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.