Resources / Field notes
Field notes from the operator's chair
What running thousands of seats taught us about AI agents, live agents and the contact center, written by Palera's founder.
EK
Eric KadesCEO and founder, Palera. Ran a 2,000-seat contact center and managed more than 10,000 agents.
OperationsWhat running 2,000 seats taught me about broken contact center softwareThe mistakes were not dramatic. They were small, operational and easy to normalize, and they cost us every single day.Eric Kades · 4 min readAI agentsWhere AI agents and live agents actually breakNot in the model and not in the prompts. In the handoff, when the live agent starts from zero.Eric Kades · 5 min readCustomer experienceCustomers do not hate channels. They hate repeating themselves.The fastest way to lose a customer is to make them explain the problem twice.Eric Kades · 4 min readAI agentsEvery AI agent company runs into the contact centerThe agent wins the demo. Then it has to live inside a contact center, and the project stalls.Eric Kades · 5 min readDataYou do not own your customer conversations. Your vendors do.Most contact centers find out who really controls their data the day they try to leave.Eric Kades · 4 min readOperationsThe contact center metrics that actually matterMost dashboards measure activity. Customers experience resolution, continuity and trust.Eric Kades · 5 min readLeadershipThe biggest AI risk in a BPO is not technology. It is ego.AI improves through iteration and frontline feedback. Command-and-control cultures suffocate it.Eric Kades · 4 min readCustomer experienceGreat service is time saved, not speedFast for the contact center and fast for the customer are not the same thing.Eric Kades · 4 min readStrategyThe safe platform choice is the expensive oneNobody gets fired for buying the big legacy platform. The cost shows up later, in every seam.Eric Kades · 4 min read
