Why the Contact Center Should Be the Heart of Your Omnichannel CX Strategy

AI-powered conversational intelligence can transform your contact center from a reactive cost center into a proactive driver of business value and enterprise-wide customer experience improvement.

They say the contact center is where CX goes to die. But the truth? It’s where the real work happens. Far from a dead end (or a cost center!), the contact center is the heartbeat of your CX strategy, fueling smarter decisions, better experiences, and measurable impact across the entire business.

As brands move beyond reactive survey-centric approaches to CX and expand their use of omnichannel signal capture and artificial intelligence, the contact center becomes the biggest opportunity to unlock immediate and significant value.

Contact centers are the epicenter of the customer experience for most enterprise organizations,  a crucial channel available to assist and support customers, especially when immediate answers are needed. Yet for most organizations, contact centers are siloed, with every interaction increasing expenses — and for many agents and customers, increasing frustrations. 

Every voice and chatbot interaction produces a treasure trove of information that can improve agent performance, as well as surface insights that enhance experiences at the source and increase satisfaction across digital and in-person channels, reducing call and live chat volume.

Burnout and Bottlenecks in the Contact Center

Most companies see the opportunity that conversational insights have to provide a better understanding of the customer experience holistically, but the reality is the contact center has been overburdened with many constraints.

When a customer calls a contact center, they typically have a question or problem that requires solving, and often they have failed to get their question resolved in prior interactions and channels of communication. Consumers often call a contact center after trying to self-serve or after interacting with IVRs or chatbots, and if the experience is negative, they’re often even more agitated than when they started and take out their frustrations on agents. 

The result? Agent turnover can exceed 50% a year for many contact centers, meaning that most agents are still ramping up while dealing with irritated customers and learning how to use often-complex technology and systems. 

The conversations between agents and customers contain the insights needed to improve upon customer service, but extracting this information and uncovering specifics on where you should focus attention from thousands, or even millions, of hours of calls and chat logs has long been a challenge. 

Through the years, organizations have done their best to understand these conversations by surveying customers after calls and sampling a percentage of random calls and manually analyzing them. This obviously doesn’t provide a complete picture, nor are these insights surfaced fast enough to solve problems before they escalate.

Thankfully, transcribing calls at scale is far easier today, which can help relieve this contact center burden. And more sophisticated AI-powered speech and text analytics make it possible to analyze this unstructured data in near real time. But bringing the resulting insights together with other data to help agents in the moment and surface CX friction points across the organization is still a challenge because of disparate technology systems, organizational structures, and department silos that bias thinking to be about individual channels.

Turning Customer Conversations Into Actionable Insights

When brands marry conversational insights with other customer data from across the enterprise, including more traditional survey data, their customer experience levels up in ways never before imagined. That’s because it not only helps agents solve customer problems faster, but it can also proactively unearth the root cause of bigger problems that led to the call in the first place.

To be effective, agents need to be empathetic, knowledgeable, and supported by their organizations with coaching, training, and high-quality technology and assets that help them understand the customer and the reason for the call, and enable them to find a solution.

And all customers want is that solution, delivered as quickly and as kindly as possible.

There are three ways organizations can achieve this that get exponentially better with every step:

• In the moment, by providing the agent with as much knowledge as possible about the customer and their journey preceding the call so they are armed with customer context and issue history. 
• Scaling it to the next moments, by coaching the agent and others facing similar questions during calls with prompts if needed, information that answers questions, and feedback afterwards to help them learn from the experience of a single call, and insights from a range of calls, so they can improve their performance over time. 
• Eliminating the moments from happening, by using the interaction from the calls to understand the root causes of customer issues, (products, services, digital experiences, quality, etc.) and share with appropriate parts of the business to help them prioritize and fix the issues that drive calls so that over time problems are mitigated, call volumes are reduced, and customer experiences are improved. 

By tapping into what questions the customer is asking, a company can coach and train agents to be better responders — and then by mining those calls to understand the root cause of a question (often poor product usability, documentation, or capability), they can improve their product, processes, and the omnichannel experiences they deliver.

This, ultimately, will shorten calls, reduce call volumes, and make other channels (self-service, chats, chatbots) more effective so they contain or reduce the number of calls that happen overall. With every reduction in time and calls, as well as uncovering important information about what’s going wrong in other areas of the business, companies save real dollars and cents while making customers happier.

Generative AI’s Impact on the Contact Center

AI is already transforming how contact centers operate — especially when it comes to understanding conversations. We can now identify why customers are reaching out, detect emotional and effort signals in speech and text, and evaluate how agents are responding in real time. But this is just the beginning.

The emerging wave — generative and agentic AI — isn’t about replacing people. It’s about working alongside them to make every interaction smoother, more meaningful, and more effective for both customers and agents.

1. Intelligent voice and chat agents can resolve routine, low-effort issues quickly, giving customers fast answers while freeing human agents to focus on high-stakes, emotional, or complex interactions. The ones where empathy, expertise, and the brand promise matter most.
2. Generative AI can summarize conversations and provide personalized guidance to agents, in the moment or after a call. Acting like a coach or mentor, it draws on thousands of interactions to offer improvement tips and even generate tailored follow-up messages. It supports agents, not micromanages them.
3. Team leads and coaches are often responsible for supporting dozens of agents, without enough time or visibility to do it well. AI helps scale coaching by surfacing the right moments, summarizing interactions, and recommending targeted actions. It gives coaches time to focus on development (not just documentation), and makes sure every agent has the support they need to grow.
4. Post-call, AI can step in to gather feedback, follow up with customers, surface unresolved issues, and even monitor long-term outcomes. Agents spend less time on busywork and more time helping people.

When used thoughtfully, AI in the contact center doesn’t eliminate the human touch — it elevates it. The result is better experiences across the board: Lower effort for customers. Higher confidence and satisfaction for agents. Stronger loyalty that drives measurable business results.

From Reactive to Proactive: Omnichannel CX

As Srikan Narasimhan, Vice President, Head of Enterprise Customer Experience & Insights at CVS Health said during a keynote discussion at Experience ‘25, CX needs to become focused on solving problems before they happen rather than resolving issues after they happen.

The contact center offers the richest insights in any organization, and is the first place to start when building an omnichannel CX strategy. As Sri said, the call may have ended up in the contact center, but that’s not where the problem started.

Customers are telling you with every call where there are breakdowns in your products, processes, and their experiences. If you’re only utilizing those insights to improve how you handle those calls, you’re missing out on fixing the root causes of the problems causing the calls.

To become more proactive and strategic, customer experience can’t be managed separately across channels, fueled primarily by surveys. It must include conversational intelligence, digital behavior, operational data, and more. 

The future of CX is one that listens everywhere, connects insights across the business, and turns intelligence into action.

In their quest to differentiate themselves through experience excellence, Pacific Life sought out a solution that enables them to gather, analyze, and democratize customer insights across the company — resulting in 3.5 million customer responses with closed-loop feedback. Read more about their story.