How AI is transforming contact centers into customer loyalty engines
Businesses today are under pressure like never before. Between rising technology costs, tighter margins, and tariffs (which are already impacting 72% of U.S. companies), leaders are being forced to rethink where and how they allocate resources. While acquiring new customers continues to be a valuable growth component, it’s increasingly difficult, so businesses are focusing intently on retaining and growing the customer base they already have. This strategic shift is highlighting the important role of contact centers: instead of being seen as a reactive cost burden, contact centers are being transformed by artificial intelligence (AI) into proactive engines of loyalty, retention and growth.
Unlocking hidden signals with AI
AI has changed the way contact centers operate by unlocking insights from customer interaction data in real time. There’s tremendous pressure on companies and their human agents to resolve issues quickly and efficiently – in fact, data from my company Vonage found that after a bad customer experience, 75% of customers are likely to take their business elsewhere. Predictive and real-time AI insights can support human agents to be more productive and efficient in their roles by flagging early signs of churn, identifying high-value customers, and alerting live agents when to adjust their approach before an issue escalates. By taking a proactive approach to customer experience, businesses can stay one step ahead, building customer loyalty by addressing needs before they become problems.
Agentic AI and smarter conversations
Agentic AI is pushing the transformation even further. Unlike earlier generations of AI that were purely reactive, agentic AI can guide conversations as they unfold, anticipate customer needs and make decisions without human oversight. Imagine a customer calling about a billing issue. In the past, an agent might have resolved the problem and ended the call. With agentic AI support, the support bot can provide real-time updates and initiate customer retention actions on its own, for example, providing a loyalty discount aligned with the customer’s history and preferences.
According to Gartner, 33% of enterprise software solutions will include agentic AI by 2028, and 15% of day-to-day decisions will be made autonomously. However, businesses should approach agentic AI with caution. While it has many potential benefits, agentic AI systems are still in their infancy and don’t have emotional intelligence or moral reasoning. Additionally, there are many questions unanswered about the ethics, potential for errors and biases, and alignment with evolving regulations. These questions highlight the inherent importance of keeping human agents involved in customer experiences.
Empowering agents and customers alike
As human agents continue to play an important role in customer engagement, AI is not only redefining the customer experience, but the agent experience as well. For decades, human agents have handled the majority of customer interactions across simple and more complex tasks. With siloed information, this not only made customer experiences take longer – it also led to higher rates of agent burnout and turnover in contact centers. AI removes the burden of repetitive tasks by automating routine inquiries, transcriptions, and call summaries, while also delivering real-time feedback and post-call analyses to help agents improve their performance. By removing tedious, administrative tasks, human agents can now devote more energy to meaningful customer experiences that help build customer loyalty. This allows contact centers to operate more strategically, strengthening both customer satisfaction and employee engagement.
We’re already seeing the impact of AI across contact centers. Businesses that have adopted AI for customer engagement are seeing improved first-contact resolution rates, shorter handling times, and higher Net Promoter Scores (NPS). More importantly, they’re strengthening customer retention and creating new pathways for long-term growth.
Through the power of AI, today’s contact centers are much more strategic. By leveraging AI, contact centers are transforming how agents interact with customers and turn every conversation into an opportunity to build trust, reinforce loyalty, and create sustainable growth.
Jonathan Kershaw joined Vonage in 2017. As Principal Product Manager he oversees support of the Company’s product portfolio through messaging, collateral and education of the sales and implementation teams. In his role, Kershaw is focused on software delivery and value methodology from integrations with Salesforce, and other leading CRMs, which enable richer insights into customer behaviour and empowers companies to build better relationships with their customers. With a proven track record of delivering value driven solutions through deep understanding of business and technical requirements, Kershaw has more than 25 years of experience as a product and presales specialist. Prior to joining Vonage, Kershaw held leadership positions with Rant & Rave (now Upland) and eGain Communications. Kershaw has a Mathematics Degree from the University of St. Andrews and holds a patent for text categorization and sentiment analysis.
