Why "We Need AI" Has Become the Most Expensive Sentence in Contact Centre Procurement

Contact centre technology did not arrive all at once. It built itself in layers, each one resting on the one before, each one adding capability the previous layer made possible. Seeing the pattern is the clearest way to understand where the next capability will live — and why it does not require replacing anything underneath it.

Contact centre routing has been through three generations in my career. Each one solved the same fundamental problem — getting contacts to the right place — and each one looked efficient until its successor arrived and revealed how much it had been quietly wasting.

Every routing failure has a financial cost, and the earlier articles in this series have costed it carefully. But there is a second cost that never reaches a spreadsheet — the cost paid by the people who work in the operation.