Reimagining Customer Experience In The Age Of AI

‘AI in the contact center and UC is here, and it’s making massive, massive changes in there,’ one solution provider tells CRN on AI’s impact on customer experience and the opportunities for partners.

Auto summarization, or the “gateway drug” for AI in the contact center, is helping call center agents drop from three to four minutes of after-call work following a customer interaction, to 15-30 seconds of after-call work, said Mike Dolloff, executive vice president of account management for Amplix, a Norwood, Mass.-based solution provider.

Amplix partners with Zoom, Five9 and Genesis, to name a few Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) providers. The firm regularly works with midmarket and enterprise clients to build out AI-powered CX strategies based on the metrics that these businesses are looking to achieve around automation, time and labor savings.

“That math and ROI for these customers is phenomenal,” Dolloff said. “That client who went from three minutes to 15 seconds or four minutes to 30 seconds — we’re talking tens of thousands of dollars a month in savings by virtue of the size of their contact center.”

And that’s just the beginning. The integration of AI into contact centers and collaboration tools is having a measurable impact on efficiency, data accuracy, and customer experience, solution providers told CRN.

“AI in the contact center and UC is here, and it’s making massive, massive changes in there. In the contact center space, we not only have a view on what’s going on from the tech side, but it’s always been tied to the people side as well,” Dolloff said.

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As a trusted advisor, Dolloff and his team are helping their clients leveraging AI to get to the bottom of customer sentiment and take action based on the data.

“What enterprises have always been trying to get to is: What are our customers saying and how are people performing?” It’s all just been random sampling and hoping that somebody responds to the survey. Now, you have an entire data set of everything going on. Where are there pauses in the conversation because we’re not efficient with knowledge or training? Are we starting calls with clients that are unhappy? Where are the calls where we’re out of compliance?

While quality assurance can now be automated with AI, the “tremendous” AI opportunity that Amplix is seeing now is with marketing teams, he said.

“You can use now all this client interaction data to understand [customer sentiment], so marketing is starting to get really more intrigued with [things] like: ‘We just rolled out a new brand name and its confusing clients. Oops, we should change that.’ Now we’re talking about much more rich data of product marketing and themes,” he said. “You can even use AI to go out into social media and understand what’s being talked about by clients before it hits the contact center.”

Agent assist features, such as auto summarization and conversation intelligence, is now table stakes across a variety of vendor UC, collaboration, and contact center offerings, including the most popular, market-leading platforms like Microsoft Teams, Zoom Meetings, and Cisco Webex, all the way to smaller players offering point products.

The next step, said Amplix’s Dolloff, is mining the data, which is more abundant and “cleaner” than notes that were once taken manually.

That’s where agentic AI comes in and why it will be the next big trend in AI in the customer experience arena, he said.

By 2029, agentic AI will autonomously resolve 80 percent of common customer service issues without human intervention, leading to a 30 percent reduction in operational costs, according to a March 2025 report from research firm Gartner, Inc.

Agentic AI in particular, according to Gartner, is poised to revolutionize the way service interactions are conducted.

AI’s Impact On CX

As organizations look to bring AI into their businesses, one of the most logical places to start is in customer experience, or CX, said Andrew Gilman, CMO for fast-growing solution provider NWN Corp.

Boston-based NWN, which grew to over $1 billion in sales last year, is focused on CX and modern workplace solutions across various environments, from boardrooms, to stadiums.

“It’s [about] great software, great touch screens, the network and the infrastructure to support all that, and then bringing AI and automation in to drive productivity, cost savings, consistency and the experience,” Gilman said.

That focus has led NWN to establish a strategic partnership with contact center software provider Five9. NWN integrates Five9’s Genius AI Suite’s capabilities into its own experience management platform that helps create a holistic view of the agent experience.

“We really focus on the whole experience of the agent, not just the software, but the endpoint that they’re working on, the network that the services are riding over and the security needed to ensure it’s compliant and safe,” Gilman said. “At the end of the day, it really comes down to: Can that agent deliver better, faster, more effectively, and can they have a great agent experience with the use of AI? On the flip side, as consumers of a lot of those products and services, can we get to what we need [in terms of] better, faster, more effectively using AI, and how do you still maintain that customer experience without losing the humanity of it all?”

The capabilities that Five9 and NWN bring together are creating an integrated experience for both sides of the equation — the agent and the company — as well as the consumer of those services, Gilman said. NWN, working in partnership with Five9, is using APIs to build the infrastructure to support new AI capabilities in a way that is driving adoption faster, he said.

“Looking holistically at that experience from the company, the agent, and all the way to the CX side, how do you implement AI in a way that delivers the outcome? Not just putting AI in for AI’s sake but really looking at AI as a part of the overall strategy,” he said.

NWN earlier this month acquired AWS AI superstar InterVision Systems, a leader in AI customer experience solutions, in a blockbuster deal that the firm said will accelerate NWN’s AI prowess. The deal will build on NWN’s own intelligent virtual agent AI CX offering, the company said.

The Data Opportunity

In a history-making UCaaS deal for both the vendor and the channel partner, RingCentral and Symplicity Communications Inc. recently completed a significant, 40,000 seat UCaaS deal with a West Michigan-based grocery store chain with 300 locations. Grand Rapids, Mich.-based solution provider Simplicity moved the grocery retailer off Skype for Business and onto RingCentral in the largest UCaaS deal in RingCentral’s history.

The project involved a 13-month evaluation with five UCaaS contenders. Three were eliminated right out of the gate. Ultimately, RingCentral was chosen for its advanced, AI-powered features, including queuing, a crucial feature for the grocery store’s pharmacies that’s often found in contact center offerings, but not as common in UCaaS platforms.

Symplicity, which started 19 years ago as a traditional telecom agent partner that sold circuits, has evolved into selling security and professional services to help businesses automate “what comes next” after a business moves to cloud-based UC and contact center solution, said Catherine Ripley, CEO of Symplicity.

“To me, this all comes down to data and analytics. The problem that we had at this grocery store chain is they couldn’t really look at their current systems and say: ‘Here’s why people are calling. Here’s what we need to solve.’ Without that data, they couldn’t really prioritize what they should do first,” she said.

AI is providing data for businesses that is helping to improve customer experience for their end customers, but businesses still need help pulling in and acting on the enormous amount of data that’s being generated from different sources, Ripley said.

With that opportunity in mind, Symplicity Communications is developing a new professional services practice to help its clients improve customer experience and reduce costs through AI and automation, Ripley said.

“The whole new professional services department [will] say: ‘Great, you have UCaaS. Now let us help you create some custom reports and let’s identify which automations you need to pull in,” she said.

For Symplicity Communications, rethinking customer experience in the age of AI is about integrating multiple data sources, automating certain functions, and meeting customers where they are. It’s a big opportunity for partners, Ripley said.

“I think what AI truly means, is you take all your platforms, and especially as you get into large and enterprise customers, they have so many platforms that different people are responsible for. You might have ServiceNow that the infrastructure [team] is responsible for and that has a chat bot in it, but then you have these other platforms that the voice team, or marketing [team] is responsible for, but nobody’s really talking because they’re all siloed. So, how do you pull that data together and say: ‘What should we be working on? What products are customers asking for? What problems are they bringing to our attention?’”

Originally Appeared Here