Unifying Your Tech Stack and CCaaS to Power AI‑Driven CX

The article at a glance

AI‑driven CX is rapidly reshaping contact centres as businesses invest in chatbots, automation and intelligent routing to boost efficiency and meet rising customer expectations.

Early adopters like Hyatt and Toyota are already seeing gains, from unified knowledge systems that empower agents to conversational AI that delivers intuitive self‑service at scale. But to unlock the full value of these tools, organisations must first tackle the critical challenge of integrating their data, systems and intelligence. This step-by-step guide sets out the key considerations you’ll need to keep in mind if you want to fully leverage AI and gain a distinct CX edge.

To stay competitive, and improve their CX delivery, many businesses are turning to AI-driven CX within their CCaaS (contact centre as a service) platforms that offer a wealth of automation and AI tools.

According to a recent Forrester report, 92% plan to invest in AI chatbots in the next two years, 72% have plans to up their investment in call centre automation solutions in the next 12 months, and 82% are in hot pursuit of AI-powered intelligent routing.

By connecting tools, systems, data and intelligence, these companies are able to better understand and meet customer needs, optimise business processes, improve efficiency, and enhance agent satisfaction.

A unified contact centre has transformed the guest experience at Hyatt Hotels, thanks to AI-powered tools that ensure its frontline customer experience team can rapidly and accurately respond to guest queries. Today it’s contact centre agents utilise a single source of truth that is searchable, scalable and built for action.

For example, Toyota is using conversational AI to deliver intuitive self-service support for customers at scale and across multiple channels. Alongside making life dramatically easier for its live agents, who now have the bandwidth to focus on resolving more complex customer issues, Toyota is delivering added value that saves customers time and effort. For example, its AI agents now automatically alert customers that it’s time to schedule a service appointment at their local dealership.

While AI promises numerous benefits, implementing it in a contact centre as a service context requires some careful planning.

To take full advantage of AI and transform the customer experience within their contact centre, companies will first need to tackle the data integration challenge. Because powering up AI-powered conversational automation, intelligent routing and AI agent assist all begins with data.

This step-by-step guide sets out the key considerations you’ll need to keep in mind if you want to fully leverage AI and gain a distinct CX edge.

Key Consideration 1: Integrate to accelerate

Integrating CCaaS into your tech stack requires a strategic approach that’s focused on creating a unified, efficient and data-rich environment. That means seamlessly blending CCaaS with existing systems so that you can:

Unify all customer touchpoints to create frictionless experiences
Initiate CX automation across voice and digital channels
Enable intelligent AI-driven routing with context
Give agents with a unified view of customer history and context, providing real-time guidance, scripts and relevant resources during interactions
Automate routine customer enquiries, initiating self-service that reduces agent workloads
Leverage real-time data insights to respond to customer enquiries more efficiently and improve service delivery quality
Use real-time analytics to improve decision-making and agent performance

From the outset, you’ll need to map out which systems your CCaaS will need to exchange data with. Typically, these will include:

Unified Communications
CRM and CSM systems
CPaaS platforms
ERP and billing systems

Failing to get these integrations right from the get-go will create data silos that will, in turn, make it difficult to initiate conversational automation and unified routing. It will also hamper the delivery of a consistent and contextualised CX journey.

Part 1 of 3: From Legacy Systems to AI‑Driven Contact Centres: Unlocking a New Era of CX
In this blog, we look at how CX leaders can evolve beyond legacy contact centre systems and take advantage of AI‑driven cloud platforms.
Read Part 1 of 3
Part 3 of 3: How AI Orchestration Transforms CCaaS Into a True CX Engine
This article looks at how orchestration helps you get more ROI from CCaaS by delivering smoother, smarter customer journeys.
Read Part 3 of 3

Key Consideration 2: Consolidate your data sources

Building a clean, consistent and accessible data foundation is vital for organisations that want to capture real value from AI, and the starting point for your AI readiness preparations will be launching a robust data collection strategy. Undertaking a comprehensive audit of your existing data sources will be key here. In addition to CRM systems and internal communication platforms, keep in mind that data relating to customer interactions will span multiple systems and modalities – voice, chat, email and social media. However, moving to an AI-driven omnichannel contact centre is a strategic transformation that requires some careful planning and preparation.

Key Consideration 3: Give your data collection a purpose

Having gained a clear understanding of your data landscape, you next need to consider how you plan to use AI in the contact centre to address specific business goals and objectives. For example, optimising agent response times, automating routine customer queries, or improving first time resolution rates. Having defined some clear and measurable objectives, you’ll be able to focus your data collection efforts to ensure you capture the most relevant data points for your purpose.

Key Consideration 4: Get data AI ready

The quality and consistency of your data will be paramount as inaccurate, incomplete or inconsistent data will result in unreliable or unexpected outcomes. To ensure data accuracy and completeness, you’ll need to establish clear guidelines and protocols for data collection across all touchpoints. You’ll also need to initiate data validation, de-duplication, and cleansing processes, ensuring that data is in an optimal format for AI implementation. This can be especially challenging for unstructured data such as call recordings, email text or chat transcripts.

Existing in various formats (text, images, video, audio files and sensor data), the context-specific information unstructured data contains is invaluable. To improve its accessibility and usability, this unstructured data should be indexed and tagged. Finally, data collected from multiple sources will need to be aggregated into a unified data set that will support smooth data exchange and workflow automation across the organisation.

Key Consideration 5: Governance and compliance

Finally, you’ll need to establish a governance framework that sets out clear standards for data collection, storage, processing and usage. This framework should also establish ownership of datasets and define roles and responsibilities – such as data owners and stewards – to maintain data integrity and ensure that changes are controlled and approved.

Keep in mind that data preparation isn’t a ‘once and done’ endeavour. You’ll need to continuously monitor and update your data pipeline and collection processes to ensure these adapt to changing business needs and maintain accuracy over time.

Helping you create a solid foundation for AI

As a specialist AI and Data Services provider, we know the importance of getting the right AI-ready data foundation in place. Designed to help you unlock the full potential of AI, we’ll help you initiate an end-to-end data strategy that activates data for AI success.

From assessing your data readiness for AI, to enabling seamless connectivity between your CCaaS and other vital business systems, we ensure your contact centre works smarter – and stays secure.

Take the free AI Maturity Assessment and get a detailed summary of your current readiness and AI adoption progress.

Transitioning to an AI-driven omnichannel contact centre - Blog Series Part 2 of 3