Contact Center Industry Abandons Containment Metrics, Embraces Customer Experience Automation

The AI ROI in Contact Center Summit highlighted the industry's shift away from metrics like containment and deflection, which have been used to measure the return on investment of contact centers for years.

Executives from companies such as Cisco Systems Inc., Five9 Inc., Zoom Communications Inc., Talkdesk Inc., and Converged Technology Professionals agreed that these metrics are no longer valid, as they do not accurately reflect the value that AI can bring to customer experience and information technology leaders.

Vinod Muthukrishnan, vice president and general manager of Webex Customer Experience at Cisco, stated that 'agentic' is a framework of tools, products, and processes, rather than just an AI agent. He also noted that it's never been easier to build an AI agent but never harder to make it enterprise-grade.

The summit also discussed the importance of measuring the time it takes for a problem to be resolved from opening to closing, not just average handle time. Pedro Andrade, vice president of AI at Talkdesk, presented data showing that organizations with high levels of customer experience automation (CXA) reported significant gains in net promoter score and cost per contact.

Amit Mathradas, CEO of Five9, noted that there is a customer-perception gap, with 99% of business practitioners believing their contact centers have improved, but only 66% of actual users sharing the same opinion. He emphasized the need for humans to be involved in certain situations, such as complexity, value, and vulnerability.

The summit also highlighted the importance of orchestration, with Andrade stating that adoption is easy, but orchestration is the hardest part. Ninety-eight percent of companies have deployed AI somewhere along the customer journey, yet only 15% combine agentic AI with cross-departmental orchestration.