Gary Proctor
BS • MBA • CCXP
The Short Version
I've spent over 20 years leading contact centers and Customer Experience functions, from lean, single-site operations to enterprise environments spanning hundreds of agents across multiple channels. Along the way, I picked up an accounting degree and MBA, demonstrable coding and analytical skills, Six Sigma certifications, and the Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) credential, but the real education came from actually running the floor: fixing service levels in real time, building a ridiculously deep bench of leadership talent, rebuilding broken workforce management processes, and, more recently, deploying AI to address numerous aspects of contact center operations while learning what AI can and can't responsibly do inside a live contact center.
How I Got Here
My path started in analytics, not Customer Experience: database management, forecasting, capacity planning, and call center optimization at MBNA America and Bank of America. That analytical foundation, later formalized through an MBA, is still part of what separates how I approach a contact center from leaders who work mostly on instinct.
From there, I moved into direct contact center leadership: insurance (Aetna), banking (Fulton Financial), healthcare and pharmacy (Wedgewood Pharmacy), and nonprofit and international credentialing (CGFNS International, now TruMerit). On more than one occasion, I inherited operations that needed real structural change, not just a new dashboard, and each one pushed me further from "run the numbers" into "own the outcome." Somewhere in that stretch, I earned the Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) credential, less to add a line to a resume than to formalize what I'd already learned the hard way: operational performance and Customer Experience are the same job, not two competing ones.
Most recently, that arc has put me squarely in the middle of the AI shift now reshaping contact centers everywhere. As Vice President, Lead Optimization at a national financial services company, I deliberately traded broad operational ownership for a hands-on, analytics-focused seat inside an organization investing heavily in nearly every facet of contact center and sales AI. I use SQL and Snowflake daily to turn raw contact data into decisions that affect both cost and Customer Experience, alongside hands-on work with agentic AI outbound and AI-driven coaching. It's the same instinct I started with more than twenty years ago, just applied to a completely different set of tools.
Some of what that arc has looked like in practice:
- Built a five-year people/process/technology roadmap and executed 74% of it inside two and a half years
- Took self-service order intake from 63.8% to 82.5%, cutting staffing needs by over 20% in the process
- Consolidated disparate lines of business into a single, unified omnichannel contact center
- Rebuilt a recruiting pipeline that had 90-day hiring vacancies down to under 30 days
- Currently applying advanced lead-scoring, segmentation, and AI-driven contact strategy work as Vice President, Lead Optimization at a national financial services company, using SQL and Snowflake to turn raw contact data into decisions that affect both cost and Customer Experience
Where I'm Headed
I'm building CXPro Connection to do independently what I've spent two decades doing inside other people's organizations: bring operational discipline and genuine Customer-centricity into the same room, instead of treating them as competing priorities. I'm available now for select engagements, and fully available to support the right opportunity, as I move toward this work full-time and transition into a more independent, consulting-based chapter of my career, bringing two decades of operating scars, not just frameworks, to every engagement.
Credentials
- Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP)
- MBA, IT Concentration, Goldey-Beacom College
- BS, Accounting, Goldey-Beacom College
- Six Sigma Lean Certifications
- Call Center Workforce Optimization Certification