The AI Contact Center Handbook
A practical field guide to customer experience in the age of agentic AI — chapter by chapter, for teams evaluating AB Support.
Chapter 12 — Strategic Vendor Selection and Implementation
The four vendor camps, the phased rollout playbook, contract terms that actually matter, the shift to outcome-based pricing, and a twelve-month calendar of what goes right and wrong.
Chapter 11 — The Changing Job Market and New Enterprise Roles
Which contact center jobs shrink, which grow, and how today's agents actually bridge into the new roles. The workforce transition as a role-definition problem, not a headcount problem.
Chapter 7 — Hyper-Personalization and Omnichannel Journeys
Chapter 7 of the AI Contact Center Handbook — why omnichannel became multichannel, what optichannel replaces it with, live journey analytics, real-time speech-to-speech translation, and the trust line that separates helpful personalization from creepy surveillance.
Part 5 — Execution
Part 5 of The AI Contact Center Handbook — where the book stops describing the terrain and starts telling you what to do: trust architecture, the changing workforce, and vendor selection.
Part 3 — Quality & Measurement
Part 3 of the AI Contact Center Handbook — how quality assurance, workforce engagement, and personalization change when AI does the talking. Covers WEM (Ch 6) and hyper-personalization plus omnichannel journeys (Ch 7).
Chapter 6 — Intelligent Workforce Engagement Management (WEM)
Chapter 6 walkthrough from The AI Contact Center Handbook. WEM — the operational muscle behind scheduling, forecasting, and quality — is being rebuilt from Excel and Erlang C into a system that learns, monitors 100% of calls, and reforecasts intraday in ninety seconds.
Chapter 5 — The Experience Orchestration Platform (XOP)
Chapter 5 walkthrough from The AI Contact Center Handbook. The XOP is the sub-second decision layer above the CCaaS, CRM, and CDP — the brain that fuses live signals and CAMARA network APIs into a real-time answer.
Part 2 — The Front Line
Part 2 of The AI Contact Center Handbook — what changes on the front line when agentic AI handles the routine work. Chapter 4 covers the human side of the shift; Chapter 5 covers the Experience Orchestration Platform that makes real-time decisions above every channel.
Part 1 — The Landscape
Part 1 of The AI Contact Center Handbook. Three chapters that map the terrain before the tactics: the legacy trap, the new architecture, and the arrival of agentic AI.
Chapter 1 — The Cost of "How We've Always Done It"
A walkthrough of Chapter 1 of The AI Contact Center Handbook — why the legacy contact center is not a technology problem, but an operating-model tax paid every day in cash and in trust.
The AI Contact Center Handbook — A Field Guide to Customer Experience in the Age of Agentic AI
A preview of Sho Shimoda's new book — what agentic AI actually means, why it changes the operating model of customer experience, and what it looks like in production inside Microsoft Teams.