Character Controller vs. Kinematic Rigidbody

I'm having trouble with colliders and the characters in my scene. I'm working on a party-based combat scene where you right-click on terrain to move, attack, etc.

I've given my actors in my scene Character Controllers but to accomplish the movement I'm directly manipulating the transform versus moving the character controller.

What I'm having a problem with is detecting collision against static objects in my scene, for instance walls with a static box collider. The actor passes through and I don't receive any collision events either on the static object or on the actor.

Is using a character controller incorrect here, and should I be using a kinematic rigidbody instead? If so, it doesn't seem that kinematic rigidbodies raise collider events (according the the matrix in the Unity doc). What is the correct approach here to 'point and click' actors that respect collisions?