Brian Nichols | Host, CX Without the BS

If I pulled out my phone right now and called your business, what would actually happen?

Would I get a human? A robot? Or that endless loop of "press one for sales, press two to waste your time"?

Here's the part nobody in tech likes to admit. Your marketing team spends thousands of dollars to get people to ring your doorbell. Then the moment they show up, a lot of businesses leave them standing on the porch.

This was a solo episode of CX Without the BS. No guest this time. Only me, making the case that the most boring line item on your P&L, the phone system, might be the biggest threat to your revenue. And at the end, the five-question audit I use with real clients.

Listen to the full episode: Why Customers HATE Calling You | Forget AI Chatbots, Fix Your DAMN Phone System First

CX Isn't Fluffy

Somewhere along the way, customer experience got hijacked by analysts and buzzwords. We started thinking CX means delighting people with personalized emails.

That's not it. Real CX is what happens when someone has a problem and they try to reach you.

Most businesses think they have a tools problem. They figure they need more AI, more chatbots, more complex routing.

You don't need more tools. You need a new definition. Your business phones aren't a utility anymore. They're the digital front door of your entire brand.

Two Front Desks

Picture walking into a nice office building. The air is cool. It smells nice. There's a clean front desk, and the person behind it looks up, smiles and says, "Mr. Nichols, we've been expecting you. Go right on back."

How do you feel? Handled. Appreciated. Acknowledged. Safe.

Now picture the opposite. Nobody's at the desk. Boxes are piled up in the corner. Somebody is yelling in the back room, and they can't hear you. You ring the bell. Nothing. Then you see a sign that says deliveries only.

You'd walk out.

That's your phone system. When a customer calls and it rings eight times, that's the empty desk. When they get bounced from department to department, repeating their account number, that's the guy yelling in the back room.

And if that front door is broken, as I said on the show, "I don't care how good your product is, I don't care how nice your onboarding team is, you have already lost."

It's Not Your Fault

So why do smart companies, ones crushing it in sales and marketing, struggle so much here?

Honestly, it's how my industry was built. CX tools started in the enterprise. Back in the day, a real front desk experience meant an on-prem call center, servers and a lot of hardware.

Then it all moved to the cloud. The big contact center platforms are great tools, if you're Delta Air Lines. For the rest of us, they brought more licenses, more minimums and more complexity. They turned CX into a product category instead of a business outcome.

Meanwhile, your sales team lives in a CRM. Your support team lives in a ticketing system. Your marketing team lives in HubSpot. And your phones are out there floating around, connected to nothing.

That created a missing middle. You're not Delta Air Lines, but you're not a lemonade stand either. You still have customers, you still care about being responsive, and you still lose deals when you miss calls. Yet a lot of vendors basically said, come back when you have 500 agents.

You have five.

The Failures Nobody Tracks

Most people hear this and think, "We're good. Our phones work."

Do you know that for a fact? Or is it that nothing is physically on fire?

Here are the moments most businesses aren't tracking:

• After-hours routing. Someone calls at 5:01 PM, not 4:59. Does it go straight to voicemail, or ring into the void?
• Dead ends. Does a voicemail create a ticket or an email, or does it disappear into a black hole?
• The runaround. How many times does a caller have to say their name, their problem and their account number?
• The visibility gap. When you miss a call, does a manager know? Does anybody do anything about it?

One at a time, you'd call that "phone stuff." Added up, it's your brand. Routing issues plus missed calls plus dead ends equals your customer experience.

What Changed

Here's the good news. The demand for CX never went away, but the technology finally caught up with how businesses actually work.

Work from home forced phones to get flexible. You couldn't be chained to a desk phone anymore. And the walls between the phone system and the contact center started coming down. Now you can get routing, queues and visibility without a six-figure contact center implementation.

The winner isn't the platform with the most features. It's the one with the right features for your size. It's about speed, simplicity and accountability, not the next shiny object.

First Impression, Flow, Follow-Through

Here's the simple three-part model I use.

1. First impression. This is the front desk. How fast do callers get acknowledged? Do they hear "Hey, thanks for calling, how can I help?" Or silence, a click and hold music? If the first 10 seconds suck, you're already fighting an uphill battle.

2. Flow. No dead ends. No loops. Get the caller to the person who can solve their problem in the fewest steps possible. If they have to press five buttons to talk to a human, your flow is broken.

3. Follow-through. This is the one almost everybody misses. If a call drops, who owns it? If a voicemail comes in, does it get transcribed and dropped into Slack or email for someone who can actually grab it? A good buddy of mine always says the fortune is in the follow-up. The same is true of the follow-through. Without it, there's no trust.

Break any one of the three and the whole experience breaks.

The Five-Question Audit

This is how I pressure test it with clients. Ask your team these today:

1. Can we change our routing or greetings the same day, without submitting a support ticket?
2. Do we know exactly how many calls we miss, and why?
3. Do customers get stuck or loop in our phone menu?
4. Can managers see what's happening, in real time?
5. Do customers reliably hear back after they reach out?

One gut check from the show: if you have to wait 48 hours to change a holiday greeting, you're failing.

Now be honest. If you answered "no" or "I don't know" to any of those, that's OK. It's not your fault. It's a map of where to start fixing things.

My Take

Full disclosure: the episode was sponsored by Level365, which is also my day job.

I talk to businesses every day who are fed up. Fed up with hidden fees. Fed up with forced minimums and features nobody uses. Fed up with being treated like a number because they aren't big enough for the big guys to care.

Here's what it looks like when the front door works. You get call queues, analytics and visibility without the contact center complexity or price tag. What you're quoted is what hits the invoice. You're month-to-month, so you stay because it's good, not because a three-year contract says so. And when you call for help, a real problem solver live answers in under 10 seconds.

If that audit gave you a little pit in your stomach, Level365 does a 15 to 30 minute intro call to look at where the friction is. If you're fine where you are, they'll tell you. No pitch, just clarity. Would it be crazy to take a look at level365.com?

I closed the episode with this, and I'll close here with it too. In 2026, "nobody cares about what technology you have." What they care about is how easy you are to do business with.

If CX matters to your business, then how people reach you matters. Don't let the front door stay broken.

Listen to the Full Episode

The whole episode runs under 14 minutes, including the Wall Street trap I hear about from business owners every day. Good length for your next drive.

Listen to Why Customers HATE Calling You on CX Without the BS

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