For years, the answer to every contact center challenge seemed to be adding another tool.
Better analytics? New vendor. Improved workforce management? Another platform. AI capabilities? Bolt something else on.
This has resulted in contact centers now managing an average of 3.9 different technology vendors, according to new research from Puzzel.
Indeed, the survey of 1,505 CX leaders across Europe revealed that only three percent have achieved a single, unified platform.
This is particularly problematic when considered alongside the report that half of CX leaders say multiple vendors lead to higher maintenance and support costs.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg:
- 71% spend at least five hours every month just keeping systems running.
- Integration challenges rank as the second-biggest obstacle facing contact centers in 2026, behind only rising customer expectations.
- 94% of CX leaders now agree that tech stack consolidation is essential to improving efficiency and performance.
Unsurprisingly, after years of adding tools, the industry is shifting toward simplification.
The push to consolidate is being driven by a more fundamental realization: AI can’t scale on fragmented infrastructure.
How We Got Here
Sundeep Boughan, Director of Sales Engineering at Puzzel, frames the challenge in practical terms, suggesting that “a lot of companies just haven’t done that audit and really understood what it is they’ve actually got.
“What they tend to find is that of those four vendors that they’ve already implemented, there’s overlapping technology and certainly overlapping functionality in those tools.”
Digital transformation pushed organizations to modernize quickly, often by layering new capabilities on top of existing systems.
Then AI arrived, and many contact centers added point solutions: a chatbot here, a sentiment analysis tool there, maybe a separate platform for agent assist.
Each addition made sense in isolation. Together, they created a web of dependencies that’s expensive to maintain and difficult to optimize.
The study reveals that Sweden reports the highest vendor average at 4.06 platforms per contact center, the UK at 3.97, and the Netherlands at 3.7. But the urgency to fix it is highest in the UK, where 97% of leaders say consolidation is essential.
“It comes down to two things,” Boughan explains.
“First is complexity. There’s a huge amount of complexity with all those tools, getting them to talk to each other, integrate, and create the analytical or reporting layer that sits underneath.
“The second challenge is around the inherent costs that you’ve put into these systems.”
The Real Cost of Complexity
For agents, 30% of CX leaders cite difficulty accessing information quickly as a major challenge.
When data lives in silos across different systems, agents waste time toggling between platforms while customers wait. Training becomes harder too, with 47% of leaders reporting struggles to train teams across multiple tools.
For customers, fragmented systems mean fragmented experiences. A conversation that starts in one channel might not carry context into the next.
For the organization, time spent maintaining systems is time not spent improving them. That’s capacity that could go toward innovation or actually using the data these systems generate.
Why 2026 Is the Moment
The AI acceleration is making this more urgent. Organizations with 500-999 employees show the highest conviction about consolidation, with 98% calling it essential.
These mid-to-large enterprises are pushing hardest into AI, and they’re discovering that their fragmented tech stacks are holding them back.
“When we’re talking about AI readiness, if you don’t have the right knowledge articles, if you don’t have a single source of the truth internally, you’re really going to struggle with being able to create that unified view and comprehensive view,” Boughan says.
He describes AI readiness as a trifecta of cloud infrastructure, unified data, and AI built on that foundation. Skip the first two, and the third won’t deliver.
Budget constraints are another factor, with 50% of leaders citing higher costs from multiple vendors.
There’s also what Boughan calls “the old adage of a single throat to choke if something goes wrong.”
With one interface instead of four, disaster recovery plans become simpler, training costs drop, and data security improves when customer information isn’t scattered across multiple platforms.
From Best-of-Breed to Unified Platforms
The shift from best-of-breed to unified platforms represents a philosophical change.
A few years ago, the conventional wisdom was to pick the best tool for each specific function. Now, organizations are willing to sacrifice some specialized functionality for the sake of integration and a holistic view of the customer.
Boughan recalls a recent example where Puzzel had a “vendor that came to us and went to tender. They had the best of breed in terms of all of the little segments of technology through their contact center space.
“A recording module was separate, a contact center platform was separate, the reporting was separate, the WFM was separate, and the analytics was separate.
“What that created was a lot of technical debt in the organization and a nightmare situation for the people in the contact center who are just having to dip in and out of so many different systems to get ultimately what should be a simple view of their customer.”
That organization chose to consolidate, accepting that they might lose some edge-case functionality in exchange for a single, threaded understanding of customer interactions.
Making the Move: A Practical Roadmap
Boughan recommends starting with an audit to understand exactly which tools you have and where their functionality overlaps. Then step back from the technology entirely and focus on the customer journey.
From there, look for platforms that offer AI-native capabilities rather than bolted-on features.
“Where vendors are starting to change now is that they’re really looking at things as customers in partnership rather than thinking of them as a very transactional relationship,” Boughan says.
He also suggests looking for quick wins that demonstrate value without requiring a full rip-and-replace.
Conversational analytics tools can often import existing call recordings to provide immediate insights.
He views this as a practical step that organizations can take right now, “because most tools will allow you to import call recordings and you can get some insights immediately from AI where it’s going to be working for you before you’ve even really made a huge investment into it.”
The consolidation wave is about recognizing that in 2026, integration matters as much as innovation.
The contact centers that will succeed with AI aren’t necessarily the ones with the most advanced point solutions; they’re the ones with the cleanest data flows, the most unified customer views, and the simplest paths from insight to action.
You can find out more about Puzzel’s research by checking out this article today.
Register now for our March 5, 2026 webinar: Is your contact centre stack overdue for a Spring clean?
You can also download the whole State of Contact Centres 2026 report from Puzzel to explore how leading organizations are simplifying their tech stacks and building AI-ready foundations.
