The Evolving Contact Center: Customer Service Insights and Predictions

As part of Omdia’s Enterprise IT team, David focuses on contact center infrastructure, workforce optimization, interactive voice response, and speech analytics solutions. He provides insight into these topics for vendor and enterprise clients through research, consulting, white papers, webinars, and blogs.

David started covering the contact center industry in 2001 as the customer service and support editor at CRM magazine. Later, he served as the publication’s editor-in-chief and editorial director for more than a decade. While there, he also worked as the editorial director of Speech Technology magazine and was the founding editor of SmartCustomerService.com. David has won multiple writing awards throughout his career, including a Silver National and a Gold Regional ASBPE award for Original Research. He holds a BA in Communication (with a concentration in Journalism) from Hofstra University.

Patrick Russell is a contact center expert with 18 years in the industry and is the Director of Product Management at 8×8. Patrick has held nearly every role within a contact center to include managing operations of several thousand agents and has been recognized as an industry thought leader by several organizations. With a passion for technology and finding new ways to help businesses improve, Patrick is an optimistic, creative thinking problem solver with an employee-first approach to improving the customer experience. When he’s not working you can find Patrick working on carpentry projects or traveling the world.

Jessica found a passion for customer experience when first introduced to the contact center market back in 2012. Throughout her time in this space, Jessica has worked in Product Marketing, Competitive Intelligence, and Sales and Channel Enablement giving a well-rounded depth of knowledge applied to her communication practices. Now as a Senior Product Marketing Manager at 8×8, Jessica champions thought leadership, experiential learning, and the promotion of new ideas to keep us all immersed in the changing landscape of CX & EX.. When work isn’t the focus, Jessica is a lover of yoga, travel, and just about anything that puts her outdoors.

Tim McElgunn is Principal Analyst for HDI and ICMI, producing and managing content and events for our community of contact center and technical support professionals. A skilled analyst, strategic advisor, writer and editor, Tim has extensive experience researching, synthesizing, and explaining strategic, regulatory, technology, and service trends. Before joining the Informa team, Tim held senior editorial and analysis roles at Bloomberg Law, Stratecast Partners/Frost & Sullivan, and Gartner.