Email was supposed to make customer service cheaper.

It didn’t.

It was supposed to make it more efficient.

It didn’t.

Instead, we built a channel where customers write essays explaining their problems, wait hours or days for a response, answer a follow-up question, wait again, and somehow call this progress.

Maybe it’s time to kill customer service email.

This week on The Contact Center Show, Bob and I get into that argument, plus:

Salesforce getting very serious about the contact center.

Why digital workforce management may finally be moving beyond forcing phone-era math onto email and chat.

Why the back office might be a better place to spend your next technology dollar than another chatbot.

And why the contact center technology market has become one giant game of Hungry Hungry Hippos where every vendor suddenly claims to do everything.

Also, naturally, we end by discussing whether AI is going to kill us all.

A normal episode.

#CustomerService #ContactCenter #CX #AI #Dreamforce

This episode cuts through the gap between what executives are saying about AI and what is actually happening inside contact centers. Companies are reporting major efficiency gains, yet contact volume and contact-center employment haven’t collapsed. Amas and Bob unpack the contradiction: pent-up customer demand, harder calls reaching humans, rising handle times, and ROI stories that are far more complicated than “AI saved us 30%.”

They also tackle the growing anxiety workers—particularly younger workers—have about AI taking their jobs. Their argument isn’t that AI won’t transform the industry. It will. The advantage increasingly belongs to people who understand what the technology can do, what it cannot do, and where human judgment still matters.

Then the conversation turns to Dreamforce and Salesforce’s AI future. If the interface increasingly becomes an AI assistant sitting in front of Salesforce, does Salesforce risk moving from the center of the user experience to infrastructure running quietly in the background? Bob adds an important Dreamforce reality check: what gets announced on stage can still be nine to twelve months away from becoming something customers can actually use.

In this episode: AI efficiency versus actual headcount; why better service can create more demand rather than less; the hidden customer demand traditional contact-center metrics miss; what leaders should tell employees worried about AI; why judgment may become more valuable as automation improves; Salesforce, Claude and the rise of “headless” enterprise software; and why you shouldn’t confuse a Dreamforce announcement with a deployable product.

The central question: If AI really is making the contact center dramatically more efficient, why aren’t there dramatically fewer humans working in it?

AI was supposed to replace contact center workers. Instead, there are more people working in contact centers today than there were at the beginning of the year.

That does not mean AI failed. In many areas, it has exceeded expectations.

In this season finale, Amas and Bob examine what they got right, what changed their minds, and what contact center leaders should expect next. They discuss why AI is changing frontline work rather than eliminating it, how automation is exposing leadership failures, and why the agents who remain will handle increasingly difficult work.

They also explore where AI is already delivering—particularly in quality assurance, knowledge management, and customer self-service—and why even impressive bots still fail when companies deny them the information or authority required to solve real problems.

The next phase will not be about acquiring more technology. It will be about managing what companies have already bought, determining where humans still matter, and separating genuine guidance from vendors selling both the product and the consulting required to make it work.

Plus, Amas and Bob revisit their position on customer surveys, predict the issues that will dominate the rest of the year, and reflect on The Contact Center Show’s rise to number 22 among Apple’s management podcasts.

In this episode:

• Why AI has changed contact center jobs without eliminating them

• What Bob learned from two very different AI service experiences

• Why better automation creates harder work for human agents

• How weak bots expose leadership, data, and authority problems

• Where AI has exceeded expectations

• Why customer surveys may still have value when used to develop agents

• The growing importance of AI management and governance

• Why technology companies are becoming consulting companies

• The danger of buying more features than an organization can use

• What The Contact Center Show should tackle next season

The Contact Center Show will return at the end of September. Until then, explore the archive and send Amas or Bob your feedback on LinkedIn.