How Telcos are Turning Contact Centres Into Revenue Drivers

Contact Center Industry veteran Shalima Bhalla spent her early career as an engineer configuring agent routing systems and building contact centres. She watched customers at banks and telecommunications companies plan for months just to change a single interactive voice response (IVR) workflow: the automated phone system that greets callers and routes them through menu options. 

The technology was complex and tightly integrated into back-end systems. One alteration would cascade through entire workflows and execution stretched into years.

“I worked with customers who had to plan for months to change one IVR workflow because if they made one change, it would have a domino effect on the entire workflow,” Shalima says.

Cloud infrastructure has compressed that timeline to days, with the process of introducing a multilingual bot or adding a language becoming a plug-and-play exercise. 

From cost centre to intelligence hub: Rethinking the telco contact centre

Telcos internally operate some of the largest contact centres in the world, serving their vast customer base across wireless, broadband, enterprise and wholesale.

“Most telcos still treat their internal contact centers as cost centres measured by call volumes and handle times. Yet those interactions contain real-time signals about customer issues and growth opportunities that very few operators mine systematically.”

“Rather than just looking at contact centre data as call volumes or performance metrics, if you take that richness of data and extrapolate patterns, you can see in real time what’s going on and what your customers are telling you,” Shalima says. “When businesses dive deeper and understand those patterns, they can design retention campaigns and churn prevention strategies very quickly and efficiently.”

The shift requires using contact centre data as a real-time feedback mechanism rather than managing incoming calls as efficiently as possible. The business case is straightforward: identify problems before they become churn drivers.

Beyond connectivity: How telcos are embedding themselves into customer operations

Telcos already power almost every business with bandwidth and connectivity. When they extend that footprint with CCaaS, the system becomes woven into daily operations, replacing that system means disrupting how the company functions. That creates switching costs beyond contract terms. 

Telcos already have the trust and long-standing relationships with their business customers. CCaaS becomes the most natural entry point to turn that trust and their data advantage into real value,” Shalima Says.

“When they move from just providing bandwidth to a complete suite of customer experience applications – CCaaS, AI and analytics under one brand – they not only increase margins but also improve customer loyalty and stickiness, because they embed into customer workflows.”

How cloud and AI agents provide a better, more personalised experience

Cloud infrastructure combined with AI changes what agents can accomplish during customer interactions. Before a customer reaches a human agent, these systems surface complete transactional history, a sentiment score indicating whether the customer is angry or neutral, and the probable intent behind the contact.

“That empowers the agent to provide a service that’s more contextual and personalised,” Shalima says.

Contact centre work involves managing difficult conversations with unhappy customers throughout the day, with agents frequently juggling multiple screens to access different systems whilst handling calls. 

AI-powered systems reduce that burden by surfacing relevant information automatically, with after-call summaries and categorisation happening without agent input.

Shalima describes this as making every agent a “super agent”. AI tools raise the floor by giving all agents access to information and prompts that previously only the best agents intuited through experience.

Integrating conversational AI with contact centre platforms

Conversational AI handles routine queries like balance enquiries and billing information in natural language rather than through menu trees, with customers able to speak naturally instead of pressing numbered options.

The real value emerges when context flows seamlessly into the handoff to human agents. Customers who describe an issue to an AI system shouldn’t repeat it during escalation. When designed well, the integration between conversational AI and contact center platforms should maintain that continuity end to end.

“Cloud communication and cloud contact centres have changed the game – they’ve made it more agile and modular,” Shalima says.

The modular architecture means operators can test new capabilities quickly, then roll them out globally if results prove positive. Telecommunications operators historically ran contact centre applications integrated into back-end systems as part of broader workflows, with changing anything requiring extensive time and planning. Cloud infrastructure breaks these dependencies through modular design and API-based integration.

Building CCaaS architecture around compliance requirements

Telecommunications operators face data privacy, data residency and carrier-grade resiliency requirements that constrain technology choices. Cloud contact centre platforms now support these requirements. But Shalima distinguishes between checkbox compliance and architectural design that enables continuous innovation.

Operators that treat compliance as a checklist find themselves unable to adopt new capabilities when technology evolves. Those who build regulatory requirements into architectural principles can evaluate and deploy innovations as they emerge.

“The successful contact centre operators design their architecture to meet these guardrails, so when new technology comes in, they’re not scrambling at the last minute,” Shalima says. “Their guardrails are embedded in the architecture, so they can keep up with the pace of innovation.”

Three principles for telco customer experience transformation

Shalima identifies three principles for operators reimagining customer experience through cloud contact centres. First, human interaction design must consider the impact on agents and customers. Agents already juggle multiple screens to serve customers, meaning new technology should reduce the burden rather than adding yet another system to monitor.

“You don’t want to add more burden to the agent, because rather than improving the experience of the end customer, it actually deteriorates that experience,” Shalima says.

Second comes data-driven empathy. This extends beyond using customer data for cross-selling and upselling to creating hyper-personalised experiences that anticipate needs. Operators that use data to reduce customer friction build loyalty that translates to lower churn and increased average revenue per user.

The third is sustainable scalability that adapts to different markets and high-growth scenarios without requiring redesign when business conditions shift. Operators expanding into new markets need infrastructure that accommodates regulatory variations across jurisdictions, while operators experiencing rapid growth need infrastructure that scales without performance degradation.

Why partnerships require co-innovation beyond contracts

These principles shape partnership strategy. Shalima distinguishes between commercial agreements and partnerships built on co-marketing, co-innovation and joint training programmes.

“The partnerships built on leveraging the strengths of two companies is where the power lies,” Shalima says. “Instead of just a commercial agreement, the power lies in co-marketing, co-innovation and training your engineers and sales teams together. That’s where the multiplier effect comes in.”

Deep integration through shared engineering and sales training creates more value than arm’s-length contracts. When operators and technology vendors align their roadmaps and train teams together, both sides understand customer requirements better and can respond faster to market changes.

Shalima worked with ISVs at Avaya, Cisco, Afiniti and AWS, and today emphasises open architecture through application programming interfaces, shared data structures and marketplace distribution. But technical integration proves insufficient without roadmap sharing, feedback loops and joint customer engagements that ensure solutions address actual requirements rather than theoretical use cases.

Using telco data to predict customer problems

The opportunity over the next three years centres on how operators use customer data, Shalima explains, while “leveraging that data efficiently to predict intent and solve problems, even before customers know about them.”

A network problem detected and fixed before service degradation reaches the customer eliminates the support interaction entirely. From an operator’s perspective, this prevents a negative interaction that might damage retention. From the customer’s perspective, service simply works.

Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) such as AWS, Google and Microsoft provide the infrastructure to aggregate data from multiple sources, apply machine learning models to identify patterns and trigger automated responses. The question is how quickly operators implement systems that identify issues, resolve them and notify customers after the fact.

5G deployment changes what contact centres can offer beyond this predictive capability, enabling augmented reality and virtual reality-based support experiences. For instance, an agent could walk a customer through router configuration by sharing a virtual representation of the device, highlighting specific ports and settings in three dimensions. Contact centres could evolve beyond call handling into command centres that converge Internet of Things data with customer experience management.

What separates proof-of-concept from production

Operators have completed their pilots. The technology exists. Cloud architecture has matured from early adoption into mainstream deployment and AI capabilities have moved from experimental to production-ready.

The shift now is from proof-of-concept fatigue to production deployment that moves business metrics. Operators have historically managed contact centres for efficiency metrics like average handle time and first-call resolution. These metrics matter for cost control, but they miss the larger opportunity. The data flowing through contact centres carries signals about product issues, pricing problems and churn risk that affect revenue directly.

An operator that identifies these signals and acts on them treats the contact centre as a strategic asset rather than an operational cost centre: a shift that requires organisational change beyond technology deployment. Finance teams need to value retention signals differently, product teams need real-time access to customer feedback and marketing teams need to design campaigns based on contact centre patterns.

The operators that succeed will be those that reorganise around customer experience as a business-wide function rather than a single department’s responsibility.

“Customer experience is a responsibility of each and every part of the business,” Shalima says. “Businesses that understand that and leverage platform, technology and partnerships to enable it are the ones that will succeed in the next decade.”