If you want to know what is actually happening in customer contact - not the keynote version, not the vendor pitch version, but the version grounded in independent research across hundreds of organizations — you talk to Nicole Kyle.
Nicole is Chief Product Officer at CMP Research, the Customer Contact Research Company, and the firm whose data quietly shapes much of what gets discussed, debated, and decided at CCW Vegas every year. I interviewed her on the floor of Caesars Forum this week, and the conversation did not disappoint.
She gave me the three things keeping CX leaders and customer contact leaders up at night right now. Not three things from a slide deck. Three things she is hearing consistently, across CMP's entire client and community base. And each one of them cuts through the noise in a way that most of the sessions this week did not.
The first is customer analytics. Data is everywhere - but it is not centralized, and it is not clean. Nicole described two types of organizations: those who have invested in sophisticated analytics tools that still cannot get a complete picture of the customer journey because the underlying data is fragmented, and those still wrestling with an incumbent provider that isn't delivering, lacking the internal skills to act on what they do have, and facing a vendor selection process that is long, complex, and high-stakes. The gap between data ambition and data reality, she argued, is one of the defining operational problems of 2026.
The second is self-service adoption - and this one came with a data point that stopped me. Consumer demand for self-service has actually increased by 6% over the last three years. Customers want to self-serve more than ever. And yet the experience, when they try, still lets them down. Resolution rates are not where they need to be. Personalization is not where it needs to be.
The result: customers try, don't like what they find, and don't try again. Nicole's framing was precise - this is a gap between demand and delivery, and closing it requires better journey design, better analytics, and smarter vendor selection. She also introduced CMP Prism, the firm's independent proprietary market evaluation framework, which maps the AI solution landscape across hyperscalers, CCaaS providers, and point solutions — a tool designed to cut through exactly the kind of marketplace chaos CX practitioners are navigating right now.