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EMERGE Executive Interview

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In this interview, Sheri Greenhaus, Managing Partner at CrmXchange, sits down with Ray Naeini, CEO and Chairman of EMERGE, to discuss how companies can provide exceptional customer service.

Throughout the conversation, they share their expertise on overcoming common challenges—ranging from siloed systems to the critical role of ongoing vendor support. Their discussion offers valuable perspectives on transforming customer interactions and adapting to the rising expectations of today’s consumers. Join us as Sheri and Ray discuss strategies and emerging trends that are shaping the future of the contact center industry.    

Sheri Greenhaus: What inspired the creation of EMERGE?    

Ray Naeini: The call center industry is rapidly evolving worldwide. Rising expectations for customer service, agent performance, and operational efficiency are driving this transformation, yet these factors also pose significant challenges. Success depends on having comprehensive business knowledge, nurturing innovative ideas, and effectively integrating AI-driven technologies. Unfortunately, while many sources exist for these critical success factors, they are often fragmented, too localized, or lack the global perspective, innovation incubation, and networking opportunities needed for true transformation. 

The success of transformation will depend on call centers’ access to knowledge related to every aspect of their business, cost effective and rapid incubation of innovative ideas, AI-driven technologies, and the support for effective acquisition and onboarding of such technologies.

EMERGE was created to focus on call centers globally and address their challenges in the three most impactful functions - workforce performance, customer retention, and operational efficiency.  . It empowers contact centers worldwide with knowledge, insights, technologies, best practices, and access to incubation platforms to materialize innovations in technologies and know-how to succeed in their transformation journey.

Sheri Greenhaus: EMERGE’s broad range of services makes it seem as if the company is tackling the work of a full-fledged consultancy—an impressive feat, especially since it delivers these insights without the typical fees.    

Ray Naeini: It may seem like a broad range of services. However, our experience, knowledge, and current resources have enabled us to create a systematic service structure for all call centers, focusing on their most important and Functions of workforce, customers and operation, and offering services through four Service Venues of Knowledge, AI, Incubation, and Solutions – as shown in the following picture. We have created a core system of knowledge and technology to drive the four venues of services.

Sheri Greenhaus: And you do this at no cost?    

Ray Naeini: Yes, we are starting with free services but implementing a Service-Led Growth (SLG) strategy similar to Product-Led Growth (PLG), in which we would like the call center industry to recognize and embrace the value and benefits of our services, then move to a tiered, but highly competitive, pricing model for more advanced and customized services.

Our SLG strategy is funded by Omvix Group investment company, which is also the parent company of both EMERGE and Onvisource. Though EMERGE remains entirely vendor agnostic, it has the ability to sponsor projects with OnviSource or other organizations.

Sheri Greenhaus: With all your experience, when someone comes to you with a problem, do you feel like you can quickly diagnose the issue?    

Ray Naeini: We have over 20 years of direct experience in both offering advanced technologies to and managing complex call centers. This combination of technology and call center management has empowered us to diagnose and address a very broad range of challenges in the call centers. Furthermore, we have access to resources and knowledge sources globally to assist us in responding to service requests.

Our systematic service structure, consisting of Functions and Service Venues, also assists us in addressing problems, as sometimes,  companies may not even know how to articulate their problem. That’s why we separate issues into Functions and Service Venues.

For example, is it a workforce problem? Are they losing customers? Are they dealing with outdated systems that don’t communicate with each other, leading to high operational costs? By understanding these challenges, we can ask the right questions, uncover hidden issues, and help companies find cost-effective solutions.

Sheri Greenhaus: In your view, what are the most significant trends shaping the contact center industry today?    

Ray Naeini: There are three major areas:   

• Workforce Performance Improvement - Agents are expected to be Super Agents. In today’s call center industry we expect so much from agents, from knowledge and problem solving, to a broad range of professional and soft skills. Training and retraining is not the only answer. Agents need to be empowered by interaction and desktop analytics improving their performance, workflow automation, augmentation using virtual agents, real-time auto language translation, and equipping them with the real-time guidance and knowledge about customers who they interact with.  
• Customer Relation-Building and Lifetime Value Management beyond CX relationships is essential for customer loyalty and retention. Customer resolution is no longer adequate. Customers are more loyal to brands that engage with empathy and genuine understanding.  To cultivate meaningful relationships, customers need to experience empathy, respect, social inclusivity, and feel an emotional connection. 
• Operational Efficiency - To effectively compete and grow the business, call centers need to utilize unified and AI-driven solutions to unify their call centers’ siloed data, reduce costs, and increase insights.  

Sheri Greenhaus: Are you finding that customer service isn’t improving? Sometimes, I feel like it’s declining, but I don’t know if that’s just because I notice it more. Is service actually getting worse?

Ray Naeini: It may not necessarily be a decline in customer service quality. What we’re seeing is that customer expectations are higher than ever. Agents need to have instant access to everything about a customer to serve them effectively. It’s not just about knowing what products they have—it’s about having a complete profile that allows for establishing a personalized experience.

For that to happen, agents need the right tools, historical data, and insights. Many companies still focus solely on CX being customer satisfaction per transaction, which is important, but if they don’t consider the entire customer journey across all of their past interactions, they’re missing the true understanding of customer behavior, retention, propensity, or possible churn . It’s about looking at the customer holistically over time and continuously using analytics to better align services to customer demands.

That’s why we believe in integrating CX with Customer Lifetime Value management, or what we call CXLV.

While CX is transactional, CLV is continuous. You can’t separate the two—they must work together.

Also, consider the younger generation. They want multiple channels and immediate responses. If a company’s service approach is outdated, it won’t be able to meet these expectations. The younger generation prefers to chat or interact with an IVA (Intelligent Virtual Assistant). If you don’t have the tools to serve customers across multiple channels, you risk losing them.

At the same time, poor customer service can drive customers away. Even if your prices are higher than your competitors, providing exceptional customer service significantly increases the likelihood of retaining them.   

Sheri Greenhaus: It’s interesting because everyone assumes the younger demographic wants multiple ways to connect—and they do. Even I want multiple options. But I recently spoke with a group of 30-somethings, and they all said the same thing: If they can’t get a person on the phone, they don’t want to deal with the company.

They’ve found that when they use a chatbot, it often fails to ask the right questions, doesn’t provide clear answers, and makes it impossible to escalate to a live agent. That experience signals to them that the company doesn’t care about its customers. It’s a pattern across that age group, which makes me wonder if we’re making assumptions about customer preferences that aren’t entirely accurate.   

Ray Naeini: The problem is not the customers’ lack of desire to use self-service channels such as chatbots or virtual agents. The problem is with self-service technologies.  Chatbots and virtual agents need to be more humanized and more sophisticated to carry on human-like conversations with the ability to manage conversational turns. Early versions of self-service technologies have failed and left customers with a bad experience. Bringing them back to use self-service will take much better technologies and a great deal of convincing. Nevertheless, we are observing a notable comeback by companies that use the more advanced and humanized conversational AI.

Additionally,  companies need to determine which channels best serve different segments of their customer base.

Sheri Greenhaus: With social media making it so easy for customers to share their frustrations; I see more and more people saying, ‘No, I want to talk to a person.’ Maybe companies think digital self-service is what customers want, but in reality, customers—and even the agents—don’t always prefer that.

Simple tasks, like updating an address, can be handled automatically, and that’s great. But when there’s an actual issue, no one wants to waste time going back and forth with a chatbot. When that happens, customers turn to social media—posting on X or TikTok—complaining that they can’t get their problem solved.   

Ray Naeini: No doubt that social media plays an amazing role in spreading the customer experiences with their companies. However, your point brings up an important topic about agent throughput augmentation, whereas, the simple Q/A interactions can be handled by chatbots and virtual agents, and live agents can attend to more complex service requests – increasing the overall productivity of customer services organizations.   

Sheri Greenhaus: So, is part of your work helping companies simplify their customer service and remove these pain points?    

Ray Naeini: Yes. We publish a lot of content—white papers, industry reports, and insights related to how to address these challenges, what are the best practices, what solutions call centers should consider, how to acquire, deploy and use them, what are the relevant best practices, and even incubating new ideas to investigate optimal solutions.

We gather credible information from various sources to share with the market, making it freely available so businesses can learn how to improve.

We also participate in and host conferences—both online and in-person—at no charge. We want people to learn how they can do things better.

We include various vendors in our services to offer the best solutions and best practices. We’re Our goal is to serve the entire global contact center industry, whether it’s enterprise, BPO, or niche verticals.

One key point we always emphasize when discussing technology is vendor support. Implementing a new tool is one thing, but having a vendor that supports you through the process is critical. The  proper implementation ensures businesses can truly see the benefits and the expected ROIs for their specific needs.   

Sheri Greenhaus: I think one of the biggest challenges companies face is making complex tools simple to use. During our webinars, we keep the chat open, and most of our audience consists of operational professionals. They understand the issues firsthand and genuinely want to help their customers. However, they often find themselves struggling because they never received proper training. Sometimes, the person who originally purchased the tool is no longer there, and the knowledge transfer doesn’t happen.

It becomes like a game of telephone—each time someone new takes over, they know less about the tool than the last person. As a result, many businesses end up using only a percentage of the tool’s capabilities without even realizing what’s available to them.   

Ray Naeini That happens a lot—especially when companies sign up for a tool online without fully understanding what they’re getting. It looks good, so they go with it, but then they don’t know how to use it effectively. 

Or, if a company purchases a pre-packaged solution, the vendor may provide initial setup guidance—showing how to integrate data or navigate the system—but after that, support becomes expensive. Many companies hesitate to ask for help due to the added costs, so they try to figure things out on their own.

As a result, they end up using only a small portion of the tool, which is incredibly inefficient. That’s why I always emphasize that technology is only half the equation—ongoing support and vendor collaboration are just as critical. The success of any tool depends on the long-term partnership between the company and the vendor. In fact, in the era of AI-driven solutions, vendors need to provide AI-centric support services, in which a team of vendors’ AI analysts are available to offer assistance in the best use of AI-driven solutions.   

Sheri Greenhaus: Unfortunately, many still struggle with siloed systems that prevent them from seeing the full picture of customer interactions.    

Ray Naeini: It is unfortunately the case.  Without a unified view of all customer interactions, companies have no way of knowing if the agents were professional, courteous, and effective, why the customer was upset, or if the issue could have been resolved in a better manner.

This problem is created by customers’ 3^rd party systems from various vendors that do not communicate or share data and process data in different formats. Manually capturing, unifying, and analyzing data to obtain holistic views becomes an expensive and lengthy process. Additionally, analytics solutions that are not provided with enterprise-wide data will not produce holistic and conclusive actionable insights. The solution is to implement automation solutions that seamlessly integrate with the 3^rd party systems, capture and unify siloed data, and perform analytics across the enterprise-wide and unified data.

If businesses don’t adopt new processes, integrate smarter technologies, and address key challenges, they risk falling behind. The ability to quickly identify and resolve customer pain points is critical for survival in today’s market.   

Sheri Greenhaus: Can contact centers use analytics to improve their understanding of both customer challenges and agent issues? 

Ray Naeini: GEN AI-driven technologies and advanced analytics, powered by automation, are transforming today’s agents into SUPER AGENTS. By unifying enterprise-wide data, agents gain real-time,  holistic, and historical insights, enabling them to deliver context-sensitive, personalized customer service. Multichannel interaction analytics go beyond traditional quality assurance, leveraging meta-analytics and deep mining to offer comparative and impact analysis, summary analysis, and root cause analysis to uncover valuable insights.

Additionally, desktop analytics and transaction automation streamline operations, while interactive agent engagement tools enhance coordination and collaboration with agents. Task and workflow automation further optimize efficiency, and intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) augment agents’ throughput. . AI-driven language auto-translation also breaks down communication barriers, allowing the same agents to assist customers in multiple languages effortlessly. Together, these innovations empower agents to perform at unprecedented levels, driving superior customer experiences and operational excellence.   

Sheri Greenhaus: If a company wants to take advantage of what you offer, how can they find you?    

Ray Naeini: We have our EMERGE website. Companies can register as members, but even non-members can reach out anytime. We’re always happy to answer questions.    

Sheri Greenhaus: What’s the key takeaway you’d like our audience to remember when thinking about EMERGE?     

Ray Naeini: EMERGE is a unique service dedicated to the call center industry worldwide. EMERGE is a free, vendor-agnostic service that focuses globally on improving call center workforce, customer loyalty, and operational efficiency. It brings together the knowledge, AI technologies, call center solutions, and access to incubation of ideas – offered mostly free of charge.  

Our goal is to help the industry evolve and transform call centers to intelligent call centers. Every call center faces challenges in its transformation to intelligent call center.  EMERGE aims to be a structured, comprehensive, and globally accessible resource—ensuring that contact centers have the tools and insights they need to thrive.