Reference material from The AI Contact Center Handbook by Sho Shimoda. Available on Amazon.
The equipment that survives the read
Twelve chapters give you the argument. Six appendices give you the equipment. Where the chapters explain why a contact center leader should think about AI in a particular way, the toolkit hands over the specific instruments — the vocabulary, the diagnostic checklists, the compliance references, the integration patterns, the vendor map, and the operational math — that you actually use once the book is closed and back on the shelf.
These appendices were written to be used, not read cover to cover. Bookmark this page. Reach for the specific tool when the specific situation appears in your week.
How to use the toolkit
The six appendices are independent — you can jump into any one directly. In practice, certain pairs get pulled off the shelf together, because certain moments in a CX transformation are structural enough that they always demand the same reference material.
- Before starting a vendor selection: reach for E · Vendor Guide and the vendor security questionnaire inside B · Readiness Checklists. The market map plus the security screen is the shortlist-to-shortlist path.
- Before launching an AI agent in production: reach for C · Compliance Frameworks and D · MCP Toolkit. The governance mandates and the integration architecture together decide whether the launch is safe.
- During any operational review of the AI program: reach for F · CX Math. Erlang C, containment arithmetic, and inference economics tell you whether the numbers on the dashboard support the story leadership is telling itself.
- Anytime a term is unfamiliar — from anyone, in any meeting: A · Glossary. The industry runs on acronyms; the glossary is the fastest catch-up.
What the toolkit is not
Nothing here is a substitute for judgment. Nothing here is a substitute for qualified legal, compliance, or engineering counsel. The checklists in B, the mandates in C, and the vendor snapshots in E all assume you will pair them with the specific expertise your organization needs. They exist to structure the conversation, not to end it.
Where the toolkit is at its strongest is in the moments where a CX leader knows the question but does not yet have the vocabulary for it. The right appendix collapses a two-week research project into a twenty-minute read.