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CX Gurus
CX Gurus episodes
- Where Performance Meets Fun — Cynthia Carrese on Building Cultures That Work
Cynthia Carrese is Founder and Managing Director of C2 Strategic Partners, a customer success and leadership strategist who turns contact and sales centers into places where performance and fun go hand in hand. With a career spanning Fortune 500 powerhouses and fast-moving startups, she scales operations, boosts KPIs, and builds cultures that inspire.
In this episode:
- Cynthia's origin story across Fortune 500s and startups
- Scaling operations without burning out teams
- Boosting KPIs while keeping the work enjoyable
- Culture as a genuine performance driver
- Developing strong leaders and relationships that stick
Produced by the Cloud Tech Gurus Team. Subscribe for more insights from industry leaders. Visit www.cloudtechgurus.com
1 hr 5 min - The Power of Connection: Valerie McSorley on People-First CX and Communities That Thrive
Valerie McSorley is an award-winning producer, podcast host, and networking expert with deep roots in the contact center and customer experience industry. Over 25+ years she's turned relationships into results — and she joins Fred to talk about connection as a strategy, not a soft skill.
In this episode:
- Valerie's origin story and 25+ years of building communities
- Why connection is a strategy, not a soft skill
- A human-centered approach to contact center performance
- Building culture where every voice matters
- Leading with authenticity — and helping others "bee" their best self
Connect with Valerie: https://www.valeriemcsorley.com |
Produced by the Cloud Tech Gurus Team. Subscribe for more insights from industry leaders. Visit www.cloudtechgurus.com
1 hr 5 min - 30 Years of Fixing Contact Centers: Shellie Plymale on Doing CX the Right Way
Shellie Plymale, CEO of Plymale Enterprise Group, brings over 30 years of experience transforming contact center operations — from omni-channel strategy to performance optimization. With a Six Sigma background and APAC leadership on NICE CXone, she delivers high-impact, vendor-agnostic solutions.
In this episode:
- Shellie's origin story and 30-year path
- Applying Six Sigma discipline to CX and EX
- Omni-channel strategy that actually works
- Global and APAC consulting, including NICE CXone
- Why employee experience and customer experience rise or fall together
Produced by the Cloud Tech Gurus Team. Subscribe for more insights from industry leaders. Visit www.cloudtechgurus.com
1 hr 5 min - What If Your Contact Center Was Perfectly Staffed - Every Hour, Every Day?
Every contact center leader makes the same bad bet every morning: overstaff and burn labor, or understaff and burn your CX. The traditional 8-hour shift was built for a world that no longer exists.
In this episode, host Darren Prine sits down with **Jon Brown, SVP of Client Results at LiveOps**, to break down **precision staffing** — a flexible, on-demand model that schedules agents in 30-minute intervals matched to real call flow instead of a forecast.
What we get into:
- Why traditional and part-time shift models fail at almost every point in the demand curve
- How 30-minute precision intervals put agents exactly where the calls are
- Paying only for productive time — and why that alone typically cuts staffing costs 25–30%
- Handling seasonal surges, holiday peaks, and open enrollment without burning your team into attrition
- Why one flexible partner beats juggling five BPOs during a spike
- How LiveOps sources specialized, brand-passionate talent that performs like full-timers
- Real ROI: the COVID surge scaled to thousands of agents in 72 hours, plus higher upsell and lower attrition
If scheduling is a constant headache on your team, this one's worth your time.
See how precision staffing works → https://cloudtechgurus.com/gigcx
Subscribe on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/@thecontactcenterguruspodcast
Watch this episode → https://youtu.be/qLooYXE-Sw8
Guest: Jon Brown, SVP of Client Results, LiveOps (liveops.com)
Host: Darren Prine, Cloud Tech Gurus
Produced by the Cloud Tech Gurus Team. Subscribe for more insights from industry leaders. Visit www.cloudtechgurus.com
44 min - Escape the AI Graveyard: Why Most Bots Fail & How to Build AI That Actually Resolves
Every contact center has an AI graveyard. Failed chatbots. Pilots that never scaled. The root cause is almost never the technology — it's a lack of AI readiness, unclear use cases, and AI that was built to respond rather than resolve.
In Episode 5 of the Contact Center Gurus Podcast, host Darren Prine is joined by Mike Schulman, VP of Channel Sales at Yellow.ai, for a no-hype breakdown of what separates the AI implementations that work from the ones that get shut down.
Mike has been in the room for over 1,100 enterprise AI deployments across 85+ countries. He knows exactly where the line is.
What they cover:
- Why 60–70% of companies aren't even at AI readiness level one yet — and what that means before you evaluate any vendor
- The difference between generative AI and agentic AI, and why most vendors are using the term "agentic" incorrectly
- Why AI resolution rates went from 5% in 2022 to 60–80% today — and where they're headed in the next two years
- The "build once, deploy many" approach that lets CX teams own the platform without writing a single line of code
- Real case studies: Waste Connections (25,000+ monthly calls automated, $3.5–4M saved) and Feral Gas ($14.5M in net new business from end-to-end order automation)
- How to pick your first use case, show ROI fast, and build from there
Key Insight: The companies winning with AI right now didn't go all in on day one. They picked one or two high-volume, repetitive use cases, showed value fast, and expanded from there. That's the playbook.
About Yellow.ai: Yellow.ai is an AI-first customer service automation platform with 1,100+ enterprise deployments across 85+ countries. Named clients include Sony, Domino's, Hyundai, Waste Connections, and Randstad.
Produced by the Cloud Tech Gurus Team. Subscribe for more insights from industry leaders. Visit www.cloudtechgurus.com
58 min - Stop Paying for Agents. Start Paying for Outcomes. | Ft. Siddharth Victor, Movate
The BPO industry is splitting in two — commodity providers heading toward irrelevance, and transformation partners capturing all the growth.
In this episode, Darren Prine sits down with Siddharth Victor, SVP & Head of Support Services at Movate, to break down why the traditional BPO model is structurally misaligned with what clients actually need — and what the shift to outcome-based CX looks like in practice.
Sid brings 23 years of experience, starting as a tech support engineer and now leading Movate's entire CX and enterprise support sales and solutions division.
What we cover:
- Why traditional BPO contracts are built to fail clients
- How AI is eliminating labor arbitrage as a defensible business model
- A real gaming company case study: 6% → 86% autonomous resolution, AHT cut 80%, cost per interaction down 66.5%
- What outcome-based contracts actually require from both sides
- The single biggest reason outsourcing engagements fail
Resources & Links:
Free research report — Transform or Become Extinct: cloudtechgur.us/BPO-MCXP
Connect with Siddharth Victor: linkedin.com/in/sid-victor-3355b73
Learn more about Movate: movate.com
Connect with Cloud Tech Gurus: cloudtechgurus.com
Produced by the Cloud Tech Gurus Team. Subscribe for more insights from industry leaders. Visit www.cloudtechgurus.com
47 min - Stop Buying Chatbots, Start Deploying AI Agents
Most healthcare contact centers have tried chatbots and been burned. But what's possible today with AI agents is dramatically different.
In this episode, Darren Prine sits down with Rebecca Clyde, Co-Founder and CEO of Botco.ai, to break down what AI in regulated environments actually looks like when it's built right — from day one.
What you'll hear in this episode:
- Why early chatbots failed healthcare — and what changed
- How a 25-location behavioral health provider built a live agent backup system and never needed it
- Why patients in behavioral health feel less judged talking to AI than to a human
- How AI detects crisis signals and adverse medication reactions in real time
- The AI companion built for cancer patients getting answers in under 30 seconds
- Why the bar isn't resolution rates — it's quality of life
- How AI is matching patients to clinical trials in seconds from a doctor's phone
Want to explore AI solutions for your contact center? Visit us: https://www.cloudtechgurus.com
Learn more about Botco.ai: https://www.botco.ai
Produced by the Cloud Tech Gurus Team. Subscribe for more insights from industry leaders. Visit www.cloudtechgurus.com
37 min - Why the Simplest Contact Center in the Room Keeps Winning
Jim Murphy didn't start out building contact centers. He started with a pager business out of a college apartment in the San Fernando Valley. Then the 1994 Northridge earthquake flooded his inventory, FEMA sent a $2,000 check, and a business mentor told him to stop pretending and get a real office.
Thirty years later, Jim is the CEO and Co-Founder of BroadVoice — a cloud communications company operating across four continents. Along the way he built DSL Extreme, the largest independent ISP in California, competed with Vonage head to head, and in 2021 acquired GoContact, a Portugal-based CCaaS platform built for enterprise BPOs. That acquisition gave him a front row seat to how the most demanding contact centers in the world actually operate.
In this episode, Darren and Jim get into the real cost of platform complexity — what it actually means when agents are toggling between four systems while customers repeat themselves on every call, and why layering AI onto that mess only makes things worse.
They walk through a real healthcare case study — a hospital system with surgical centers, urgent care clinics, and an offshore BPO, all running with zero visibility into the patient journey — and what changed when everything moved to one platform.
Jim also shares his take on the BPO industry, where he sees a clear split forming between providers that have embraced AI and outcome-based models, and those still billing by the human hour. His view on what the next five years look like for the partner community is one of the most direct takes you'll hear.
In this episode: → What platform complexity is really costing you beyond the license fees → Why agents starting from zero on every call is a stack problem, not a people problem → A real healthcare case study and what unified CX looks like in practice → Why data analytics is as important today as the dial tone itself → The BPO split — clear winners and clear losers playing out in real time → What it means to shift from selling hours to selling outcomes → Why the next five years will be the most transformational in contact center history
Produced by the Cloud Tech Gurus Team. Subscribe for more insights from industry leaders. Visit www.cloudtechgurus.com
35 min - AI Readiness vs. AI Deployment: Why Getting the Order Wrong Costs Millions
Most organizations buy AI and call it a day. But that's exactly where the real work begins.
Darren Prine sits down with Wayne Butterfield, Founder of STX-AI, to unpack why so many AI initiatives fail — not because of the technology, but because of what happens after the purchase.
What you'll learn:
- Why procurement is the starting line, not the finish line
- What post-deployment scaffolding actually looks like
- How to treat AI as a capability, not just a technology
- Why customer experience design still gets the basics wrong
About Wayne Butterfield: Wayne is the Founder of STX-AI. For more than 15 years, he has helped organizations navigate AI, automation, and digital transformation — from early RPA deployments to today's agentic AI capabilities.
▶️ Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/rwTrwQ11Ubk
Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@thecontactcenterguruspodcast
Produced by the Cloud Tech Gurus Team. Subscribe for more insights from industry leaders. Visit www.cloudtechgurus.com
1 hr 4 min - From AI Chaos to Customer Confidence: Building Virtual Agents That Actually Work
Guest: Adam Fenwick, SVP Global Alliances, Boost.ai
Topic: Conversational AI in contact centers
Focus: Strategy, design, regulation, and scale
Audience: CX leaders, contact center executives, IT and digital leaders
Produced by the Cloud Tech Gurus Team. Subscribe for more insights from industry leaders. Visit www.cloudtechgurus.com
47 min
About CX Gurus
From the publisher's feed
We didn't study contact centers. We ran them.
CX Gurus goes inside the enterprise contact center with the operators who've lived it — from 500-seat teams to 10,000+ global BPOs. Each week, host Darren Prine and guests break down what's actually working in CX and AI, and what's just noise.
Expect straight talk on AI agents, QA, WFM, vendor selection, and the messy reality of transformation. No consultants who've never taken a call. No hype. Just the practitioner's view from the floor.
Built by Cloud Tech Gurus.