Beyond The Dial Tone
Independent thinking for the modern contact centre.
Beyond The Dial Tone explores the architecture, strategy and governance behind modern contact centres, conversational AI and enterprise customer experience.
Latest articles
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What Would It Take To Leave?
From 12 January 2027, the EU Data Act bans switching charges for cloud services, contact centre platforms included. In a contact centre, the fee was never most of what kept you there.
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Who Turned This On?
Every platform ships something called sentiment analysis. Depending on how it works, it is unregulated, regulated from December 2027, or already illegal. Almost nobody knows which one they are running.
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Who Is Allowed To Say Yes?
Issue 4 asked which system holds the truth about a customer. It never asked the harder question: who is allowed to act on it. We spent fifteen years removing that authority from…
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Which Record Wins?
I framed the last issue as a choice between two architectural directions. Two readers pointed out the assumption underneath it. There is rarely one system of record, and human agents have been…
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Parity Isn’t a Strategy. Neither Is a Day Rate.
Why transformation has to be the starting point of a platform move, and why the rate card turns out to be the same mistake made twice.
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Three Models. One Question. No Fence-Sitting Allowed.
I gave ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini the same prompt: name the best contact centre platform. Be unbiased. Ignore everything you know about my views. One answer only. Here is everything they said,…
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Same Convergence. Opposite Architecture.
Salesforce and Microsoft agree that CRM, contact centre and AI are converging. They disagree about where the engagement layer should sit relative to the system of record.
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There Is No Best Platform
The question gets asked in every procurement, every forum and every conference bar. It has no answer, and the people most willing to give one are usually the least able to give…
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Erlang Doesn’t Cover This
Every major platform now wants to plan and evaluate your AI agents alongside your people. The workforce maths that makes those words mean something was built for a resource AI agents only…
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The Thirty-Minute Dashboard, Three Months On
What model-assisted analysis actually costs, what it actually produces, and what the demo does not prove.
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