If there’s an industry that will be transformed by AI, it’s going to be the contact centre industry – and that’s good news for all of us, because has anyone ever enjoyed being on hold on a call or waiting for an email or WhatsApp reply? Anyone? Hello? Bueller?
Thought so.
The first thing that comes to mind when you hear of contact centres is cost, cost, cost, always a necessity, never a strategic function. Fortunately, this is changing and changing fast. Contact centre directors are starting to realise the wealth of data they hold, every conversation, ripe for AI to mine and enable not only differentiation but personalisation on a totally different level.
AI powered CRM, automations, omnichannel communications, Conversational AI, generative AI: they are revolutionising the contact centre. It is becoming the heart of the business; it’s all about customer loyalty and efficiency – AI is an enabler for both and that’s how you need to see it. AI is an enabler.
Now, let’s not all panic and go: “AI is going to destroy the call and contact centre industry, with approx. 1million jobs in the UK, nearly 4million in the US, and millions more across the globe doomed.” That’s not the case, far from it. Consumers still prefer human interaction; we love to talk. Sometimes you need to speak to the agent, and automation can only do so much.
What AI is going to do is make jobs a lot better and a lot easier. Let’s look at how.
We are redefining customer service as customer experience. This is the era when businesses care about customer experience, because customers have choices, and it is easier – not to mention cheaper – to keep a customer than to try and find new ones.
But this isn’t just about customer experience. There are benefits throughout the whole contact centre. Ask any contact centre manager what their pain points are and workforce management and people scheduling will be high up there. AI can remove that pain of employee management.
By looking at the types of data I mentioned earlier and analytics, AI-enhanced tools can work out the best scheduling and organisation possible, working out not only when is going to be a busy or quiet period but what skillsets should be available at certain times of the day. How does this benefit you and me? It means that staffing should not only be available to deal with calls, but the right people will be on hand to deal with the calls, making them – theoretically – quicker to resolve.
Even aside from that, looking at what everyone expects to be the big kicker – AIs and chatbots making human agents redundant. Far from it. For a start, chatbots and AI are only as good as the training they are given, and the training comes from the interactions between humans and customers as much as anywhere. It’s too early to be thinking in terms of AI or chatbots replacing humans. Instead, the best thinking at the moment is that the AI should be doing two things for humans in a contact centre setting: dealing with the more routine calls (“when is my bin collected”, “what’s my bank balance”, and “what are your opening hours” are still perennial classics, even in this internet age) and assisting – but not replacing – humans for the more challenging calls that still require the human touch.
There are actually a number of spin-off benefits from this approach: customers looking for an answer to a routine question get it answered quickly, increasing their satisfaction, while those looking for answers to a non-routine or more urgent query get answered quicker because staff aren’t bogged down with the routine issues. The other spin-off benefit is actually for the contact centre staff. Because they aren’t dealing with the same-old queries day in, day out and are engaging in more purposeful work, their level of satisfaction goes up.
AI’s influence on contact centres is not limited to customer interactions and workforce management as it is also reshaping quality assurance and compliance monitoring, giving supervisors a superior workspace tool to what they had in years gone by.
Traditional quality assurance methods relied on manual call monitoring, which was both time-consuming and prone to bias. AI-driven quality assurance solutions can analyse 100% of customer interactions in real time, identifying compliance risks, measuring agent performance, and ensuring consistency in customer service. AI-powered compliance monitoring also helps businesses adhere to industry regulations by flagging potential violations and recommending corrective actions, reducing legal and reputational risks.
But even this is starting to look like table stakes as we move into an era of agentic AI and more proactive customer communications. When this is combined with multimodal AI, pulling together text, voice, and visual inputs, the future is one of seamless and intuitive customer interactions.
Where Agentic AI will transform the contact centre business is by enabling AI-driven systems to operate with greater autonomy, decision-making capabilities, empathy, and contextual awareness, significantly enhancing both customer and agent experiences. Unlike traditional AI, which primarily responds to inputs, agentic AI proactively initiates interactions, anticipates customer needs, and autonomously resolves deeper issues without human intervention.
And while some may have their concerns around the security implications of ‘chatting with robots’, again AI can make it a more secure experience. AI-powered authentication methods, such as voice biometrics and behavioural analytics, provide secure and frictionless identity verification. Additionally, fraud detection algorithms analyse patterns and anomalies in real time, identifying potential threats and preventing fraudulent activities before they escalate. The ability to authenticate users and detect fraud without adding unnecessary friction to the customer journey will be seen as a game-changer in contact centre security once customers are accepting of it.
With security also comes the question of privacy, rights and ethics. AI-driven contact centres rely on vast amounts of customer data to deliver personalised experiences. Ensuring compliance with data protection regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA, is essential to maintaining customer trust. Ethical AI considerations, including bias mitigation and transparent decision-making, must also be prioritised to ensure fairness and inclusivity in AI-driven interactions.
The AI-powered world, never mind the contact centre, is no longer a distant vision; it is a reality that is reshaping the customer experience landscape.
Businesses that embrace AI-driven CCaaS and UCaaS solutions are positioning themselves for greater efficiency, improved customer satisfaction, and competitive advantage. As AI continues to evolve, the potential for innovation in contact centres will only expand, driving a future where AI and human collaboration create truly intelligent, customer-centric engagement ecosystems.
Contact centres need to extol the benefits of expanding their AI influence, AI has changed the rules, it is an incredible opportunity as well as a challenge as I talked about earlier that your customers expect you to resolve, because if you don’t, they will find a vendor that has. Lots of great companies in the past that failed to grasp the opportunity of new technology. Remember Netscape Navigator, AltaVista, and so many more.
Talking about web browsers is actually relevant here because what AI will bring to contact centres will be as transformative as what the web brought to the world. Remember what Bill Gates said about the internet in a Microsoft internal memo 25 years ago today: “It’s a tidal wave” and the company needed to get on board with it. That’s where we are – and where we’re going with AI in the customer experience revolution.
