Today’s contact centres have unparalleled access to new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI). Yet both customer and employee experience ratings have fallen¹ over the last two years. Customer issues are often left unresolved, and agents aren’t seeing clear progress or feedback.

Why is that?

We’ve noticed that contact centres struggle to successfully integrate new technology with their existing platforms, identify clear use cases for AI, and align talent and operations to drive value from new technology.

The good news? You can change your contact centre’s story with the right framework. We’ll cover current barriers in today’s contact centres, and five steps to prosper in customer, employee, and operational experience.

The contact centre: current state

Heightened customer and employee expectations demand more personalized, streamlined tools and processes faster than some contact centres have kept up. We found this to be especially true for public service contact centres in the last two years. However, both private and public sector contact centres share the overall struggle to scale their systems with company growth, and both sales and service delivery suffer as a result.

Customers have expressed a preference for self-service solutions. However, despite its increased adoption in contact centres, they don’t meet customer expectations in terms of resolution time, ease of use, and accessibility.

Generative AI (GenAI) can help deliver the efficiencies employees crave and personalization that customers expect. The challenge is that although there’s been a 15% increase of AI adoption in contact centres from 2023 to 2025, our recent survey revealed an average 0.5-point loss in customer and employee experience (CX and EX) ratings from 2023 to 2025.

The difference between those realizing the CX and cost-savings benefits of AI and those who aren’t is all about approach. Simply investing in AI is not the answer; it’s about scaling your AI strategy and integrating it into your existing tech stack and processes.

Five-step framework for scaled success in contact centres

Contact centres need a comprehensive approach to realize the true benefits of AI across revenue enhancement, increased CX and EX scores, and cost savings.

This five-step framework has proven successful in leveraging AI to drive benefits.

1. Lead your AI strategy with a solid business case

Take a look at your entire contact centre and key metrics. Which areas of your business need the most improvement? You can find the answer by identifying measurable pain points and reverse-engineering them with GenAI. For example, low customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores should inform key customer-supporting tasks that your AI strategy will address. This might look like call categorization to better prepare new employees for common inquiries.

Agentic AI will handle 80% of customer interactions by 2029²

One leading Canadian financial institution faced high operational costs and long call handling times, and sought to improve their operations with AI. We helped them address these issues head on with a bilingual conversational AI solution to drive results like:

• 95% call containment rate
• 92% routing accuracy
• $0.45 average cost per call (down from $10 per call)
• CSAT of 95%

Key actions to take:

• Use GenAI to analyze historical interactions (call recordings) to identify pain points.
• Prioritize pain points to address in your strategy, starting with the ones with the highest impact and lowest complexity to implement.
• Address pain points with use cases for AI that are specific, defined, and measurable.

2. Elevate your self-service game to meet customer demand for convenience

While an omnichannel strategy is still essential for success, contact centres are prioritizing investment in digital, self-service channels:

• 42% digital assistants
• 38% mobile applications
• 37% chatbots
• 34% customer portals

....much more than for traditional channels like email (13%) and SMS (3%). Yet, unfortunately, only 8% of customers are satisfied with contact centre self-service tools. It’s worth noting that while self-service is important to customers (13%), it’s not as important as resolving their issues upon first contact (47%).³

If your self-service solutions aren’t resolving issues upon first contact, you might need to augment them with AI. We helped one of our clients, another leading financial institution, implement an omnichannel strategy and AI-driven agent assist with NLP in their contact centre. This drove results like:

• 95% CSAT score
• 30 second reduction in call handling time
• $10 million in annual savings

Key actions to take:

• Prioritize first-contact resolution (FCR) as a key metric for success, and measure it frequently across new channels and technology adoptions.
• Leverage GenAI to prepare human and virtual agents with key data and precedents to improve FCR.
• Consider self-service solutions from a user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) perspective, such as accessibility, ease of use, and a closed feedback loop to keep the customer informed.

3. Create a dedicated, GenAI deployment squad to build and measure progress

Most contact centres’ operations are scalable. However, scaling can deplete time and resources when paired with inflexible architecture, legacy infrastructure, or outdated technology. If you can’t scale your contact centre operations quickly, you might not be agile enough to maintain high ratings in CX, EX, or OX.

Scaling success means assessing your existing infrastructure and CRM components to identify ways to improve tasks with GenAI. And you can't build or monitor key metrics for GenAI adoption without a dedicated team.

The best sources of insights for your AI squad are your customers and representatives. You can inform AI design and strategy by listening to common pain points that come up in call recordings.

That was the case for one client we partnered with to create a GenAI deployment squad for their contact centre. With a cohesive focus that bridged AI integration across talent, governance, data, and delivery, we helped them achieve:

• Multiple scalable AI components that drove automation and efficiency
• Improved data readiness
• A robust AI governance framework to ensure ethical and compliance AI practices

Key actions to take:

• Enlist well-rounded support across your entire organization, including product owners, compliance experts, customer excellence, legal, IT, and leadership.
• Create a regular schedule of meetings to identify challenges and pain points that come up throughout your organization’s GenAI adoption journey.
• Evaluate platforms and solutions based on their flexibility to scale, and assess their capabilities against your organization’s current and future needs.

4. Invest in your employees

We’ve long seen a correlation between happy employees and happy customers. The easiest way to understand how to support your employees is to ask them. Yet over 30% of contact centres⁴ still don’t conduct employee experience surveys.

Contact centre employees have long dealt with burnout from the struggles of the job. A common culprit? Organizational inefficiencies. For example, only 15% of contact centre staff find information accessible. That’s why it’s vital to integrate AI with existing tech and train your agents to use it to avoid siloed, inaccessible data.

We collaborated with one client to train their agents on Google Cloud’s contact center technology. Agents learned how to leverage AI summary tools, improve verification processes, and automate routine tasks. The results included:

• 3.5 minutes in handling time reduction
• Improved agent morale and job satisfaction
• Overall faster service and higher-quality customer interactions

Key actions to take:

• Create a process that equips employees with streamlined access to customer data to help them provide positive, personalized experiences to customers.
• Keep a pulse on employee sentiment with a scheduled cadence of surveys.
• Host regular upskilling sessions and refreshers on key features, relevant metrics like FCR, or additional workflows.
  

5. Integrate safely with your existing tech stack

Even the most advanced AI applications won’t deliver value in a contact centre if you don't integrate them with existing tech. Consider all the data in your CRM platform, like customer history, employee performance metrics, and operational KPIs. New technologies need exposure to this data to be truly efficient. This rings especially true for regulated industries like banking or insurance, where organizations must plan for integration and compliance much earlier before implementing new technology.

When integrated securely and successfully, AI technology can translate into employee satisfaction and cost savings.

One of our clients faced slow authentication and long hold times, and sought our support to improve their operations. With support from our technology partner, Google Cloud, we helped our client automate customer authentication, transcripts, and summaries to drive results like:

• Completely automated customer authentication
• 33% reduction in call handle time
• 1,750 minutes saved each day (29 hours per year)

Key action to take:

• Plug GenAI tech and assist tools with systems like ServiceNow and Salesforce, and plan for API orchestration.
• Explore integrations with new technologies and knowledge management applications to align processes with existing customer knowledge and best practices.

The Deloitte difference

Deloitte’s customer service leaders bring nuanced experience across a global network of contact centre clients in every industry. We’re in tune with key contact centre challenges and have proven experience skyrocketing customer, employee, and operational experience with our software and service offerings. Our practical tools and methodologies help us evaluate your contact centre and determine the best place to start your journey.

We have strong relationships with technology partners like Salesforce, Amazon, Google, Creatio, and ServiceNow, along with CCaaS providers such as Genesys, Nice, and Five9. These relationships help us ensure smoother integrations with new technologies in your existing tech stack. You can view more results from our successful engagements below:

Start a new story for your contact centre

Excellence across customer, employee, and operational experience requires a coordinated AI strategy across your entire organization. When you prioritize current customer and employee needs in the process, your most important contact centre metrics will skyrocket in response.

If you've struggled with contact centre performance for years, we’re here to help. The best part? We can transform your contact centre in as fast as a few months.