Agentic AI, machine customers, large language models (LLMs)… there’s lots of new terminology for contact center leaders to consider in 2025.
Yet, they must also cut through this noise, strategize, and – ultimately – prioritize to ensure they’re meeting new expectations from customers, employees, and the broader business.
With this in mind, here are five questions for contact center leaders to ask themselves so they can steer the ship in the best possible direction.
1. Which Cloud Strategy Is Best for My Business?
Whether its agentic, generative, or predictive, AI is having an increasingly significant impact on contact center operations.
As such, brands must feel confident they have the ideal foundation to innovate without disruption.
CCaaS offers the most agile base to pivot from. However, some enterprise contact center leaders have concerns about data privacy and sovereignty.
There’s also a new threat: tariffs.
With the US on a tariff rampage, it could – theoretically – impose tariffs on companies transferring data across borders. Meanwhile, other countries could fight back by taxing US cloud providers, including AWS, Google, and Microsoft.
Such moves could – over time – increase CCaaS costs.
Given these rising concerns, contact centers should be wary of following the one-size-fits-all CCaaS trend. Instead, they should choose between full cloud, hybrid, or on-prem solutions based on their unique growth trajectory, compliance needs, regional concerns, and data sovereignty challenges.
That’s according to Ben Levy, President of Enghouse Interactive. “Our CxEngage platform operates in multiple regions,” he said. “We currently have cloud infrastructure in the UK, the US, and soon in Asia, ensuring compliance with local data regulations.
“Security remains a growing concern for organizations globally, encompassing both industry-specific and geographic compliance requirements.
We understand the geopolitical concerns around data sovereignty and continually adapt to address those concerns.
Ultimately, this decision is not about technology for technology’s sake; it’s about enabling practical solutions that support rapid scaling while safeguarding critical data.
2. Will AI Empower or Replace My Service Team?
Many contact centers have hit the headlines recently for cutting service staff and pointing to AI.
For instance, Sky UK, the prominent television and internet provider, recently laid off 2,000 agents and shut down three customer support centers.
However, even as AI takes new forms and automates more conversations, some brands are choosing a different approach.
Consider Gucci. It has implemented customer-facing AI. Yet, it also leveraged AI to empower its existing staff to engage in deeper customer conversations instead of replacing them.
The result? Its call center revenues increased by 30 percent because its support agents could market and sell products.
These divergent stories underline a difficult decision many customer service leaders must soon make: do we empower or replace?
Levy stresses the continuing importance of live agents in contact centers. “We view AI as an enabler—not a replacement—for the human touch, which should still be the optimal approach.
As such, Enghouse has developed a three-pronged contact center AI strategy:
- Automate: Automate routine tasks to free up agents for higher-value interactions by leveraging virtual agents that work inside the contact center alongside human agents. These virtual agents are measured and monitored, ensuring consistency in performance tracking and optimization.
- Assist: AI aids agents both during conversations – by providing real-time, context-specific knowledge – and afterward by summarizing the call and identifying follow-up actions.
- Add Insight: AI generates deeper actionable business insights across all customer conversations, improving decision-making across the entire organization.
“By augmenting agent performance with targeted AI applications, we ensure that technology enhances genuine customer relationships, a point we believe differentiates us from competitors who sometimes lean too heavily on automation,” concluded Levy.
3. Can We Do More to Develop an Open, Extensible Ecosystem?
Many contact center transformation projects stall and cost much more than first expected. Why? Because they end up requiring considerable custom development.
Bolt-on solutions – like a WhatsApp add-on – are still a significant issue here. They make it tricky to add data into customer conversations or extract it from them.
As such, brands often get stuck when introducing a new contact handling process or strategy, and custom development is the only way out.
Recognizing this, many businesses are establishing a future-proof, open contact center ecosystem.
That starts with an architecture that offers open APIs and flexible integration capabilities designed to retain and seamlessly connect critical front- and back-end systems.
Levy underlined how Enghouse Interactive achieved this. He stated:
Every user interface and function we develop is built on APIs, allowing customers to integrate with our system as well as their own custom applications. They can do this independently with our documentation or leverage our professional services team for support.
In creating this unified ecosystem, Enghouse helps reduce complexity while protecting the contact center’s investments and enabling a more agile base for innovation.
4. Is Our AI Strategy Ethical & Future-Proof?
Many CX platforms embed third-party AI tools that they white-label. That’s a problem for contact centers that are cautious about where their AI comes from, the data it uses, and how it was trained. And from recent AI lawsuits, both businesses and contact centers vendors should be cautious.
After all, if customer data is used to train AI models, that could have significant legal and ethical ramifications.
As such, companies should be wary of working with contact center vendors that believe a message – such as: “Your call may be recorded for training purposes” – is sufficient cover.
Indeed, businesses and their vendors must be aware that end-customers assume that means they’ll use the recording for internal training. That is entirely different from allowing it to be taken offsite and used to train an external vendor’s AI software.
Vendors that don’t offer sufficient guidance here may – over time – end up in a deep legal quagmire.
Levy offers assurances that Enghouse isn’t one such vendor. “Protecting customer data is paramount, and we have a steadfast commitment to never using customer data to train our models,” he said.
Our dedicated teams of experts employ alternative techniques (including proprietary AI methodologies) so that we can deliver cutting-edge solutions without compromising your – or your customers’ – data privacy or security.
“We treat our customers’ data as sacred, even if regulations haven’t caught up with the technology,” he concluded.
By working with contact center providers that follow this approach, businesses can ensure they meet rigorous regulatory requirements and build lasting customer trust.
5. Do We Know What Will Drive Value in the Contact Center?
From conversational intelligence and automated quality assurance (QA) solutions to virtual agent and agent-assist applications, there are a lot of technologies promising to improve the contact center.
Given this, leaders must consider: what can we invest in that will drive real value?
Levy recommends a holistic approach that ensures leaders consider the total cost of ownership and long-term ROI when evaluating new solutions.
“We help organizations look beyond initial licensing fees and consider implementation, training, and ongoing maintenance to ensure that investments drive sustainable growth,” he said.
In doing so, Enghouse helps brands focus on the outcomes they wish to achieve. Levy concluded:
Our approach is focused on generating measurable business outcomes, lowering overall costs, and maximizing the value of every dollar invested in technology.
The Best Path Forward? Practical AI Innovation
As contact center leaders strategize on their future architecture, AI plans, and innovation curve, Levy endorses a practical, forward-thinking approach.
“While many competitors talk about hyper-personalization and advanced AI, at Enghouse, we are committed to practical innovation, ensuring that every decision is actionable and aligned with your overall business strategy,” he said.
By supporting brands in aligning their technology choices with strategic goals, Enghouse is more of a consultative tech provider.
Indeed, it considers itself a partner, supporting its customers in devising, implementing, and optimizing customer service experiences.
To learn more about Enghouse Interactive, visit its website.
