Turning AI into ROI: The recipe for CX success.
Artificial intelligence (AI) adoption in the contact centre space is accelerating as executives look to keep pace with competitors and rising expectations. Yet, reports that up to 95% of AI projects fail reveal a deeper issue: many organisations are deploying AI before defining the business problems they are trying to solve. AI has become the default response to CX challenges, rather than the outcome of a thoughtful strategic approach.
By Dion Millson, Head of AI Strategy at Connect
Bake your AI cake.
Thinking of AI as a technological silver bullet that transforms your contact centre operation and solves everything from long wait times to inconsistent service quality is like trying to bake a cake without a recipe.
You might have access to premium ingredients, but without understanding how they work together, the right proportions, the proper technique, or an experienced chef to guide you, the results are unlikely to match the vision.
Rising pilot failure rates, concerns about an AI bubble, and a widening gap between massive investment in AI and actual returns are signals that AI, while transformative, is not a universal solution.
The best way to realise a genuine return on investment (ROI) and deliver real, sustainable impact is to implement AI as part of a comprehensive, integrated business strategy, rather than as a standalone technology pilot.
A strategic approach begins with clarity: What are the business priorities? Which customer outcomes matter most? The next step is creating a CX roadmap that aligns these priorities with the right technologies and processes.
AI should be selected only once the business problem is defined, ensuring the tools complement existing systems and deliver measurable value. This shift from a technology lens to a business lens is crucial for unlocking efficiency, enhancing experiences, and fostering employee engagement.
There has been a change from the old paradigm where improving CX meant increasing cost – the right use of technology will dramatically improve customer experiences while at the same time delivering real cost savings.
AI excels at processing vast amounts of data, identifying patterns, automating routine tasks, and providing real-time insights. This is great for tools like AI Agent Assist, AI Quality Management and Conversational AI.
However, AI cannot fix broken processes, compensate for poor organisational culture, or replace the need for human judgment in complex situations. It won't magically align disconnected systems or overcome resistance to change
The recipe for exceptional CX.
Designing your CX strategy is like crafting a recipe for the perfect cake – it requires the right combination of ingredients mixed in the right sequence by an experienced chef to get the perfect outcome.
The problem is that implementing a customer journey is the most incredibly complex cake to bake. Each customer journey requires many different ingredients from across the business to come together in the right way at the right time. Implementing technology requires careful consideration of each ingredient, such as:
- Foundational ingredients: The base technologies used with CX, such as contact centre systems, CRM, CSM, WEM and data tools.
- People ingredients: A customer journey touches so many different stakeholders across an organisation, all of whom have different opinions, from business to IT to risk, often with different representatives for each different system and for each different channel within a system.
- Optimisation ingredients: The different AI and automation technologies that sit on top of the foundation ingredients must be brought together seamlessly to improve CX.
- The chef: The right service provider with the skills, experience and access to all the necessary ingredients to bake your CX cake.
The binding agents.
A business strategy leverages many artefacts, such as designing the company hierarchy and culture, determining what products the company will sell and what it will offer, and how it will compete for specific customer segments.
These elements act as the binding agents in your recipe. They hold everything else together and determine whether your final product will be cohesive, flop or fall apart.
You can't simply add AI on top of misaligned objectives, siloed departments, or a culture resistant to change and expect exceptional results.
A strategic recipe for AI implementation.
Leverage Connect’s expertise to maximise the mix between value and sustainability.
Add some customer journey design.
A considered customer journey seamlessly orchestrates all the different technologies together with the company’s human elements.
Many organisations assume they can plug a RAG model into their data and instantly produce a high-performing bot. In reality, this often leads to shallow, FAQ-style exchanges that fail to support real customer journeys.
Typically, customer journeys start off as customer-led, with the customer explaining a need, and the agent looking to understand what’s required.
From there, the journey needs to become agent-led – taking the customer through a process that fulfils their need. This process requires understanding, which begins with context.
Context engineering has become a fundamental part of conversational design and comes in various forms:
- Session context: All the data or fields that the agent gathers along the way, like determining that the patient is the caller’s child, not the caller.
- Customer context: Defining who the customer is, what products or services they have with the company, and any previous interactions they have had.
- Journey context: Information relevant to specific stages of the journey.
Within each step of this journey, it is vital to understand which ingredient is most important to solve or assist with the customer query at that specific moment
Churn in the channel.
Channels are no longer just access points – they are ingredients in the customer journey. Voice AI offers immediacy, text channels like WhatsApp allow asynchronous exchange and richer data capture, and human agents provide empathy and judgment.
Omnichannel ensures customers can engage on their preferred channel, but opti-channel goes further: it intelligently selects the best channel for each step of the journey.
For example, a voice agent may remain in conversation while a WhatsApp bot collects location data in parallel.
Designing these experiences requires creativity and – critically – the seamless transfer of context across channels. The new journey comes from a mindset of imagination, not replicating what has always been done on a new channel.
Prep your workstation.
Businesses can't expect AI to transform CX when it's deployed onto legacy infrastructure, relying on messy data and processes designed for a different era.
A more relevant framework includes three stages that help build the right ecosystem before accelerating AI adoption.
- Lay the foundations for success. Do the initial groundwork by building the infrastructure, sanitising data, establishing governance and compliance frameworks and training your agents.
- Analyse the masses of data retained within your contact centre to generate data-driven insights and build a 3–5-year roadmap in line with business priorities and ROI.
- Delivery and optimisation. Pilot, integrate, scale successful solutions and keep improving.
AI isn't a technology that you set and forget. It requires ongoing optimisation to retrain models, refine automations, and analyse what's working and what isn't.
Become an AI master chef.
As AI capabilities continue to advance, the competitive advantage won't come from the technology itself; it will come from how thoughtfully you've integrated it into your broader business and CX strategy.
Companies that view AI implementation as a standalone project will continue to struggle with disappointing results and wasted investment. Those who approach it as master chefs, with the right ingredients and proper technique, will find that AI doesn't just improve CX, it transforms it into a complex creation that aligns with your vision and delivers substantial returns to the business.
Frequently asked questions.
Why do so many AI projects in contact centres fail?
Many AI projects fail because organisations deploy AI without first defining the business problems they are trying to solve. AI is often treated as a technological silver bullet rather than part of a thoughtful, strategic approach aligned with business priorities and customer outcomes
How should AI be implemented to deliver real ROI in CX?
AI should be implemented as part of a comprehensive CX strategy. This includes defining business priorities, designing customer journeys, selecting the right AI and automation tools to complement existing systems, and continuously optimising solutions rather than deploying AI as a standalone technology pilot.
What are the key "ingredients" for successful AI-driven CX?
Successful AI-driven CX requires a combination of foundational technologies (like CRM, contact centre systems, and data tools), people (stakeholders across the organisation), optimisation tools (AI and automation technologies), and an experienced service provider to orchestrate these elements. Additionally, organisational alignment, culture, and clear business strategy act as binding agents for cohesive results.
About'Connect.
Connect combines global contact centre and customer experience (CX) expertise, deep domain knowledge, and unparalleled industry skills to make the complex, simple. Since 1990, we have leveraged our vendor-independent managed services approach to digitally transform how organisations communicate, both internally and externally. We specialise in combining the most relevant technologies and services from leading vendors and platform providers to create opti-channel engagement solutions, orchestrating frictionless experiences and simplifying complex communication challenges.
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