As someone who has spent years watching contact center leaders navigate the tension between rising expectations and shrinking budgets, I know the “always on” mandate can feel like an impossible target.
Customers today don’t just want 24/7 service; they want it to be personal, predictive, and effortless, whether it’s 2 p.m. or 2 a.m. If you are a CX leader staring at a legacy infrastructure that struggles to stay resilient during business hours, let alone around the clock, this article is for you.
Why “Always On” Is Now the Minimum Standard
Customers expect brands to be available, responsive, and consistent, every hour of the day, on every channel they choose. Yet many contact centers are still wrestling with legacy platforms that were never designed for that level of resilience or agility.
CX Today’s spotlight theme this month, Modernising the Contact Center for Always-On Service, captures a shift already visible in the market. Enterprises are accelerating CCaaS adoption because on‑premises systems are struggling with scale, resilience, and integration. Legacy platforms now limit scalability, flexibility, and the ability to handle seasonal peaks, while operating costs remain stubbornly high and talent is harder to retain.
At the same time, KPMG’s latest Global Customer Experience Excellence 2025-2026 report shows that customer experience is improving across markets, with customers reporting a 1 to 2 percent uplift in overall CX.
Behind that incremental progress is a deeper structural change in how leading organisations design service. KPMG argues that customer experience excellence is shifting from optimizing single touchpoints to building “Total Experience”, defined as:
“The unification of customer, employee, partner, and digital touchpoints into an integrated, intelligent whole that delivers predictable, reliable, and measurable experiences.”
For contact center leaders, that definition is a clear call to rethink both technology stack and operating model.
From Contact Center moderniZation to Total Experience
Always on expectations, peak load volatility, slow integration with digital channels, and a persistent gap between customer expectations and service capabilities are now a familiar set of pressures, alongside the technical direction of travel: CCaaS, cloud-native resilience, AI routing and deflection, API-first integration layers, omnichannel orchestration, and workforce optimization.
KPMG’s research provides the strategic frame that sits above these investments. The report identifies five principles of Total Experience that top performing brands have mastered:
- Customer centricity
- Data driven insights
- Seamless integration
- Employee empowerment
- Technology enablement
In KPMG’s words, leaders are now “connecting every person, process, and digital interaction around a consistent, coherent, and human-centered experience.” That is exactly what an always on contact center has to enable. It is no longer enough to extend hours or add more channels. The experience must feel joined up, predictive, and low effort, regardless of when or where the interaction starts.
For CX leaders planning modernization roadmaps, this means viewing the contact center as the experience backbone, not a standalone function. CCaaS platforms, agentic AI, and omnichannel orchestration become the infrastructure that allows Total Experience to operate in real time.
The Six Pillars, and Why Time and Effort Is a Contact Center Problem
KPMG’s Customer Experience Excellence model is built around The Six Pillars of Experience. These are Personalization, Integrity, Expectations, Time and Effort, Resolution, and Empathy.
The 2025-2026 report confirms that Personalization and Integrity remain the strongest drivers of commercial outcomes, leading both Net Promoter Score and loyalty.
However, for always on service, Time and Effort and Resolution are often where contact centers either shine or fail. KPMG notes that:
“Customers increasingly expect experiences that are personal, intuitive, anticipatory, and they expect them every time, everywhere, from every interaction.”
Time and Effort measures how easy it is to get help and complete tasks. Resolution measures how quickly and effectively issues are solved, without repetition or hand off. If we map those pillars onto the common challenges, the gaps become clear:
- Legacy systems make it harder to offer low effort, one and done journeys.
- Limited integration means customers repeat information across channels.
- Capacity constraints slow resolution during peaks and out of hours.
Sector data in the KPMG report underlines how critical these pillars are in operational environments similar to contact centers. For example:
- Retail, which has invested heavily in frictionless journeys, outperforms the cross sector average on Time and Effort by 2.4 percent, with this pillar rising 0.8 percent year on year.
- Airlines, which rely on rapid disruption management, increased their overall CX score by 1.6 percent, driven by a 2.0 percent gain in Time and Effort and 1.8 percent gains in Integrity and Expectations.
- Utilities and logistics, both heavily contact center dependent, lag the global average by around 5 percent, with Time and Effort and Expectations significantly below the norm.
These results mirror what many contact center leaders already feel. When journeys are slow, fragmented, or opaque, it shows up quickly on Time and Effort, Expectations, and Resolution. Modernizing for always on service is ultimately an attempt to move those three pillars in the right direction.
Agentic AI As The Engine of Always On Service
The KPMG report is clear that AI is now central to CX strategy. More than half of CEOs (55%), rank AI as their top investment priority. The report also distinguishes between traditional AI and agentic AI, systems that can independently sense, reason, and act.
KPMG explains that in a Total Experience context, agentic AI plays a dual role:
“As an orchestrator, it coordinates across functional teams, channels, and journeys, ensuring consistency and personalization without the customer feeling the complexity behind the scenes. As a participant, it directly interacts with customers, employees, or partners, answering questions, recommending actions, or completing transactions.”
This dual role aligns closely with always on contact center needs:
- As orchestrator, agentic AI can route across channels and queues, coordinate workforce resources, trigger callbacks, and escalate in real time.
- As participant, it powers AI driven self service, conversational bots, and assistive tools for agents that together absorb high volumes and support 24/7 coverage.
KPMG goes further, describing the goal as “an operating environment where experiences are personal, anticipatory, and effortless, and where the human and digital elements of service work in harmony to improve experience while maintaining integrity and empathy.”
For contact centers, this is a helpful design principle. Always on should not default to bot only. It should blend human and agentic AI in a way that reduces effort, improves resolution, and maintains trust. That blend needs a modern, cloud native platform underneath it.
Why CCaaS and cloud native resilience are now non negotiable
There are three technical themes that are particularly relevant to always on ambitions:
- CCaaS migration platforms and cloud native contact center infrastructure
- Cloud native resilience and geo redundancy, with multi region failover and disaster recovery
- API first integration layers that connect CRM, analytics, and business systems
KPMG’s Total Experience model explains why these are more than IT choices. To deliver on its five principles, organisations need unified data, composable architectures, and the ability to plug AI agents into workflows across front, middle, and back office. Cloud native CCaaS is the practical way to achieve that in the contact center.
The report recommends that organisations:
“Integrate systems and workflows to remove duplication, use agentic AI to automate routine tasks, and design one-and-done service models that reduce customer effort.”
In high volume environments, that integration is impossible to sustain on fragmented, on premises stacks. CCaaS platforms are already designed for API driven orchestration, multi region resilience, and real time routing. When combined with agentic AI, they allow CX teams to design journeys that are resilient across time zones, channels, and geographies.
Always on service then becomes a property of the architecture, not a heroic staffing exercise.
Case Study: Alinta Energy’s cloud resilience
A prime example of this architectural shift comes from Alinta Energy. Facing intense competition and cost pressures, they migrated four contact centers to Genesys Cloud in just 18 weeks. This move wasn’t just about technology; it was about creating a resilient foundation for better service. By unifying their operations on a cloud-native platform, they achieved a single view of the customer, which directly supported the Integrity and Time and Effort pillars.
Kevin Watts, Head of Customer Service Excellence at Alinta Energy, explains the strategic value of this visibility:
“The biggest impact is having data in one place and creating visibility right across the business of what that customer wants to do. We’re now able to understand why customers are making contact, how they are being treated and whether their needs are being met — and then to use that information to improve the journey moving forward.”
This approach drove CSAT scores to 90% and is projected to deliver over $1 million in licensing savings over three years.
Turning “Always On” Into Value: Value Streams and Operating Models
KPMG introduces the concept of value streams as the backbone of Total Experience. A value stream covers the complete flow of activities needed to deliver a specific outcome for a customer, from initial need to final fulfilment. The report argues that:
“Value streams are designed end to end, cutting across business units to keep the focus on the customer journey and desired outcome.”
For contact center leaders, this is a useful way to frame modernization. Instead of optimizing isolated queues, we can map value streams like:
- “Resolve a billing query in under five minutes on any channel”
- “Rebook a disrupted journey without repeating information”
- “Open, service, and retain an account entirely through digital and assisted channels”
Once those streams are clear, agentic AI and CCaaS capabilities can be deployed where they add most value. For example:
- AI driven deflection and self service at the front of the journey.
- AI assisted classification and routing to the right specialists.
- Knowledge and workflow automation in the middle office to accelerate resolution.
- Proactive communications that reset expectations before customers feel the need to contact you.
KPMG stresses that portfolios of value streams matter, because most organisations serve multiple segments and products. For contact centers, this means designing a roadmap of journeys that will benefit most from always on capabilities first, then scaling patterns that work.
Case Study: DXC Technology’s Global Transformation
This value stream approach is visible in DXC Technology’s recent transformation. As a global IT services giant, DXC needed to modernise its own contact centers to support massive global operations and 99.99% availability. By migrating to Amazon Connect, they didn’t just swap phone systems; they built a platform for innovation. The move allowed them to deploy agentic AI tools that assist live agents, reducing handle times and improving resolution rates globally.
Richard Hunter, a BPO professional for the United Kingdom and Ireland at DXC Technology, notes that the cloud-native model fundamentally changed their operational flexibility:
“Because Amazon Connect is all online and virtual in the cloud, contact center staff do not need a physical desk, they just need a headset plugged into a laptop. There’s less hardware required, and it can be done from anywhere.”
This flexibility aligns perfectly with KPMG’s Technology Enablement principle, proving that modern platforms can turn the contact center into a hub of value creation that operates seamlessly from any location.
Sources: Amazon Connect helps DXC transform contact centers
Human Empowerment in an AI-Heavy Contact Center
One of the most important messages in KPMG’s report is that technology does not replace the human role in CX. It amplifies it. The report notes that 75% of CEOs worry that competition for AI skills could slow growth, and that leaders are retraining and reshaping roles to keep pace.
The Employee empowerment pillar is explicit:
“Equipping teams with the tools, insight, and autonomy to resolve issues and create value.”
In an always on, AI enabled contact center, that translates into:
- Giving agents unified views of the customer across channels and journeys.
- Embedding AI copilots that surface next best actions, knowledge, and context in real time.
- Simplifying processes so that first contact resolution is achievable more often.
- Empowering teams to handle exceptions that automated systems cannot yet manage.
KPMG also warns that as agentic AI interactions increase, Integrity and Empathy will need careful attention. Customers may accept automation if it is transparent, fair, and respectful. Contact center leaders therefore need clear ethical frameworks for AI use, plus “human in the loop” designs for high stakes or emotionally charged interactions.
Practical Next Steps for CX and Contact Center Leaders
If we pull KPMG’s findings together with the January theme, a practical roadmap for always on modernization begins to emerge.
- Anchor your vision in Total Experience, not just channel coverage. Define how the contact center will connect customer, employee, and partner journeys, then map the value streams that matter most.
- Prioritize Time and Effort, Resolution, Personalization, and Integrity. Use these pillars as design criteria. Ask if each initiative will make journeys easier, issues faster to resolve, interactions more tailored, and decisions more transparent.
- Accelerate CCaaS and cloud native migration. Treat cloud native resilience, geo redundancy, and API first integration as non negotiable. They make 24/7 reliable service possible, and they unlock AI orchestration.
- Invest in agentic AI as both orchestrator and participant. Use AI to route, predict demand, and automate routine work, while deploying conversational agents and assistants that handle simple interactions and support human agents.
- Redesign roles, metrics, and culture around empowerment. Modern tooling needs modern ways of working. Shift from handle time targets alone to measures that reflect pillar performance, such as effort, resolution, and trust.
- Plan for governance and ethics from day one. Document where AI is used, how decisions are made, and how customers will be informed. Ensure there are clear escalation paths to human support.
The real test isn’t understanding this; it’s acting on it. Insight is easy. Execution is the differentiator. The question isn’t whether this matters, but whether you’re prepared for it.
As KPMG concludes:
“Total Experience delivers relevance at scale, trust in every interaction, and a sense of belonging that binds customers, employees, and partners together.”
Modernizing the contact center for always on service is one of the most visible ways to bring that vision to life.
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