How cloud contact centers are powering the future of voice AI

No customer should have to navigate a complex phone tree, only to be forced to connect to a human agent. You navigate the maze and when you finally reach a human, you have to repeat the issue and provide your information all over again.

Today, business leaders are striving for a different reality. They want to deploy Voice AI to deflect common questions, allowing customers to simply say why they are calling rather than navigating complex phone trees. Crucially, they want that information to travel with the customer. If AI can’t solve the issue, the human agent who picks up should already have the full call context. However, achieving this balance often necessitates a fundamental shift in infrastructure.

Legacy, on-premise systems are dead weight. Siloed, rigid, and impossible to scale. Modern CCaaS isn’t an incremental upgrade, it’s the only launchpad for transformative Voice AI. To truly meet and exceed customer expectations, every contact center must now be built with AI at its core to bridge the gaps between channels, agents, and systems.

So let’s explore how implementing tools like Voice AI and agent copilots can revolutionize your contact center, boosting operational efficiency and creating a better overall customer experience.

Journey to the cloud and the emergence of AI-first contact centers

For decades, contact centers were limited by physical constraints. On-premise systems were rigid, capital-intensive beasts, adding seats during a holiday rush meant buying hardware, changing a routing flow meant calling IT and waiting weeks. These systems made it nearly impossible for organizations to adapt quickly or scale operations efficiently.

The initial migration to the cloud solved the logistical problems. It introduced unprecedented flexibility and agility, allowing businesses to respond in real time to changing demands while converting heavy capital expenditures into manageable operating costs. But now we are witnessing the next phase of this evolution: the AI-first contact center. With this new wave, artificial intelligence is not a plugin or an afterthought, it’s embedded at the core of operations. Instead of retrofitting standalone AI bots onto legacy systems, which often results in siloed data and a clunky experience for agents and customers, businesses are reimagining the entire experience with AI as a native, foundational element.

This approach redefines what is possible. Consider the success we’ve seen with Zendesk customer The Good Meal Co. By moving away from fragmented systems and adopting Zendesk Contact Center, they were able to streamline their workflows, seeing their Average Handle Time (AHT) drop by 40%, while their Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores rose by over 12%.

Voice AI is the future of AI in the contact center

As the industry has transitioned from siloed on-premise ‘call centers’ to integrated cloud hubs, AI and digital transformation has increased both the volume and complexity of queries and businesses must continue to adapt.

Now the use of Voice AI Agents is growing in the contact center. AI has progressed to the stage where it is competent enough to listen, understand and speak with a customer just as a human would. Unlike the frustrating, robotic menus of the past, Voice AI agents can decipher everyday language, understanding true customer intent. The business outcomes of this capability are profound. It means a contact center can effectively duplicate its best agents infinitely, providing immediate, 24/7 support without ever putting a customer on hold. This scalability drives a massive reduction in operational costs by automating routine Tier-1 queries (like checking an order status), while simultaneously boosting revenue by ensuring that highly skilled human agents are preserved for complex, high value conversations that require genuine empathy and negotiation.

This is impressive, but what does this actually deliver for your business?

• Reduced Average Handle Time (AHT): Voice AI processes customer data and backend queries instantly, without the need for typing, navigating screens, or manual note-taking, significantly shortening the duration of routine transactions.
• Improved First Contact Resolution (FCR): By integrating directly with APIs and knowledge bases, Voice AI Agents can execute actions (like processing refunds or resetting passwords) immediately, resolving Tier-1 issues with fewer transfers to a human agent.
• Boosted CSAT: Immediate access to support combined with hyper-personalized interactions (based on CRM history) drives satisfaction. If the AI detects frustration via sentiment analysis, it can seamlessly escalate the call to a human with full context.

In the near future, Zendesk envision contact centers evolving into “systems of action.” where the automation of routine tasks expands significantly. AI will automate real time decisions and low-value responses, drastically reducing response times. This shift changes the role of the human agent. They will transition from reactive responders to proactive supervisors of AI-powered digital workers.

Agents will then be able to work across voice and a plethora of other channels, collaborating seamlessly with AI agents. A natural progression of this is for best practices and top-tier agent expertise to be encoded into AI workflows, ensuring every customer receives elite level support.

We see AI Agents on a path to automate over 50-90%+ of support requests. This creates a role for AI Agents to feature at the core of contact centers with digital agents on both sides of the conversation, with a business’s AI agents serving a customer’s personal AI agents.

Imagine a future where your personal AI assistant calls a company to resolve a billing dispute, speaks to the company’s Voice AI, negotiates the refund, and simply notifies you when it’s done. That is the level of scale and efficiency we are heading toward.

The path forward

The revolution in customer service is here, but it is not happening in a vacuum. While Voice AI is the star player set to revolutionize the customer experience, the modern cloud contact center has set the stage to make this possible.

For businesses, moving to the cloud is no longer a nice to have; it is the essential, non-negotiable platform that enables intelligent, scalable customer support. By adopting an AI- first strategy with platforms like Zendesk, businesses can achieve boosted operational efficiency, better customer outcomes and a more empowered agent workforce.

Zendesk Contact Center provides the unified ecosystem necessary to turn the promise of Voice AI into a reality. The technology to transform your customer service is already here, the only thing left is how quickly your business chooses to embrace it.