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.

This is one of my favourite interviews from the week. Nicole does not speculate. She does not perform optimism. She tells you what the data says — including the parts that are uncomfortable — and she does it with the kind of clarity that makes you want to act on it before you leave the building.