Contact Center Pipeline November 2026 | Page 26

Instead of viewing AI merely as problem solvers, brands should also evaluate these agents as true concierges: capable of wowing customers with deep historical knowledge, real-time context, and unforgettable experiences.

However, achieving this requires more than a shift in mindset; it demands a cultural transformation as well. It means breaking down traditional silos between contact centers, Marketing, and Sales; connecting the dots between inbound and outbound activities and sharing customer insights often trapped in internal aisles.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 23

When teams and departments openly exchange these fragmented pieces of customer memory, they can solve inquiries faster, suggest better, more relevant products and services, and create more seamless and unified customer journeys.

SUPER AGENTS, SUPERB OPERATORS

Much like the ACD, IVR, CTI, and cloudbased platforms that came before it, conversational AI is the next major technological leap, ushering in a new era for contact centers.

It allows AI agents to automate the mundane while augmenting the memorable. A coach, a researcher, a marketer, and a customer archivist can now whisper in the ears of human operators, helping them show up and show out

CONVERSATIONAL AI

with greater speed, accuracy, and empathy than ever before.

As the curve from experimentation to deployment continues to bow, the brands pulling ahead understand this isn’ t just another customer service tool but a complete customer experience( CX) transformation, one reliant on cultural evolution as much as technological innovation.

The result is unprecedented hybrid harmony, turning every interaction into a moment that reinforces to customers why they fell in love with your brand in the first place.

Andy O’ Dower is VP, Field CTO at Twilio where he helps customers build the next generation of customer engagement. Andy brings extensive entrepreneurial, technical, and business backgrounds. He has founded and scaled platforms, B2B SaaS, and B2C products for thousands of customers and millions of consumers at Wowza, Snapsheet, and Curiosity.

METRICS

HOW TO CATCH, RESPOND, AND PREVENT THE PROBLEM

The good news is that this problem is measurable and the fixes are operational. Here’ s a guide:

1. Catch it by scoring resolution

Read repeat contact alongside FCR and a resolution-quality score:

• FCR really just tells you whether the issue stayed in one interaction.

• Resolution scoring tells you whether it was actually settled.

26 CONTACT CENTER PIPELINE

• Repeat contact tells you whether the customer disagreed enough to come back.

Read together, those three signals surface the failures any one of them would hide. And you have to look at more than a sample because these failures cluster in conversations that individually look fine: a 2 % QA sample rarely catches that.

2. Respond by treating a repeat as an escalation

In the data, effort and repetition compound. A high-effort repeat contact scored three times worse than a low-effort one, because the second attempt inherits all the effort of the first and adds the cost of rebuilding context. A repeat contact on a hard issue is not a normal queue entry and should be routed as a severity escalation.

3. Prevent it by fixing resolution

When repeat rates rise, the reflex is to build more self-service walls to keep customers from coming back. But the data argues that you should do the opposite, as repeat contacts are symptoms of broken resolution.

On asynchronous channels like chat, email, and text especially, a resolution-confirmation step before a ticket closes is the highest-value change you can make, because a ticket that closed without resolving anything is the most expensive failure in the operation.

Rob Dwyer is CX Executive in Residence at Level AI and a three-time ICMI Top 25 Thought Leader. He spent 15 years training agents and contact center leaders before moving into AI transformation work, and hosts the Next in Queue podcast on customer experience.