This article first appeared in UC Advanced magazine issue #24.
While artificial intelligence continues to have an impact on solutions, one area that has already gone through somewhat of an AI revolution is the contact centre.
Artificial intelligence is revolutionising contact centres by automating routine tasks and pre-qualifying requests for faster resolutions. Although AI reduces cognitive load through real-time transcription and automated wrap-ups, high staff turnover and increasing workloads remain significant industry challenges. Moving forward, Agentic AI and connected devices will enable proactive, contactless issue resolution. Ultimately, as common enquiries are handled autonomously, a ‘hybrid frontline’ will emerge, keeping human agents essential for complex, emotional interactions requiring genuine empathy.
One of the key themes that comes up every time I ask about the contact centre is the fact that there isn’t a business or organisation out there that doesn’t need it.
Of course, if you’re a big enough company or have shady ways of locking customers in, you can make it difficult and grow a reputation. But for the most part, good customer service goes hand in hand with a good public image, one that cares for customers and is there to help them with their problems.
In recent years, businesses have been able to lean into artificial intelligence to turn FAQ pages into helpful chatbots, mitigating the need to have a customer service rep on hand to answer such simple requests.
”If we’re honest, for many customers across countless companies, the contact centre, or more precisely the call or support interaction, used to be one of the most frustrating touchpoints,” said Jana Richter, Executive Vice President, AI and Innovation at NFON AG. “Nobody enjoys waiting in a queue only to explain their issue multiple times. This is exactly where we see the biggest difference today, thanks to artificial intelligence.
“AI has brought speed and continuity to customer support,” added John Finch, VP Product Marketing, at RingCentral. “Initially, businesses were deploying it to handle routine tasks – answering FAQs, booking appointments, capturing details – before passing full context to a human agent. This delivered no repetition and faster resolution for customers.
“From our perspective, the improvement begins before the actual conversation even starts,” said Richter. “Modern AI can recognise, structure and pre-qualify requests early on. This means that when a customer reaches out, the system already understands the context, whether it’s a technical question, a billing enquiry, or other cases.
“As a result, customers are routed to the right person much faster, or they receive an immediate solution for common inquiries.”
While AI can help with the FAQ-type queries, a human on the other end of the line is always needed as a backup. However, even if a customer’s problem can be handled by AI, some customers demand a personal touch.
“Our own consumer research shows the picture is nuanced,” said Ben Booth, CEO, MaxContact. “While AI can streamline matters and improve operational processes, customer sentiment remains mixed.
We know that 42% of consumers have switched providers due to poor contact centre experiences, and the majority (70%) still prefer speaking to a person when issues are sensitive or complex.
“For AI to improve the customer support experience, it needs to become far more intuitive, personalised, and better at recognising emotion and customer sentiment. The good news is that those technologies already exist. Developments such as voice-based emotion tracking mean AI can now escalate queries and connect customers with a human advisor much earlier, often as soon as frustration is detected. That way, advisers can deliver a better, faster and more empathetic service where it really counts.”
Reducing the Workload
Personally, I’d say that the empathy that agents have is critical to the success of a contact centre. Last thing you want to hear after going 4 rounds with the Floyd Mayweather of interactive voice assistants is “what do you want?”
When AI is taking away a lot of the menial interactions, you’d imagine agents’ lives have gotten easier. However, Martin Taylor, Co-Founder and Deputy CEO, Content Guru, said that “Workload remains the number one source of job dissatisfaction and churn in contact centres.
“We’ve seen agents embrace AI as it works alongside them to remove more of the tasks they don’t enjoy and allow them to spend more time supporting customers. Traditionally, most agent training has been taken up with learning how to navigate the organisation’s systems, rather than how to communicate with customers.
“Intelligent agent-assist tools surface relevant knowledge instantly, eliminating much re-training when corporate information changes, while technologies such as Real-Time Transcription and Summarisation remove time-consuming in-call and post-call tasks that previously consumed many hours for agents and back-office teams.
“In some contact centres, agents can spend up to 60% of their time on post-interaction wrap-up tasks, so automating much of this process reduces cognitive load and allows agents to focus on what they do best: delivering empathetic, human service.”
“The benefits depend on how AI is introduced within the organisation,” said Paul Hughes, Head of Direct Sales & CX at Mitel UK. “If agents are actively involved in the rollout, given the right support and feel as though their opinions are valid, it can drive engagement and satisfaction. If they are left out of the process and not given the ability to share feedback, it can just as easily create uncertainty and resistance to new technology.”
It would seem that contact centres are yet to take Hughes’ advice, as according to Booth, staff retention is a mixed picture and AI’s influence remains unclear. This has translated into an average annual turnover rate for contact centre agents of 31.2%, slightly higher than 30.2% the previous year.
“Retention has not yet improved, despite increasing adoption of AI tools. At the same time, 63% of organisations reported salary increases, which is positive, but also indicates that contact centres are working harder to attract and keep skilled agents.
“One of the biggest influences on retention is the overall pressure agents feel in their roles. Over half of agents (52.6%) said their workload had increased “significantly” in the past year, while only 11% reported a decrease. If AI is intended to reduce pressure by taking on routine or repetitive tasks, rising workloads raise questions about whether the technology is being deployed effectively.
“Ensuring that AI genuinely reduces staff strain will be essential to improving long-term staff retention.”
Proactive and Predictive
Looking forward, although AI has meant that businesses can offer a much better experience for customers when they have to get in contact, the technology still has a lot to offer.
It seems that recent product announcements have focused on bringing as much data to the contact centre as possible, removing data silos such as CRMs and instead leaning on them to give artificial and human agents as much information as possible.
With this information, Zach Bennett, Microsoft Teams MVP and Principal Architect at LoopUp, said that the future of contact centres is “proactive and predictive.”
“AI will increasingly anticipate customer issues, enable seamless escalation from bot to voice or video, and support continuous coaching through conversation analysis.”
“One particularly evolving field is Agentic AI,” said Richter. ”These systems can act independently across system and process boundaries. For example, initiating a service process, prioritising a disruption or guiding customers through the next steps automatically.
“This will fundamentally change the role of the contact centre itself. Where service has traditionally been reactive, the future will see a much stronger focus on predictive and proactive service. Often, resolving issues before they even become a classic support case. And that is what will truly transform the customer experience in the years ahead.”
With the continued rise of connected devices, Tayler added that IoT would be able to feed potential problems to an automated support centre so that the human customer doesn’t need to go through any support themselves.
“One major shift will come from the rise of the Internet of Things connected devices, such as smart meters or vehicle telematics, which are enabling the emergence of digital customers.”
“With the number of connected devices expected to reach around 40 billion by 2030, digital customers are already beginning to generate automated service interactions. Combined with the rise of agentic AI, the increasing ubiquity of connected devices will unlock potential for so-called contactless resolution, where issues are identified and resolved automatically through connected devices and their underpinning systems, without the customer needing to contact a brand directly.
“Gartner has predicted that by 2029, agentic AI will autonomously resolve 80% of common customer service issues without human intervention. Despite these advances, the human role will remain essential. Agentic AI will eventually resolve the majority of routine enquiries, but complex, emotional, or time-critical interactions will still require human empathy and judgement.”
Working with AI
That last sentiment is one that is shared amongst all customer service and contact centre providers. Although artificial intelligence can handle a large number of simple complaints and will obviously inevitably become more competent, as Richter puts it, “the real value will come from using AI to amplify human agents, not replace them.”
Described by Finch as a “hybrid frontline”, the resulting collaboration will make “every interaction faster, more personalised, and more intelligent.”
