudey spent his career designing customer journeys. Then a massive heart attack, followed by kidney failure - put him inside one he never designed and couldn't control.

In this episode, Wes and host Jess talk about what customer effort actually feels like from the other side of it, not measured on a dashboard, but lived through 15 doctors, 29 medications, and a story he had to retell over and over to a system that already had it.

This isn't a typical CX conversation. It's two practitioners comparing notes from the hardest classroom either of them has ever been in.

Watch the full episode now 👇
▶️ https://bit.ly/4xOZic9

He designed customer journeys for a living. Then a massive heart at...

08/19/2026

Join me at the Customer Connect Expo. Watch my 60-second video for details and why you should be there.

08/18/2026

Six cardiac arrests. 55 shocks to the heart. One flatline that lasted eight and a half minutes.

Wes Dudey was given a 1% chance of walking out of the hospital.

He walked out.

He also spent his career designing customer journeys, and what that near-death journey taught him, as a patient moving through a system he couldn't control, changed how he thinks about customer effort entirely.

This is just one moment from the first episode of CX Gurus. The full conversation connects his survival story to the contact center in ways most CX leaders have never had to think about.

Full episode drops Thursday.

🎧 Listen on your favorite podcast app → https://bit.ly/4igCrBL
▶️ Watch & subscribe on YouTube → https://bit.ly/4g7v52g